Hey everybody, welcome back to the Conspiracy Podcast. Thanks for joining us again for another lovely Tuesday. Not for us, but for you, a good one. That’s right, Eric, Sean, Jorge, we’re your hosts. What up.

We did a poll and this one was the most voted on one, and you know, ask and ye shall receiveth from us. And if you’re not following us on social media, you got to do that so you can participate in these surveys. A lot of these are based on ideas from people emailing us, messaging us, things like that. So I really dig when people email us or message us. It’s also, we want to get you guys involved, and it kind of makes, we want you to be a part of this too. We get some good episode ideas from you guys, but also some good feedback of like, you know, maybe we went a little too far here.

Keep it coming. I think one of the guys called us, just shout out to the review, bro misogyny. And I think we’re pretty pro women here. I don’t understand that one. Anyway, it’s funny how you guys sometimes will misinterpret it, like with the Flat Earth. We got a lot of flack for that. We weren’t on that side, we were just telling what happened, how the guy did an experiment.

And just to remind, maybe for new listeners, the point of this is that we are all friends but we all come from different backgrounds. We come from different parts of the country. Some of us are Eagle Scouts, some of us are failed scientists. So the idea was to take these famous stories that we all hear and we debate about and actually go, what is this story beginning to end, and then decide what we think about them and if they’re legitimate or not. We’re not advocates for anything, we’re just talking about it and then giving our opinions.

And then the last thing just before we get rolling, please bear with us. We are getting lots and lots of emails, and so sometimes it takes a couple days to reply. So just don’t rage at us. We also have jobs. We have like kids and stuff and wives. Sorry. So we’re going to dive right in. This one is a QAnon and the whole Pizzagate thing. Now forgive me, I know nothing about this. Good. I don’t even know what QAnon stands for, so we’re going to get into that.

So I wanted to give a quick overview of QAnon itself, and it’s really confusing and it’s an extraordinarily polarizing topic. This was the worst research I’ve ever had to do. There is no middle ground. It’s two massive extremes, the utmost fanatical extremes. And you’re doing research and 70% of the information is one side or the other bashing the other side. So please bear with me, I did my best to try to give you a nonpartisan view on it.

So first things first, QAnon is actually a political conspiracy theory and movement, which is weird, because QAnon itself is a conspiracy. So it centers around various claims that are made by anonymous individuals, that’s what the Anon is, and these individuals are known as Q. So those claims have pretty much been developed and relayed on these online communities and online influencers. And the main tenet, or core belief I guess, is that a cabal of satanic, cannibalistic child molesters are operating a global child sex trafficking ring, a cabal to control the Earth.

So do me a favor and dumb that down for me. A group of powerful people that are in control, and they also are trying to take over the world. Sexual deviants, and they’re doing satanic rituals and things of that sort. So that’s kind of the main base. There’s a lot more which we’ll get into later. So it also gets into the political sphere a lot, a big part of Q. Followers believe that the Trump administration secretly fought this cabal of pedophiles, and that there was going to be arrests and executions of these members, and they call it the storm or the event. When this whole QAnon thing was big back in like 2017, 2018, and then 2020 obviously, the election, that’s when I kind of got on the radar, the storm’s coming and all that.

Just to clear it up, what’s cabal mean? A cabal, it’s like, imagine a giant evil organization set to control the world. That’s in essence what a cabal is. But it’s also, like, we don’t know who it is, highly secretive. Very true. QAnon folks, do we call them folks? I don’t know what to say. Believers? It’s so weird. Maybe we should go on the message board and ask what they prefer to be. I’m afraid to go on the message board. I’m not good at being anonymous, I can’t do it, it’s too hard.

QAnon named a bunch of Democratic politicians, Hollywood actors, high ranking government officials, business tycoons, medical people as members of this so-called cabal. Sorry, I’m going to back up here. First off, Q, what do we, I will get into where the Q itself originated, but the people, the individuals themselves are known as Q. What’s our famous line? You probably already are going to bring this up in a bit. Wait, where the hell are we doing it? It’s Comet Ping Pong, right? Okay.

So they said that these people, there’s a bunch, and that’s where it gets political, because as you’ll see, the QAnon thing is predominantly from a far right wing, radical right wing perspective in terms of political belief systems. But they’re just naming names, politicians and actors. But they would also just drop information that is going to happen, and then it turns out to happen. A lot of things didn’t happen, some of it did, and it kind of fuels even more, especially when one thing does happen people like, I told you. And then it solidifies the whole Q.

What would happen is things wouldn’t happen, they’d be like, see, it’s all part of the plan. Like, what the hell. What is the famous boomer statement? A clock is right twice a day. Broken clock twice a day, brother. So the QAnon also claimed that Trump stimulated the conspiracy of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in order to get Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the sex trafficking ring, and then prevent a coup by Obama, Clinton and Soros.

And one of the things, I literally highlighted it just because I personally think it’s BS. So QAnon is described as anti-semitic, or rooted in anti-semitic tropes, because of its fixation on Jewish financier George Soros and conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family, because they’re Jews. And I’m like, I didn’t even, I swear to God I didn’t even know they were Jewish. Does that make me anti-semitic because I had no idea they were Jewish? I thought they were like Austrian or something. One day we got to do something on this George Soros guy, because he always comes up in all kinds of this stuff. He’s the new Rockefeller. He’s like always behind the curtain but also always in front of everything, his name always comes up. We’ll pencil that in for a later episode.

I’m terrified of doing people that are still alive, I’m going to be honest. George is like 95, I’m terrified that the night is coming after him. I texted you, I said hey, we can’t post this, he’s coming, he’s going to remember. He’s going to show up in your office one day and you’re going to crap your pants. It’s going to be Suge and OJ, like my worst nightmare. The Expendables 8, all the villains in there. Courtney Love. Holy crap. And Eric’s got like a suicide note written in 18 different fonts.

So QAnon does have origins in older conspiracy theories, but the first post by Q was in October 2017. This is on 4chan. So 4chan is pretty much an anonymous posting board, so people can put up a new board topic and then you can anonymously post. Like Reddit, or is it like a forum? From what I know, it’s the old forum. Do you remember the early 2000s chat boards, these forums, exactly like a really rudimentary version of Reddit. Reddit’s the bomb. This is like predating that.

