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Conspiranews is back, baby! October 2020 Edition
24 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M deliver October's conspiracy theory news to you. It's predictably Trumpian!
Recommended
Transcript
Radio Tuning and Breakthroughs
00:00:00
Speaker
Previously on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy- Hold on, hold on. We have movement. Subject's apparently tuning a radio. Crikey, this is sudden. This might be it. This might be the lead we've been waiting for. Five years. Five years of waiting and goading and sometimes baking. And finally, finally, we have something.
Conspiracy Theories and Radio Communication
00:00:20
Speaker
Yes, the subject is dialling it in. We're getting something. It's national radio. Seems one a clerk. If indeed that is their real name. Has managed to fool us yet again. But we'll catch you using a ham radio to talk with George Soros eventually. We already know about those bank accounts.
00:00:41
Speaker
Yes, it's very suspicious having both a savings account and a cheque account. Who uses cheques these days? The Illuminati. That's who. And my mother. Well, that just proves it. Then there were all those meetings you've
Patron Jokes and COVID Restrictions
00:00:56
Speaker
had. We know you claim they're friends or family members, but in the age of COVID you're not allowed to meet anyone. It's so facto, they must be Freemasons. Which explains the handshakes.
00:01:06
Speaker
Anyway, we just want you to know, A. Clark, that you're on our radar now. So don't think you're getting off easy. No. Now you're legally obliged to listen to the patron bonus episodes. You unlucky devil.
Travel Plans and Teasers
00:01:28
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Hi. I am Josh Edison Bay, Dr. Ententeth. We are sitting side by side together in the same place, free of Covid. Look, look, look at this. I can poke you with my forefinger, just like that. No social distancing. Complete violation of your personal space. Look at me violate you right now. Best CGO we've ever done on this podcast.
00:02:02
Speaker
You can't even tell I'm still in Hamilton. But you're not. You get about you. It's true. I'll be getting about even further, but that's another story entirely. Well, is it though? Because this is a news episode. We've been teasing major news and giving details of major
Location Moves and Drinks
00:02:20
Speaker
news. Is it time to actually say what the major news is? I will say that I'm only in Auckland for another week.
00:02:29
Speaker
but then I'll be in Wellington but then I'm only in Wellington for four or five weeks and then I'll be in Christchurch and then I'll only be in Christchurch for two or three days and then I'll be back in Auckland but then I'll only be in Auckland for at most three weeks and then then I'm going overseas and that is where the story ends for the time being well so this is a terrible poor
00:02:56
Speaker
It is. What is that? It's not whisky. It's a London porter. I see. That's why it's frothy. This was frothy whisky. A, the amount of whisky I'm drinking
New Patron Welcome
00:03:06
Speaker
would be disturbing. And B, I'd have to really pour whisky very badly for it to have head like this.
00:03:14
Speaker
Nobody likes Bad Head. Now, like I say, it is a news episode, but obviously our personal news is that we have a new patron, the sinister sounding A. Clark. It is A. Clark. A for Antichrist. See, I was going to go for Antifa. Oh, even better. No, actually, Antichrist. Amicus. Antibellum.
00:03:42
Speaker
Aunty Bellum. Aunty Bell. Right, we're just saying words that start with A now. This is not the podcaster's guide to words that start with A. This is the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. That is another word that starts with A. Well done. Arachnid. You must have done very well in primary school.
00:03:56
Speaker
Yes. No, I never got past my A's. Oh well. So our patron listeners will know that we usually do a bit of a news roundup in the bonus episodes. Anaerobic. What, aerobic? Athletic. But then we tend to say, no, we didn't, did we do a news episode last month? No, we could not be bothered. We had better things to do. Oh, we had an interview. Was that Joe?
00:04:22
Speaker
Brian, we had an interview with someone interesting anyway. We haven't done a news episode for two months, even though patrons, of course, get news all the time.
Patron News and Humor
00:04:32
Speaker
Now, of course, because this is a news episode, patrons are getting a non-news episode, which will tell you about at the end of this episode, in case, like a clerk, you ought to become a patron too and find out more. And also, we still need four more patrons so that we will never masturbate on this podcast.
00:04:51
Speaker
Right. Although I'm reliably informed by one of our listeners, we can't stop them from masturbating whilst listening to
New Zealand Election Conspiracies
00:04:58
Speaker
the podcast. No, what you do in the privacy of your own home is entirely your business. And still illegal. So should we play a chime of some kind and just get straight into the news? I think we've got a news sting. Do we? Ooh. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:05:19
Speaker
Right, we have a selection. We have a variety of old news and new news. Old news being stories we've talked about in Patreon episodes. New news being stuff which is new. New to everyone. Well, assuming you haven't already heard about it.
00:05:34
Speaker
watching the news yourself. But anyway, obviously the first thing you have to talk about is the election here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Now we mentioned this briefly last week. Anyone living here obviously knows what happened. Anyone outside the country probably does anyway if they're listening to last episode, the actual results of the election. But in the bonus episode last week, we delved a little more into the conspiracy-laden side of the election.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yes, because if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, or are au fait with news about New Zealand, you'll be doubtless aware of Advanced New Zealand and the New Zealand Public Party, which were our two extremely conspiratorial parties in the election of this year. There were other parties like the New Conservatives,
00:06:22
Speaker
who were also playing around with conspiracy theories. I think the Outdoors Party also engaged in some of the 2018 conspiracy theories. But Advanced New Zealand, led by its co-leaders of Jamie Lee Ross and Billy Tika, I was about to say it properly and then I just completely found out Tika Hika, Jr.
00:06:43
Speaker
They ran a very conspiratorial campaign. Now we covered some of the policy platforms of the New Zealand Public Party on this podcast months ago, including the fact that the New Zealand Public Party is very concerned about subterranean vehicles burrowing beneath this country.
00:07:04
Speaker
Many words were spilt in the media about the New Zealand Public Party and the bigger party they belong to, Advance New Zealand, leading to people to believe that maybe Advance New Zealand was a serious threat to the police.
00:07:21
Speaker
They got how many votes, Josh? In total 20,878 votes, or 0.9% of the total. So not many votes at all. And the electorate of the co-leader, Billy T.K. Jr., he got how many votes? He got 988 out of, actually I don't know what the total was, but the winner got 11,699.
00:07:45
Speaker
So not a great, great showing. I mean, I don't know numbers, but I'm fairly sure that 988 is at least half of almost 12,000 votes. Yeah, it's probably less. Really? You sure? No, it wasn't a big number. I mean, we are philosophers. I mean, what do we know about numbers? No, mathematics. It's something else entirely. Numbers are real.
00:08:09
Speaker
Now, some people have said, gosh, that's odd because, you know, he had thousands or at least a thousand people showing up to his marchers in the middle of a pandemic. He claims to have tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and so on. And indeed, I believe that question was put to you on Radio New Zealand just recently. What's going on there?
00:08:38
Speaker
We've got an issue here. So according to Billy TK Jr. Advanced New Zealand had 350,000 Facebook followers, 75,000 people who had signed up to an email newsletter and $50,000 worth of donations to the cause.
00:08:59
Speaker
The problem is, Bletique Jr. would appear to be a bit of a grifter, and we can't actually take what he says as numbers seriously, given there's no way to verify those numbers, given that his Facebook page got purged by Facebook for the dissemination of misinformation, and we only have his word for how many people have signed up for his email newsletter.
00:09:26
Speaker
And people who are in the know about these things, who have been looking at the social media presence of people like Billy TK Jr. and Advanced New Zealand in general, are going actually it looks more like his Facebook page had about 50,000 followers all up.
00:09:43
Speaker
We do not know the calibre of those followers, so we're not entirely sure whether they were all firm believers in the advanced New Zealand cause, or whether they were people who were going, oh, that Blue TK Junior, he says some ridiculous stuff. I can't wait to see what mad thing he's going to say next.
00:10:02
Speaker
So there's a worry here that even if he has these vast numbers of followers on Facebook, we actually have no guarantee that these people on Facebook are there because they believe Billy TK Jr. They might be people like Josh and myself who are simply interested in studying conspiracy theories, or even worse, people who want to poke fun at conspiracy theories. Or they could just be a little bit curious, I suppose. They're not strongly committed to doing anything either way.