Q claimed to be a high level government official with Q clearance. So that’s where the Q came from. Q clearance. I will get into specifically what Q clearance is. Pretty much this person claimed to have access to classified information about the Trump administration and about its opponents. And then after 4chan, Q moved to 8chan, which is a similar thing, a chat board. And 8chan became Q’s home for what they called the drops, or Q drops, and that’s where they would post cryptic things so people thought it was code.

It’s interesting, it reminds me of the Watergate story, where you have an inside government official which was codenamed Deep Throat, and he would feed the reporters. They would meet in that underground parking garage and they would feed him Intel. And then later on it was found out that it was a high ranking official. I’m not saying this is the same, but it’s very similar. Before you could actually be anonymous. Now it’s like a 400 pound dude with Cheetos and he’s like, trust me, I’m a secret agent.

So obviously it became a super viral phenomenon. People would repost it on Twitter. It became huge, massive, and then it kind of died out. So the way that it really began, it kind of started with Pizzagate. So Pizzagate was before the original Q post. In March 2016, a guy named John Podesta, who was Hillary’s campaign runner, he ran Hillary’s campaign, his email account got hacked. They did like a phishing attack and they hacked his stuff. And so then WikiLeaks published a bunch of his emails, and this was in November 2016, and they believe that these emails contained coded messages connecting a lot of high level Democratic party officials, pretty much code relating human and child sex trafficking to pizza restaurants. The one specific one in DC that was called the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria, that’s like the main one.

And I’ve seen a lot of these emails. Some of them, it’s not, hey dude, I want some pizza, I’m hungry. It’d be like, oh, we want to order, we have some friends coming, we want to order two pizzas, one specifically pepperoni. It would be really awkward. Why would you talk about pizza that way? Corporately I have never emailed about that, not a single time. Hey bro, you want to get a pizza, via email, to a coworker? Not one time ever. Strange. That’s what made it, I think that’s what really fueled it, why are you talking about pizza like this. It would be weird orders, they’d be for four people and they’d get like eight pizzas. Why do you need so many pizzas? I’m having a party of three, can you bring me 52 pizzas. It’s some weird stuff.

So that was kind of the start, and then obviously Pizzagate got really big. People were protesting, hashtag save the children and all these things. It’s vehemently denied, and then there was actually a lot of criminal activity that happened against this pizzeria. People would go there, break in. Comet Ping Pong Pizza. And so that guy’s business got ruined. But it was pretty sketchy. We’ll put it up on our Patreon. It was like an email of, dear John, Friday I would like Hawaiian pizza for one. It’s very specific. And the person, oh I know just what you need, or something, that’d be the response, and you’re like, what the hell. It’s super sketch, it’s really awkward. It’s shitty code, it’s the worst possible code.

There’s not a lot on Pizzagate, there really isn’t, and when you try to find more on it, pretty much the internet just is bitching at you for even considering looking it up. Another thing, by the way, on both of these two things, because a lot happened in 2016, 2017, that whole time, everything was considered fake news around that subject. One of the things that happened is, I remember Google started suppressing anything that had to do with it. You try to research and you can’t find anything. Go multiple pages deep and it’s just every major news outlet saying you’re an idiot for even trying to look at it. They rank them, but any other little blog that’s actually digging in, like every. I had watched a couple weird fringe documentaries, I know some about it, but you’re not getting anything. It’s pretty much saying how people who think this are stupid and they’re crazy and they’re psychos and you can’t trust them.

So essentially Pizzagate is, there’s the code system that was set up in DC and a pizza location where you pick. Is there a basement? There’s a basement there, and they were saying that things were happening in the basement or various locked storage areas that were inside of the pizza joint. So you would go there and that’s where you would go to get your pizza, exactly. And there’s all those people that you named, pictures on the walls, they’ve all been there, and they’ve known to have been there. And that’s how it originated.

So the only data that we have are John Podesta’s emails, which in themselves are just weird. So I don’t know if I can jump to that conclusion that that’s what they were doing, but I can say that those emails are weird and it’s not how normal humans communicate, especially the people that are supposed to be leading your country. No one talks like that, no one communicates like that. I wonder if they’ve ever done an interview saying why. I guarantee they just said we’re not going to talk about this, they haven’t. I promise you they haven’t. The emails were kind of like, let’s say we’re talking about some office stuff, and it’s like, oh, we’re going to get some furniture delivered, and by the way I ordered three pizzas. On the side. It was like a pizza appointment and all this stuff.

In essence, obviously like I said, Anon just means anonymous, that’s really the basic thing. Pretty much Q was preceded by these so-called anons. So the Q came after the anons, and then Q obviously claimed to have this government insider access. And then even before that, in 2016, in July, there was an anonymous poster named FBI Anon. It’s so ridiculous. My username is going to be FBI agent John, trust me, I work there, so give me a break. So dumb. Trust me. He claimed to be a high level analyst and strategist at the FBI and he had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case. So he began posting information.

The leaked email case, is that what you mean? Yeah, this was having to do with the whole thing that happened with Hillary Clinton and pretty much her email server, how she had like 26 or 28,000 emails that were on her own private server that she was not supposed to have, but obviously nothing happened, because she deleted all of them. And they’re like, I didn’t have anything. Didn’t they impeach Trump for having a box in his place? They tried to impeach him, but they were declassified at that point. We’re not going to get into that, Jesus Christ man.

If I was president I wouldn’t keep, at any point would I say bring this to my house, Stephanie put this in my garage. Bring this whole pallet of boxes over and just scatter them everywhere. I wouldn’t even sign stuff. Nope, not on me. Sir, this is the entire budget for next year, we need your signature. I can’t do it. Get the VP in here, I’m on vacation, sorry.

So they began posting information about this investigation in 2016, and there was an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, and then there were claims that Hillary Clinton was going to be imprisoned once Trump became president. And then there was another one at that time, they’re predicting, it’s Nostradamus in new form. Like, a clock’s right two times a day, predictions, one out of a million times. So then there was another one, HLI Anon, high level insider Anon. They hosted a Q&A about various conspiracy theories. Some of these are insane. Princess Diana was murdered after trying to stop the September 11th attacks. No way, dude. First off, that doesn’t make sense. If you listen to our Princess Diana episode, you know she died in the mid 90s, 9/11 happened 2001, much later. That’s why I’m saying some of this stuff’s ridiculous. Why would you write this?