00:10:31
Speaker
So yes, any claims of the election being rigged against the advanced New Zealand party don't actually look very good. Now what is interesting is that about a week before the election Billy TK Jr. did make the claim that if his party got less than 1% of the vote then voter fraud will have occurred and basically he's been did all over the place in Parliament.
00:10:59
Speaker
And of course he got under 1%. He's now going, look, I said if we didn't get more than 1% that obviously we've been diddled. Some people are going, maybe he'd seen advanced polling, which indicated he wasn't going to do particularly well, and was kind of setting up the narrative for the claim that voter fraud has occurred. Because he's certainly making the claim there should be more votes. Which, I mean,
00:11:27
Speaker
You can point to the number of potential votes that could have been cast and that number would make things up, but that's probably just because a whole bunch of people don't vote. Apparently voter participation was quite high this year. About 89%, I believe. So actually pretty good, certainly compared to other years. However, 200,000 votes were effectively wasted.
00:11:49
Speaker
of people voting for parties that got no representation in parliament and it does seem that Billy TK Jr is conflating the wasted vote with what he's calling the missing vote and claiming all those 200,000 votes are mine and they made them disappear, they've been wasted.
Social Media Crackdown on QAnon
00:12:08
Speaker
No, no, no. Those are the votes that went to things like the New Conservatives, the outdoor party,
00:12:14
Speaker
organizations like that that didn't get anywhere those votes are effectively wasted except of course they're not because we have a proportional voting system so the balance gets built up in the parties that actually did get representation. So let's speak no more of Billy TK Jr. I think. Let's instead speak about Facebook and Instagram as it happens who a couple of weeks ago did another crackdown on QAnon. Has this one
00:12:43
Speaker
Stuck. Has this one been any more effective?
00:12:46
Speaker
Yes and no. Once again QAnon and the various groups associated with QAnon have managed to find ways to talk about their theories in coded or cryptic ways. Also another reason to say no is that Facebook and Instagram did engage in this crackdown on pages devoted to QAnon but no crackdown on influencers that mention QAnon.
00:13:15
Speaker
The big example we use in Australasia is the celebrity chef in Australia, Pete Evans, who goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on about QAnon. And of course, Facebook and Instagram have done nothing about him as an influencer. But if he were to set up a QAnon page, they would shut that down.
00:13:35
Speaker
So, I mean, it's more than they used to. I think prior to this, they would only ban things that actually were inciting violence in some way or another. But, yeah, it's... It also doesn't apply to individual posts, does it? No, only pages. It's only whole pages or channels or what have you. So, yeah, I mean, it's not nothing, but it doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot.
00:14:02
Speaker
One thing I did like about this story, apparently this crackdown has
Hunter Biden's Laptop Story
00:14:06
Speaker
been policed by Facebook's Dangerous Organisations Operations Team, or DO. Are they doing the do? We will see. I mean, an awful lot actually depends on what happens after the American election, which of course we'll have to cover next week. We will, yes. So it's Tuesday, right? It is, yeah. So Wednesday, our time.
00:14:31
Speaker
So by Thursday, when we normally record, we should know something at least. Although, of course, there's the whole business there about some on the Trump side of things are trying to say there must be a result on election night and other people are saying, well, no, there's never a result on election night because it always takes a long time for all of the votes to get counted. So who the hell knows now? I think bridging the gap between old news and new news, we have a story that I think we first covered last week, but which has developed a little bit since.
00:15:00
Speaker
Which is Trump trying to do a butters emails thing on Hunter Biden. Now I've heard that the laptop with the Hunter Biden material on it has a video of Hunter Biden traveling back in time and having sex with himself whilst inventing crack cocaine. Is that correct? It's not far from the mark. And indeed I would not be surprised if I heard people actually claiming that of it. Now the story if you haven't heard it. Are you Hunter Biden? No.
00:15:30
Speaker
Are you going to be Hunter Biden? Have I ever been Hunter Biden? What's the statistical possibility of me becoming Hunter Biden? Well, I mean, as every podcaster continues to podcast, that trend heads towards 100%. Right. Well, we must be part of the way there then. Now, if you're not familiar with the story... And the thing is, no one is, because it keeps on changing. But Josh is going to try and explain it anyway. The guts of it is that a laptop or several laptops
00:15:59
Speaker
It's important to note, it could be many laptops. It could be more than one laptop. It might only be one laptop. Was slash were handed into a laptop repair shop in Delaware, supposedly by Hunter Biden. Or by one of his associates, acting on Hunter Biden's behalf.
00:16:17
Speaker
Hi, I'm Hunter Biden's friend. My name is Immaterial. I made a drop off Hunter Biden's laptops. Please don't look at the content of Hunter Biden's laptop. I'll be off now. I'm Hunter Biden's friend. Something like that.
00:16:35
Speaker
These laptops weren't picked up. Hunter Biden's meant to be this kind of cutthroat CEO working in the Ukraine if you believe the Republicans. Why is he taking these laptops into a repair shop in Delaware? I think they come from Delaware, although Hunter Biden doesn't currently live in Delaware as far as I'm aware. But so the owner of the shop
00:17:01
Speaker
Supposedly, there's some business around, I got suspicious of it because it had a sticker from the Bo Biden Foundation, a foundation named after, I think, Joe Biden's brother, Hunter Biden's uncle, and then either handed it into the FBI or the FBI came to him and said, hey, we here, you might have Hunter Biden's laptop. Can we have it, please?
00:17:26
Speaker
And however it goes, supposedly there is a laptop on which there are covered emails which showed Hunter Biden setting up a meeting between his father Joe Biden and a senior executive at the firm Burisma who he works for in, works or worked for in Ukraine.
00:17:44
Speaker
therefore furthering the narrative that they've been peddling for quite some time, which is that Joe Biden interfered in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor because that would have been damaging to the firm barisma for which his son worked.
00:17:59
Speaker
That story has always been argued against anyway. The reply to it is that we'll know this prosecutor wasn't investigating Burisma and wasn't fired for investigating or was fired because this corruption investigator was found to be corrupt himself. And while Joe Biden, I believe, did say he should be gone, so did lots of other people internationally.
00:18:24
Speaker
a story we've covered several times on this podcast now we certainly have but then this story comes along and yeah it just gets did you just say suri did you say story what did suri just think you said i think i said story and my ipad thought i said suri and suri decided to interfere with this podcast there's uh that's the singularity that's what it is
00:18:50
Speaker
The story has been murky. It's been changing. The man who runs the store, Mr... Mac Isaac. Mac Isaac. There we go. First of all, he has some sort of a vision condition, which means he couldn't positively identify the person who brought the laptop in as Hunter Biden himself.
00:19:14
Speaker
And then, yeah, the story has gone backwards and forwards around details like, did the FBI come to him or did he go to the FBI? The general sources on, of course, let's not forget the detail that supposedly before handing in the laptop, he took a copy of its hard drive and handed that in to none other than Rudy Giuliani.
00:19:34
Speaker
And this story was eventually published in the New York Post who were made aware of it by one Steve Bannon. And yeah, it's just sort of, the story itself appears to be full of holes. And then everyone who's looked at it said this appears to be a fairly obvious disinformation campaign.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah, so what's interesting here is that apparently what happened initially when news of this laptop and the emails came out is that members of the Trump campaign team contacted the Wall Street Journal and said, look, we've got some incriminating evidence about Hunter Biden and his father, Joe Biden.
00:20:23
Speaker
Here are the emails, will you write a story exposing this? And the Wall Street Journal went, this sounds interesting, we shall investigate. And this then led to Trump making coded references of a big story coming out in the Wall Street Journal pretty quickly, which would show his opponent in the presidential race looking fairly poor.
00:20:47
Speaker
What happened is that the Wall Street Journal kept on investigating things. Giuliani got spooked by how long it was taking them to do this, so he shot the story to other venues like the New York Post, who ran with it immediately. The Wall Street Journal eventually did publish a story, which was to say, there's nothing here.
00:21:09
Speaker
So yes, if these emails are true, it does seem as if someone tried to set up a meeting. There's no indication this meeting ever went ahead, or that Joe Biden ever met with the people at Beresima. So there's no story, it appears to just be foul rumours. But by that point in time, the New York Post story was already
Missing Evidence and Skepticism
00:21:29
Speaker
out. You had people like Glenn Greenwald, who has resigned from the intercept,
00:21:35
Speaker
over the fact that the Intercept is doing due diligence and actually checking these stories out when he wants to actually run with the Hunter Biden story himself and so yeah it's all getting very very confusing.