So then after the 2016 election happened and Trump got elected, there were more posters. So there was CIA Anon, and then there was CIA Intern. So they claimed to be high ranking CIA officers. I love CIA Intern, I’m a high ranking intern. That’s the terrifying part about the internet, anybody can be anybody, there’s no, you can. I just assume everything is fake news. But then there’s another one, White House Insider Anon, and they offered previews of things that were going to go down regarding leaks that would affect the Democratic party. So you can see how it started to spiral out of control.

And that’s the only thing about this. While some of the things may be good points, I could go on there right now and be like, President Anon, and say anything. So there’s a good side and a bad side. The good side, I got to talk about freedom of speech and living in the US. We can do whatever we want. We literally, us three, started a podcast called The Conspiracy Podcast, the most unoriginal podcast name you could ever come up with. It wasn’t taken. We bought the domain, and we are able to talk about whatever we want without yet being disposed of. Pretty rad. I’m not saying we’re making any money, but we can pretty much do what we want and say what we want. Some of these episodes we’ve gotten real wild on. I think that’s one of the beauties of this country.

But now it’s becoming far different, because going to the extreme of it, now you really can’t say anything that hurts people’s feelings anymore, because then that’s hate speech. I understand certain things for sure, say a whole race of people shouldn’t exist, maybe you shouldn’t be saying that. But something that I personally believe in, not in a shitty or malicious way, why does it matter? I’m not saying it to upset you, I’m sorry that you feel upset by what I’m saying, but why should that matter? Now I feel like it’s getting to a point where it’s like, do you believe in unrestricted, say what you want? I think so, because if you close the door on anything you’re closing the door on.

Here’s the thing, who is anyone, who is the government to halt what someone believes in, even if what they believe in the vast majority of humanity doesn’t agree with? Even if someone’s like, oh I hate all black people, talk about it, but what gives me the right to say what they believe in is wrong? I don’t have that right. It’s an individual thing and I think individuals should be allowed to express their own personal beliefs, because like Eric said, you close the door the opposite way. Let’s say they’re like, well, don’t say anything bad about the establishment, well, you can’t say anything, or it’s like, we decided that what you believe in and everyone that believes the same thing is wrong, and so now you can’t say stuff. So it opens the door to start chipping away, and I feel like it’ll be a long term process, but soon it’ll be China. What did you say about the Communist party, bro? Jack Ma, oh, you’re super rich, okay, you disappear for two months and you come back and who are you? It kind of just leads down the path of losing your rights.

So that’s the good part. The bad part is what turns into fake news and propaganda, and the technology that we are coming upon is AI, CGI, deep fakes. A deep fake can get a Grammy, what the hell man, nobody has a chance. See, my thing is, that to me doesn’t fall under free speech, because you’re saying something as a different person, which isn’t you as an individual. You should be able to say whatever you want, but if I create some AI face of somebody else and then say things as them, that’s not cool, you can’t do that.

I’m not saying full freedom is great, there’s no such thing as full freedom. I’m just saying, freedom of speech to me is an individual thing. You shouldn’t be able to copy someone’s likeness and say something for them, because you’re not them. If you want to say it you can say whatever the hell you want. So identity theft is not freedom of speech. No, because you’re speaking as another human, it’s not you. Not like freedom of speech as Eric, like hello, I’m Sean. It doesn’t work that way. I have a Tundra out in the car in the parking lot, it’s mine now. I don’t want the Tacoma, I want the. So back on top.

So a 4chan user named Q Clearance Patriot, he was the first Q. So Q Clearance Patriot first appeared on the boards on October 28th, 2017. And he posted the thread and it was called Calm Before The Storm. This is where the storm comes into play. So it was 2017. So I mean, honestly, it was the calm before the storm. True, from 2017 to 2020, oh my God. I’m not saying I’m on board, I don’t even know what he’s going to say, I’m just saying. You just made Eric a believer. The storm, he’s like, okay, the first I was calm and now I’m storming. The first conspiracy I go with, this one. Out of all of them, Eric’s like, I’m in. Where do I join 4chan?

So the storm became code for, in essence, trying to predict events and things that would happen, arrests, imprisonment, swamp, all that. Did he name names? We’ll get into some of the names, the main ones that were talked about. So this implied that he had the Q clearance. Q clearance is actually a Department of Energy security clearance that’s required to access top secret information regarding nuclear weapons and materials. So that’s specifically what Q clearance is.

So Q’s first post said that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested and that would cause massive unrest, and then there’d be a number of other arrests happening. And then a few hours later he makes another post saying Clinton was being detained, though not arrested yet, and that Trump was going to remove the criminal rogue elements. Pretty much alluding to George Soros, Huma Abedin, who’s another politician, and Operation Mockingbird. So what Operation Mockingbird was, allegedly it was a large scale program in the CIA that was in the early Cold War days, where they attempted to manipulate domestic news and media organizations pretty much for propaganda purposes. They’re using the media as a propaganda tool, Joseph Goebbels level. I actually believe in that one, 100%. I bet if we did a survey on that one. You go watch CNN you get one story, you go watch Fox you get the opposite story, and everybody’s just throwing stuff at each other.

One of my favorite things is during the 2020 issue, it was on CNN and the guy’s like, the protests are mostly peaceful, and like behind him the buildings are on fire, there’s a raging fire in the back, he’s like, it’s mostly peaceful, the building is on fire behind him. Ridiculous. Or the other one, I think Rogan showed it, where it’s 50 news channels saying the same thing, the exact same thing, like everybody has the same script. They’re all under an umbrella. It might just be that they don’t have content and that’s how they distribute the content. No, they’re reading the same script. It’s another thing to be, hey this is kind of the topic of what’s going on, change like two words, come on, change anything, change a word, just switch up the order that you say it.