00:21:49
Speaker
Yes, Greenwald published the emails he'd sent between him and the Intercept and basically just, yes, accusing them of censorship when it appears that what was going on wasn't censorship so much as editing. And the Intercept have basically said, yes, we were doing journalism. It's the fact that Greenwald refused to have us insist that he actually verify or back up anything he's saying reflects poorly on him, not us.
00:22:19
Speaker
So the whole thing, yeah, has been quite, hasn't stopped the likes of Fox News going on for it. And now there's the Tucker Carlson thing. Now, is this a separate thing entirely? Or is it meant to be tied to the laptop thing? I've been able to get that straight. So the story here, is it tuck or cut? Tuck or tuck? Tuck is what the other calls is. Tuck you in, Tucker. You've tucked in, Tucker. Tucker Carlson
00:22:45
Speaker
claims to have incriminating evidence about Hunter Biden, or at least he claimed he was going to get incriminating evidence, but the evidence was lost in the post. Which did appear to be a kind of dog ate my homework excuse for not being able to substantiate a story, except that when the story came out,
00:23:09
Speaker
The United States Postal Service. Actually, no, it wasn't the... No, I thought it was the UPS. So one's the private one, one's the public one. Whichever one it was. They said, actually, no, it is true. A package being sent to Fox News to the producers of Taka Carlson's show.
00:23:31
Speaker
did go missing in the post, and we've located the envelope but not the contents, so it does seem as if something weird has occurred. Although then it turns out that what was being sent by the post were not hard copies of emails, it was a USB stick, which has led people to go
00:23:52
Speaker
One, why did you not back up the USB stick before you sent it? And two, why did you not email the contents? Why were you relying on a postal service to send electronic documents?
00:24:07
Speaker
And yeah, the whole thing is just... I had these... There are these documents that nobody made any copies of, despite the fact that... Which have conveniently disappeared en route. And yeah, so the whole thing has... I mean, it seemed like a bizarre thing to just even come out with. Why, if you didn't have the documents in your hand, why bring it up in the first place?
00:24:33
Speaker
Just bizarre and yes and i'm still not quite certain if this is meant to be corroboration of the stuff that was supposedly on this laptop if it was something else entirely different then there is just today i've been seeing stories that they've identified
00:24:48
Speaker
The people behind one of the Hunter Biden stories, I don't even know which one it is, is basically a fake organization and the person who was supposedly supplying this information doesn't exist and their photograph was one of those not a real person dot com AI generation photos. Yeah, I saw reference to that on Twitter as well. Things are getting too complex. It's all over the place and I have no idea what's going on. And none of it really seems credible in any way.
Voter Suppression Legal Issues
00:25:17
Speaker
Talking about people who are not credible in any way, we should talk about our good old friends Berkman and Wahl. They sound like they should be a crime-fighting killer. Or possibly grave robbers, I'm not sure. Might be off their street. Crime-solving grave robbers. They found their crime-solving through body-snatching. There we go, Berkman and Wahl coming to Netflix and then being cancelled after one season.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yes, so Jacob Wall, Jack Berkman, who we've talked about numerous times, are the guys constantly trying to set up various stings and allegations about people that are always really transparently, obviously false, and yet they keep coming up again and keep getting media attention again. But now they've managed to get themselves in actual trouble now.
00:26:09
Speaker
So they were supposedly, were allegedly behind a vote suppressing robocall scheme where calls went out to 12,000 or so, I've heard different figures, people and they were doing the thing which people have been accusing people of
00:26:28
Speaker
in several past elections, which is going around and telling people, basically trying to frighten people off of voting. Telling them that if they go into a centre to cast their ballots, then the information will be entered into a database and will be used by the police.
00:26:48
Speaker
to locate fugitives or to call in debts or outstanding warrants whatsoever, and possibly by the Centre for Disease Control to track people down for mandatory vaccines, none of which is true, and all of which is simply designed to stop people in largely minority communities, i.e. largely Democrat voting communities, from even going out and voting in the first place.