Honestly, you know what we should do, we should try to manipulate the news, we should try it one time, just see what happens. Something very small, very silly, but we should see if we can create news from nothing. It’d be an interesting experiment. I think I told you guys, July 4th I was at the parade and I got interviewed by the media. I forgot exactly what they were asking me, but it was about the country, kind of a little bit of patriotism this and that. Then I see this stuff on the news and then they just turned it around on how I was unhappy about the war and this and that. They literally just took certain words to make a new sentence of what I was saying. So they definitely manipulate to just tell their own story. I mean, I do that in the editing of this podcast, make Eric sound great, make Sean sound like crap. Make Eric great again, MEGA.

Q’s activity really started surging in that November, and then more posts expanding upon the Hillary Clinton thing, other conspiracy theories including Obama and Saudi Arabia, Iran, all these different categories that were really hot at the moment. And so followers became like fanatics and they started analyzing every post, trying to find more deeper underlying info in each post. Also, like you said, a lot of right wingers and mostly Trump fans, like extreme, it was fueling that whole thing too. It reminds me of a long time ago where it was, the person who would predict the future, and they were the prophet, and everybody’s like, oh the prophet, he’s like, there’s going to be rain next week. Honestly that was the primitive beginning, like the medicine man, the witch, the burning. There will be a full moon at the end of this month, and he just knew astronomy. Like a sorcerer.

But people took it a little far. Literally one in November 2017, Trump sipping water from a bottle was interpreted as a secret sign that the arrests were going to happen. I don’t know how you make that correlation. He’s like, I’m thirsty, they’re like, it’s happening, it’s going down right now. I think they were emptying the swamp water. I remember they were also questioning him at the podium, and he would never really deny it, he was just kind of, but he wouldn’t confirm it either. That’s him being, I’m going to milk this now. He’s like, you decide, and everyone’s like, okay, and went bananas.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, after Pizzagate was the start, they started going further and implying there was a worldwide cabal in place. And so early rumors by QAnon followers started to spread, the figures say Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea, Senator John McCain, and that all these people had already been arrested and indicted and they were wearing monitoring bracelets at public appearances. So people were just looking for anything. Then it came super dark. Well, it gets into the rumors of the frazzledrip. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the frazzledrip. Never heard of that. It sounds like a rad grapefruit juice or something.

So it’s a super messed up theory that there was a snuff video that was circulating the dark web with Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin pretty much murdering a kid and then drinking the kid’s blood and wearing the kid’s face skin as like a face mask. Real dark, nasty, nasty stuff. I don’t know how it started. First off, remind me again, who’s the Huma? Huma Abedin is a politician. She was involved heavily with Hillary’s campaign. Abedin is an American political staffer who was vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president of the United States. Before that she was Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton when she was US Secretary of State in 2009. So she’s a big politician, connected to Hillary. Now it makes a little more sense.

Then later there were two 4chan moderators whose other names are hilarious. There’s Paul Furber, who is known as BaruchTheScribe, which I might make that my fantasy name, Baruch The Scribe, I like that. And then Coleman Rogers, who is PamphletAnon. So they worked with a YouTuber named Tracy Diaz and they were promoting QAnon to a much wider audience. So they’re going on YouTube and then they sort of reach out this way. This is pretty much how QAnon spread, so that’s why I’m going through how they spread it. And the YouTubers, they were like, oh hell yeah, get some views, get some ad money, of course they’re going to spread this out.

And then they started going to Reddit and they were getting on various subreddits, and they had this really big QAnon subreddit and it got banned because of incitement of violence and posting private information, so they got shut down. And then QAnon spread to social media, to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all these. And big QAnon groups started popping up around that time. That’s when they moved to 8chan from 4chan, from one shitty board to another. And then 8chan weirdly enough was shut down in 2019, it was pretty much linked to some shooting and they shut it down, and then it got brought back up.

So QAnon got attention in mainstream media, not just these little forums. It was in November 2017, and that’s when Fox News, Sean Hannity, comedian Roseanne Barr, they were spreading pretty much QAnon on their own personal social media. So it really started to pick up steam then. Alex Jones claimed to actually be in personal contact with Q, the original Q, and this led to everyone, and then the best. Alex Jones is the dude, Info Wars. He’s kind of like the dude who says a lot of stuff, and then he got one right, and then they got huge because of it.

So then actually the other day I saw something that years ago he had talked about what happened in 2020 that we can’t say. So then, this is, I purposely put this in here because it’s a little near and dear to us. This led to QAnon followers being at a 2018 Trump rally for midterm elections in Tampa, and this was the first real QAnon presence. Were you there? No, I was not there at all. I’ve never been to any political rally ever in my entire life. Because you know me, I hate politics, I hate it. I would never waste my time. My wife went to a DeSantis one. Remember, it’s kind of a crush thing, our wives saw Kissimmee, wherever it was, I found a picture recently. Maybe we should go, for just us, to a rally. Why would I waste my time? I’ll go if we get media badges. If we get media badges I’ll totally go for sure.

QAnon started getting accepted into religious groups. So some Christian pastors were introducing their congregations to QAnon ideas, which is wild. How do you tie it? So the Indiana based Omega Kingdom Ministry, they tried to combine QAnon and Christianity with Q posts and Bible quotes that they would read during church services. I don’t know how it gets religious. Do you think he was just trying to get butts in the seats? Maybe it’s because of the underlying thing about it being satanic, so maybe it was used to combat that. Good point. But then other Christian pastors pretty much called QAnon heresy, they’re like, the Heretics and we will stand against this.

I just don’t think it has anything to do, why is it even involved? Besides that, it’s like bringing politics into religion. Although we would have to see all the posts, because maybe there are a lot of Bible quotes. I really don’t think there is. You mean the Q is dropping Bible quotes? The pastors were putting the Bible. How do you correlate, oh let’s order a Hawaiian pizza which equals pedophilia, to the church? I’m trying to justify it for them. Maybe God’s into it, maybe God is Q. Maybe attendance on Sunday was a little low, try to pump it up.

Then they started selling all the merch. You mean the church was, or? No, they were slinging. I wonder who was getting this money. I think it was individuals, because they were selling it on like some Amazon stores. There’s a lot of books. So there’s a book called QAnon, An Invitation To The Great Awakening, supposedly authored by 12 QAnon followers, and it was on Amazon’s bestseller list in 2019. There was also a QAnon blogger named Neon Revolt, it was an alias for a guy named Robert Cornero Jr. Neon Revolt, I don’t know, Michael Jackson named his kid Blanket, so what do you want me to say, like Cheeseburger in Paradise. So then he wrote a book called Revolution Q: The Story Of QAnon And The Second American Revolution, also for sale on Amazon. So in 2020 Politico noted there were 100 titles associated with QAnon all for sale on Marketplace. So they were just cashing in on the gold.

It actually makes sense they cash out, because Jorge and I are in this space a bit, when you see search terms and you start to see, wow this is trending so much, that I’m going to just buy 10,000 t-shirts, make some quick cash. Everybody probably at this point has heard this new trending song, Rich Men North Of Richmond. He’s slaying, but people are slaying off of everybody, everybody’s selling hats and t-shirts and all kinds of stuff, because people are watching the search volume and it’s easy money. I made like 10 grand once, that was my Amazon.

A lot of sites started to aggregate all the Q posts, trying to get all this data and put the story together. And it became a lot easier for people to get the information, so if there’s one particular site that aggregates all the posts and has all the data in one space, it makes it easier to disseminate that information. So there was a bunch of those. One was QMap, that was the most popular and famous aggregator. Pretty much QMap got shut down because of some British fact checking organization. That’s another thing I remember, there was so much fact checking on Facebook and stuff, so anytime you posted anything like that, it’d get nuked. So they needed a site to put everything that was not Facebook or Twitter.

All these online communities started popping up, and there were a lot on Facebook. So Facebook did its own internal investigation and they found that the Facebook network had thousands of QAnon themed groups, millions of members, millions of followers. So it became really huge. What’s the appeal? I think it’s really like an anti-establishment type thing. Take me as a personal example, you know me, I don’t trust the government, just because I feel like there’s too much corruption already in play, and the same system that’s supposed to be getting better keeps getting progressively worse, and so you’re always looking for something to back you and make you right. In the words of the great George Bush, fool me, can’t get fooled again. You keep getting the same rhetoric, oh change change, and then nothing happens, and you’re like, why do I keep trusting something that never changes. So that’s why I personally am like, I think they’re all full of it, all politicians.

You’re already thinking like they have all this shady stuff going on, and then Q drops something and you’re like, I knew it. I think people want to believe, they’re looking for something to believe in, and then whatever aligns closest with what they already think they’re going to believe. So if you’re already on that fringe, and the Q drops were helping Trump and helping his whole message and campaign, so if you’re already on board, you’re like, hell yeah, Q’s the truth. So I think that’s how it really took hold.

And then it gets into Reuters, big company, big media company. So Reuters did this whole evaluation, or audit, and so according to them Russian backed social media accounts were promoting QAnon as early as November or December of 2017. So I don’t know if you remember this whole thing going down, it became, oh, the only reason Trump’s trending now, he’s got Russia and China pumping them up, and they’re using these accounts. But my only thing is, you think they would have just used a VPN, because they’re saying these accounts are coming directly from China. Well, if you just VPN into Mississippi. Why would they just do that? You don’t think Meta has the tech to track that back? Because here’s the thing, if I can get a VPN on my app, it’s the most basic thing. You mean to tell me that the country that makes every smart device on Earth can’t trick Reuters? I was thinking Russia, China. I’m thinking China, bro, come on. We’re the most basic, we got him, got the suckers.

You can download on the App Store a VPN to hide yourself. It’s not that good, meaning if you were in the specialized sense. I’m just saying that if you were a superpower country, you don’t think they could fool Facebook? You really think they couldn’t fool Facebook? I mean, I agree with Sean, they did for a while, until they uncovered it. No, they didn’t fool them, Facebook didn’t care. That’s true, Facebook just didn’t give a crap. That’s possible too. That was the only thing about me, if they were really trying to do this and make a play, you think they would have put a little more budget behind it.

Remember when Zuckerberg went in front of Congress? When was that, like 2019, I think that must be around that time, as part of that. Because the election was 2016 and everything happened right around that time. And so Reuters is just saying that there was Russian government funded state media such as RT and Sputnik that were amplifying these conspiracy theories. In 2019, citing QAnon as evidence that there was internal division in the US. I mean, that makes sense. Oh look at this, these pieces of crap, they hate each other. I love how they just call it like project Sputnik. We’re calling this project Stalin, no big deal, hammer and sickle media, insane.

There was a 2021 report from this research group that’s focused on national security, they’re called the Soufan Center, and they found that one of the 166,000 QAnon posts in the United States between 2020 and 2021 originated from foreign countries, primarily Russia and China, and that China was the primary foreign actor touting QAnon narratives online. So that’s terrifying. It’s interesting data, but I would love to see the data that they’re using, because it’s just one independent research group. So I don’t know what data they used, I would love to know that personally. It’s hard to find solid reliable data. It’s also because it’s just one. If there were seven of them that held that same thing, it’d be facts. But it’s like one that I’ve never heard of, Soufan or whatever. Doesn’t sound German. They’re not from China.

There was another guy who was a researcher of QAnon, and in 2020 he noted that QAnon dedicated Facebook pages existed in 71 countries worldwide. So it was like a global thing. Then a guy named Joel Finkelstein told the Washington Post that German and Japanese QAnon movements were strong and growing. There were three main QAnon groups in Japan, and several members were arrested in 2022. Why are they just trying to break up the US? I think what Sean said is right, it’s the against the establishment thing. So each country has their own situation, their own problems. But QAnon was the theory of a worldwide cabal. So they’re thinking, oh yeah, our government is doing this, it just happened to originate in the US.

So then between March and June 2020, which is during the 2020 sickness, right in the mix, QAnon activity nearly tripled on Facebook and doubled on Instagram and Twitter. By this time it’s worldwide, the whole world’s on this. Although to be fair, everything tripled, because there’s nothing else to do. Interesting stats, one in four Britons believe in QAnon related theories, but only 6% support it. Shout out to our Brits, a lot of you guys, UK all day. I might be there in October potentially for podcasting. We’re at 10% UK now. One love UK. One of the most popular QAnon Twitter accounts in the world was a British influencer named Martin Geddes.