00:27:15
Speaker
Now this is illegal. What they did, there's also bribery charges as well. I wasn't quite clear on who it was they were trying to bribe at the same time in connection to this. No, this story is very, very murky. Very, very murky. But what I do know is that they've been charged in Ohio's Cuyahoga County
00:27:36
Speaker
with eight counts of telecommunications, fraud and seven counts of bribery. A charge includes attempts to convince people not to cast ballots. So apparently they could face up to 18 and a half years each in prison, if convicted of all of these and given the maximum sentences.
Supreme Court Election Concerns
00:27:52
Speaker
I can't imagine that'll actually happen, but they do seem to be in a bit of a pickle. And I mean, this isn't the only legal trouble they're in.
00:28:00
Speaker
No, they're facing similar criminal charges in Michigan and a civil lawsuit in New York City connected to the very same scheme. Now, at the moment, they are free on a US$100,000 bond after pleading not guilty to the charges in, I believe, New York State.
00:28:25
Speaker
Wall is also facing felony charges in California over alleged violations of security laws, and the FBI is investigating them over the leak of juror questionnaires in the trial of former Trump advisor Roger Stone
00:28:44
Speaker
So basically, they seem to have been engaging in very bad behaviour everywhere for quite some time. Yes, I mean, they've certainly been involved in morally questionable behaviour in terms of trying to... What did they do? They tried to say Elizabeth Warren had had an affair with someone. They had Pete Buttigieg, I think they tried to... One of the things they liked to do was basically pay people to claim to have had an affair
00:29:13
Speaker
with certain politicians. That's probably where the bribery comes in. Could be that as well. I thought it was in connection to the robocalling though, I'm not quite sure. And yes, those have never, those have always been laughed out basically, but were not, I suppose, illegal unless you wanted to go for some sort of defamation thing or something. But they actually seem to be in proper legal trouble now and couldn't have into a couple of nice guys.
00:29:40
Speaker
No, no. I mean, the Elizabeth Warren one kind of made the news for the sheer fact that the allegation they made of Elizabeth Warren having sex with 26 year old Marines kind of made just kind of seem incredibly awesome guess. Look, she might be a relatively elderly senator. I think she's in her 60s.
00:30:02
Speaker
I don't know, certainly younger than Biden and Trump. But she's still pulling 26-year-old incredibly fit men. Yeah, not exactly the burn they were looking for. No. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. We'll just have to see what happens. I assume a lot of people will be braced for some good quality schadenfreude, if they do get a decent sentence. But on the other hand, they are well-connected white guys.
00:30:28
Speaker
The justice system tends to be fairly soft. Especially given what's going on with the court system, particularly the Supreme Court, which is very conservative now. It is 6-3 conservatives now.
00:30:46
Speaker
Which, I mean, yeah, is that it? Has Trump won now? Does he have the muscle to no matter what happens in the election, he can contest it? That is the worry. Trust that the courts will decide in his favour. Unless it's a total landslide for Biden, no two ways about it, he's going to have some wiggle room to complain. And now he has the, unquestionably, he has the Supreme Court on his side.
Melania Trump Body Double Theory
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah. A little bit worried for you, America. Just ever so slightly. Talking about Trump, what's Trump's wife up to these days? Good old Melania. Let's finish with something a bit more frivolous. So the old Melania Trump's body double.
00:31:29
Speaker
conspiracy theory went another round over the weekend. And this isn't new. People have for a while been pointing to a secrets security officer who looks a bit like Melania Trump following her around. People have suggested maybe she body doubles for her in some situations. There have been instances of photographs of people saying, look at this woman and her photograph doesn't look anything like Melania. It must be a body double.
00:31:55
Speaker
And in one particular one, I think people have said, well, no, but what you see in that photo, I think it was a photograph of a television screen, which was distorted. And so obviously it wasn't going to look exactly like her face. But so there was there was a photo going round over the weekend of this woman standing next to Donald Trump.
00:32:14
Speaker
And a whole bunch of people saying, that's not Melania, that doesn't look anything like her. I mean, it's hard to say because she's wearing dark sunglasses that obscure a lot of her face anyway. But a whole lot of people got on board with, oh, this is clearly obviously not Melania. She obviously didn't want to be there because she hates Donald Trump so much and they're just sticking her.