And then Canada, so a lot of Canadians were into it. And then in 2020 a gunman and QAnon follower drove his vehicle into Rideau Hall, which was the temporary residence of Trudeau during 2020, and he was there to arrest Trudeau for 2020 sickness restrictions and firearm regulations. Can you imagine that? Probably just beat the crap out of that guy. Can you imagine, I show up at the White House, citizens arrest, Biden come out now, they shoot Eric’s kneecaps off instantly, there’d be German Shepherds biting your throat out. Wait, why can we get citizens arrest but not the president, not the White House?

Before we go further, is the citizens arrest thing a real thing? I think it’s like, a citizen can probably citizen detain someone who you catch in the act of committing a crime. But is it legit? Probably some wild west stuff. So you’re robbing something, I stop you and I just clothesline you and I’m like, citizens arrest, bam, cops are like thanks. But what if I fight back and you’re like, oh crap, I got to shoot this guy, and I kill you, or just get in a fight. Maybe we don’t have to go to shooting the guy. No, I would kill you both, size and performance, you’re both dead with your non-carry weapon, with the paintball gun, didn’t even die, I just dodge, the three pillars of dodge, dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge.

So I don’t know if you remember the big convoy protest, the truckers in Canada. That was kind of cool actually. What year was that, 2022? So those protests in Canada supposedly were the result of coordination between QAnon conspiracy theorists as well as anti-vaccine and anti-government organizations. I don’t know how much I would give credit to QAnon on that one. I think the truckers were just fed up in Canada back then, I think they were still in full lockdown. Canada and Australia, easily one of the worst, top two. Nobody was allowed to travel. So my cousin is married to a Canadian citizen, so when he was going to Canada to see her, he had to stay in a quarantine hotel for two weeks at his own expense. It was madness. I really love Quebec, it’s beautiful, that’s the only place I’ve been in Canada.

There was an Australian researcher who was tracking far right activity online, and he noticed mentions of QAnon in Australia’s local communities actually as early as 2018. And then during the 2020 lockdown when measures were imposed on Melbourne, a group of QAnon folks from Queensland traveled to protest, promoting QAnon. And supposedly Australia was the fourth largest producer of QAnon content after the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. That’s usually how it goes. That’s all of our statistics for everything I’ve ever seen, they’re always number four. It’s US, Canada, UK, Australia, and then nobody knows about China and Russia, they’re just behind the scenes. That’s literally the statistics of the Earth.

And then the movement started spreading to South America after that. So that’s kind of the spread. I wanted to make sure we saw how things started to evolve into the worldwide phenomenon that it was. It’s obviously majorly died down, but I wanted to go back, because obviously it’s a podcast on conspiracies, to end with really the main quote unquote beliefs or theories, and then we can make our deliberation on what we think is real. To delineate one’s thoughts.

QAnon’s core beliefs, as we discussed, are that the world is being controlled by a secret cabal of satanic worshipping child molesters, Trump is secretly battling them, and then Q is giving you the date on this battle online. We didn’t really go into the child trafficking, so I want to get into a little bit more. So this cabal is thought to perpetuate its existence by controlling politicians, mainstream media, people in Hollywood. And pretty much Q says everything’s imminent, but the only way to stop it is to support Q and be a patriot. That’s what I say, prevent the storm. Is this by money or by just being aware of it? What’s the call to action, Q Patreon? I think it’s just probably awareness, being aware of something that is true makes it. So be a patriot, I guess.

So QAnon followers believe that the cabal includes a lot of Democratic party politicians, and this is where it starts to go far right. And it’s not, oh it’s only Democrats, I don’t like that part. I don’t like it either, at least we threw in both sides in ours. See, for me I think all politicians are crap, so I don’t care what your affiliation is, you’re all crap. Libertarian, Republican, you all suck. But they’re not all human traffickers. So they’re saying include a lot of the people in the Democratic party such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Anthony Fauci, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres.

Wait, hold up, pause, you’re putting the Pope and Ellen DeGeneres in the same sentence? Not us, we reiterate, not Sean. These are just main high profile people that they’ve chosen, they’re not all in the same caliber. Sounds more like the list of the most famous people on Earth. But you can’t put it past the Pope, have you seen the whole thing of the Dalai Lama? Did you see the video of the suck my tongue? I did see that. Oh my God, never saw the suck my tongue, it’s so weird. It’s literally the Dalai Lama on video and he’s like, there’s this little boy, and kiss like, kiss me kiss me. It’s got to be out of context. What context is that, okay, suck my tongue. He tells a little boy to suck his tongue.

For our listeners, go to Google, type in, this is not me, it’s on YouTube, Dalai Lama suck my tongue. And if you can find an explanation I would love to know what the explanation is. There is no explanation on Earth, doesn’t make sense for anyone to. I would not even tell my wife to suck my tongue. So disconnected from reality, logic and reality, that he apologized, but I’m like, what are you even saying in that apology? He shows his tongue and he’s literally, I thought he was talking to him and he’s like, kiss me, kiss me, kiss say. Maybe it’s some AI stuff. No bro, you clearly see him sticking his tongue out at him. The Dalai Lama came out and apologized, so it was him, you don’t make an apology for something you didn’t do. Maybe it was a language barrier. What it means in my religion, you get blessed in my religion if you suck my tongue, it’s eternal blessing, like laying hands on you but it’s laying my tongue in your mouth. It’s so weird. I used to think the Dalai Lama was a great guy. He is, he just had one little slip. Eric, if you ever slip and tell my daughter to suck your tongue I’m going to shoot you in the face. It’s a boy, a little boy. It’s not an example you can use.

So also on this list, they said Fauci, Winfrey, DeGeneres, Lady Gaga, Chrissy Teigen, Tom Hanks. Damn, sounds like the same list of Epstein’s Island, a little similar, very similar. And Kevin Spacey is not on the list, all of these guys are on the list but Kevin Spacey is not.

So one key tenet in QAnon’s narrative leading up to the 2020 election was the recurring prediction that Trump would be reelected in a landslide and spend his second term bringing about the storm by undoing the deep state, disbanding the cabal, arresting its leaders. Maybe they just meant 2024. Well, then after Trump lost, Q stopped posting, and then there was just one guy. It started off as one. But when he says Q stopped posting, we mean the one main, wherever the one, the Q drops are coming from. Q, FBI, CIA, JFK. And then people started going through the previous posts trying to find clues or hints.

I think the bigger scandal, in my mind, is this sex trafficking and satanic ritual thing. So QAnon pretty much merged with the whole Pizzagate concept, fusing the beliefs in the one, that children were being abducted and child trafficked, which is happening, I just don’t know if it’s the people they say, but it’s happening everywhere. And pretty much this is all tied into the cabal. They believe that certain politicians and Hollywood elites engage in adrenochrome harvesting, which weirdly enough, adrenochrome is a real thing.

So define that for me. Adrenochrome is pretty much synthesized adrenaline. And supposedly it’s solely for research purposes and there’s no medical uses for it, but it is a real thing, adrenochrome is an actual thing. I used to think it was fake, I literally thought it was a fake thing I’ve heard, but then I was like, oh, it’s real. But that’s the synthesized version, what you’re talking about. So they’re saying that they’re using adrenochrome, which is adrenaline extracted from children’s blood, to produce a psychoactive drug, a drug that also has some sort of effect on you as well as prevents aging. That’s the theory.

The Holy Grail of the 21st century. But the messed up part is that they get this by sacrificing these children. Like fear, they have to torture them, they have to have all this fear to produce high levels of it, high levels of adrenaline. That is the most messed up thing I’ve ever heard, it’s so uncomfortable. It’s not even, I’d say it’s not even sex trafficking, it’s worse, it’s way worse. Torturing, murdering a child to create fear adrenaline, so that they can then be young. It’s so messed up. I really really hope that’s not true, so I’m not going to subscribe to it, because I just hope it doesn’t exist, because you have some hope in man, that we wouldn’t go that far. We’re not the Aztecs, come on now. Anything but this.

You know, sometimes when we do our research, it’s basically like 10 documentaries and then a book and then a podcast, and then we do it. But then sometimes I get so overrun on that topic. So for example the next one we’re doing is UFOs. So after a while I get so overrun on it that I have to go to something else. And so I was watching an Auschwitz thing, and the reason I’m telling this story is because at the end of it I was like, I didn’t think that man could do something of that level, magnitude, to where there’s even deniers of it. That’s the thing that’s weird, that people, Holocaust deniers believe that it didn’t happen, and they can’t believe. Honestly what I believe is they think that humans just couldn’t do that to other humans. They can’t accept that that was done. So if history teaches us anything, anything is possible.

I was kind of going to say something similar. People are like really good, people are good, but then there’s also a lot of people that are bad people, and they’ll convince other people to get on board with their stuff because they don’t know better or whatever the case may be. No limits, anything’s possible. I would hope there’s no evidence for this, I hope not, but that’s what they believe, they do these weird rituals, and then there’s the drip thing that I mentioned about Hillary and Huma doing that weird stuff. And they think that adrenochrome is some sort of elixir to remain young, and it’s very Holy Grail like, the Fountain of Life, fountain of youth, the fountain of death.

And then in 2020 a group led by QAnon promoter Timothy Charles Holmseth, they called itself the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force. They were not affiliated with the Pentagon, just called themselves that. They were spreading claims about tens of thousands of children being held hostage and tortured in New York City. At that same time there were QAnon followers that created a theory that accused the furniture company Wayfair of pretty much selling expensive furniture to launder money for child sex trafficking, which is really weird because you see the pictures and it’s like a bookshelf that’s ten grand and it’s called Stephanie. Which I always thought was weird, why does it got to be named, why isn’t it like Ikea where it’s some name like Oot.

So essentially somebody would go on Wayfair, they would buy this stuff, and then instead of getting the shelf they get this kid. So that’s the theory, because they did find multiple items that were a random thing that probably cost them like $18 to make and it’s $27,000, and it was also the name of a person, like Kelly. It’s so hard to believe, it’s unreal, but is it impossible? No, it’s not. The fact that they’re selling something that doesn’t cost $20,000, $30,000 for $30,000 and people are buying it, it’s a little odd, super odd. I can see someone messing up one decimal point, but multiple, come on.

So then there were other groups in the US and UK and they were organizing protests against child sexual abuse and human trafficking, so that became a big proponent of their belief system. There’s other weird stuff that they believe in, it gets real super fringe. So I’m going to read them, but I’m not saying these are real, please don’t crap on me for this, it’s Sean’s opinion. So they would incorporate various other conspiracies into their belief system, Kennedy assassination, 9/11, UFOs.

So in 2018 a woman named Liz Crokin said that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and that he is Q. Other followers adopted variations of the Kennedy conspiracy theory, saying that pretty much Kennedy Jr. was in disguise and he’d be Trump’s 2020 running mate. Kennedy Jr.’s on a couple, huh. And they also said that he died in the early 2000s in a plane crash in New England, a whole other conspiracy. And then people believed that in 2021, in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, that Kennedy Jr., or both of the Kennedys, would arrive and they were alive the whole time, which is insane. I just don’t understand why would they do that, even if they were alive, what would they do? Kennedy would be 400 years. Saying they were Q and they were going to show up, that they were alive the whole time, and then they would support Trump, back Trump, and that Trump would make Kennedy Jr. the president. It’s so stupid.

And then in 2018 Q said that vaccines, not all of them but some vaccines, were part of a big conspiracy theory, and that the 2020 sickness was part of this. They also suggested that hydroxychloroquine, remember when Trump was saying that hydroxychloroquine thing was a cure for it, and they accused Democrats of forcing infected patients into nursing homes, deliberately causing more 2020 sickness deaths. They also believe that the 2020 sickness is fake and that the deep state created it. That was fake? Seriously, what the hell. Yeah, keep going. We’re both getting mad, like our social media. Idiot.

So other supporters pretty much became invested in this economic conspiracy theory, referencing the National Economic Security and Recovery Act. So that was a set of US economic reforms that was proposed in the 90s where it would pretty much abolish compound interest on loans, replace income tax with a national sales tax, and return the US currency to the gold standard. So these things were proposed but they were never actually introduced before Congress, never actually enacted. But conspiracy theorists think that they were secretly passed by Congress and that it would come into play.

And then some people believe that there’s a reptilian conspiracy. Say one more time, a reptilian, we just jumped into that. And that the satanic cabal is in power and the people who run it are shape-shifting reptilian humanoids, and Zuckerberg’s one of them. He does look like a gecko or something. So that’s QAnon, that’s Pizzagate. What do you think, should we take up QAnon or should we take up Pizzagate?

I think we should just do our stance on everything as a whole, because it’s not like I blanketly believe all of it, because I don’t. But there’s some things that I do think are more believable than not. I wouldn’t say I’m 100% on really anything except for the fact that I do personally believe that there is a high level elite pedophile ring happening. I truly truly believe that. But not necessarily the sacrificing part. I don’t know about the whole sacrificing thing, drinking their blood, that to me seems like a bit of a stretch. But I definitely believe there’s a pedophile ring for sure. I agree.

But I do think that there is also an element, especially in Hollywood and the music industry, there’s definitely a weird satanic element, and anyone who says there’s not, have you seen any music video in the last five years? They’re all demons, Jesus Christ. The Weeknd has a trilogy of music videos on three different songs, they’re literally about him selling his soul to the devil, three of them. And then Dua Lipa does one and she’s like a demon, and then Sam Smith, he did a performance and he’s like the devil. Why does everyone have to be the devil, why is it so cool right now, it’s so weird. So I do believe there’s a weird, I don’t think it’s like sacrificing kids, but they could definitely be worshiping the devil for sure.

What about pizza? Like I said, I think there’s a pedophile ring and some truth, I think there is some truth there. A lot of it might be absurd, but at the same time you’re saying there’s some element. What kind of idiot would meet at a pizza place? That to me is the biggest thing. You’re rich, why meet me at a pizza place, go to a hangar, a jet. Go to a secret black ops location. So that’s why I think it’s, on a busy street you don’t need to do that. There’s also this thing of hiding in plain sight and using the code. But it’s one thing to be stupid and it’s another thing to be hiding in plain sight. You can also hide in plain sight when you’re at a black ops location that’s in DC. No, it looks like a building, it’s a building, no big deal. Let’s do it in the White House, it’s in plain sight.

So I do believe there is some truth to it, I just don’t think it was happening at Comet Ping Pong Pizza. I do believe, but I do remember reading them and I was like, this is very very sketchy, there’s so many and they’re so weird. And then it’s like, if it was any other email, but it wasn’t, it was Hillary’s, and that guy John Podesta. It’s not some random Hollywood guy been talking code about something else. But also, what people that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars eat pizza that much, let’s be honest. But it doesn’t have to equate to pedophilia. It could have been, you’re right, it could have been coke, cocaine. I don’t know, I’m just saying it doesn’t sound like there’s evidence that it’s pedophilia.

I think there is more to it, because I was watching this weird documentary, and it has something to do with pizza being used, it actually is a term that has been used in proven cases. And there’s also weird symbolism, even like a triangle, it’s a weird triangle thing, and you’ll see this exact symbol used in all these things, and it’s literally on the FBI’s website as one of the symbols for pedophilia. And they’re like, oh it’s on my shirt, on a pin. Why would you do that? The FBI saying that the symbol’s related to it is a little weird. It’s hard to pinpoint. So that’s why I’m saying I think there is. And I never really believed QAnon, even when it was big and they’re like, oh it’s coming, the arrests, I was like, no, that’s not happening.

It wasn’t on my radar until when it exploded in whatever, February, March 2020, that’s really when I first started hearing about it, because it exploded. And then when I started learning about it I’m like, it’s just some guy trying to get attention, and then it just takes off because it’s related to this polarizing figure, Trump was so polarizing, it grabs so much attention, and then it’s an excuse to make money. So I personally think that QAnon was using Trump as a tool to get big. I think they were like, this is so easy, and then what happens is then merch, oh merch, they were selling the hell out of that stuff. And then people were like, well Trump’s party Qing on, and he was like, sweet, thanks for showing up to the rallies bro, just grabbing his whole attention. I think they definitely supported him and they wanted to almost create a worship, like he’s the messiah. But I don’t think it was some guy that had this Q clearance, come on now. I think it’s total BS. CIA director John Anon, CIA insider, high ranking.

All right, this is where I’m at. Pizzagate, I’m not sure, I’m not convinced it’s pedophilia. I could see it being nefarious code. For what though, I don’t know. Give us your best guess. I don’t know what it is, send us some emails or some information about Pizzagate, because there’s a lot of people that did vote on this and there’s a lot going on out there. So if I had to guess I would say drugs. Why would you send an email about that though? But it’s in code, the same way same with pedophilia, you don’t say it out loud. So that’s what I think on that one.

On QAnon, I think it’s pretty crap, like lame, but I do believe that if there was a conspiracy it would be media manipulation. I am fully on board with that, less so merchandising and more like an external country trying to ride a wagon and then be able to manipulate what happens. I personally, now that you say that, my original thought was, I think it was a battle of who can manipulate more. I think internally in the US trying to manipulate as well as outside trying to manipulate, and I think they were having a clash of who can set the narrative better. Absolutely. I don’t believe that classified people would go and make predictions that ended up being wrong, and especially on 4chan being anonymous about it too, it just seems silly. But I do think both things have nefarious things going on, oh for sure, 100%. We just don’t know.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if a pineapple pizza was cocaine and a pepperoni was Fentanyl. That’s a good point, coke and this and that. And what about the sacrificing children part, drinking their blood? I really hope not. I mean like I said, anything is possible, I don’t have evidence that says against it, anything’s possible, I just really hope that’s not happening. And I don’t want to downplay the child sex trafficking, because I think that’s the worst thing in the universe, but torturing and murdering kids is like just a step above, on the level of evil, so hard to even say it out loud, it makes me sick to my stomach. I have a young daughter and I can’t even, it would be the darkness of all darkness.

We were walking in the park today and there were just two kids sitting on a bench, and I was like, I wouldn’t even walk near them, I don’t know why, they were like 14 years old and I was like, nope. I swear to God we walked away from that, I wasn’t even planning. All right, well there you go guys, that is QAnon, Pizzagate and the madness. We touched on the secret societies of pedophilia, high level elite kind of stuff. Let us know what you think, and like I said, please don’t shoot the messenger, just help the messenger get more information. We can all be friendly about this, my friends. All right guys, see you next week. Night night.