00:32:34
Speaker
sticking a body double on his arm and thinking that we won't notice and frankly that just triggered my major annoyances I see with all the sort of internet bollocks where all of a sudden everybody's an expert in this case on photograph analysis and like I'm not saying Melania Trump doesn't use a body double it's entirely possible we don't know but
00:32:58
Speaker
looking at a single photo and saying oh yes it's obviously if you look at the jawline and the curvature of her ears and it's obviously her when so many things can change the shape of a person's face in photographs from lighting to makeup to camera angle to focal depth and as some people were pointing out
00:33:21
Speaker
Everybody was jumping on this one photograph, but it was from an official event. It wasn't somebody's snap on their cell phone, it was a press photograph from an event. If you went to the Associated Press or whichever one it was website, there were tons of photos from that event, there was video from that event. So if you actually wanted to prove your case, you'd probably want to go through all of these photos from all sorts of different angles and so on.
00:33:43
Speaker
and actually do it, but no, no, no, everybody just looks at me. One photo says, I'm Sherlock Bloody Holmes and I can tell from the tiniest of details what's going on.
Photo Reliability Concerns
00:33:52
Speaker
And frankly, it just annoys me. We had a conversation about this a few weeks ago talking about the so-called Trump and Walter Reed Hospital signing session. And people were going, oh, obviously some editing going on there. And we pointed out that actually professional video editors had looked at the footage and went, actually,
00:34:11
Speaker
No, no. And there was another summer event when Trump came out of hospital, the same. And he gave he gave a speech on the lawn outside the White House. He was all obviously green screen and people went
00:34:26
Speaker
Actually no, the quality of light in that is quite obviously outdoor light, because outdoor light famously cannot be replicated in a studio, given you're dealing with a light source which is very, very, very far away, which causes a very interesting kind of light that studio lighting cannot replicate.
00:34:47
Speaker
So the footage looked odd, but that was because the focal length of the camera was focused on Trump making the background look oddly close and blurred at the same time, which made people think maybe it was a green screen, but actually the quality of light indicated it really wasn't.
00:35:06
Speaker
and I really recommend you look up. There are videos on YouTube about effects of lighting and effects of focal depth. I've seen one that had a person just steering straight ahead as they moved a light source in a circle around above them to the sides of their face and
00:35:22
Speaker
like you would swear there was some sort of computer morphing going on, the amount that a person's face could seemingly change just based on the direction the lighting was coming on, and then other ones of showing sort of zooming in and out with different focal lengths and watching a person's face change quite like, yeah, it can be exaggerated when you go right in and suddenly their nose is enormous and the rest of their face is disappearing away, but even subtly, it can really change the shape of a person's face.
00:35:48
Speaker
And another great example of this is cosplaying. So you'll get lots of professional cosplayers who will use makeup that will, on a camera, make the shape of their face look completely different. And so you can get someone whose face shape is completely at odds with, say, that of Angelina Jolie. But with the right makeup and the right camera, they'll be the spitting image of that person in front of the lens.
00:36:14
Speaker
So all I'm saying is don't just jump on a single photograph as proof of something like Melania Trump has a body double.
Bonus Episode Teaser
00:36:24
Speaker
I endorse what my colleague Hunter Biden is saying on this video. Precisely. It reminded me of an old article on good old craigslist from a couple of years ago where
00:36:33
Speaker
they basically said this thing, stop taking individual photographs and using them as proof of your preconceived narrative and illustrating with things like, you know, look, here's this photo of Angela Merkel giving steering death at Donald Trump, see how tough she is, and then pointing out, well, yes, but here's a photograph from the exact same meeting from about two minutes earlier of the two of them chuckling at a joke.
00:36:54
Speaker
Here's Obama and Trump side by side. Here's Obama bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia. And here's Donald Trump standing up to him. But of course, Obama is bowing because he's actually being given a middle by him. And here's Trump being given the exact same middle and bowing in the exact same way.
00:37:11
Speaker
single photographs just don't tell a story. Yes, although they can be used to further your own story. So that's my rant basically. Internet, stop it. Just stop it. And that was Josh's rant for 2020.
00:37:27
Speaker
That's all the news we had to talk about so maybe we should a little preview of what's coming up in the bonus It's actually furthering a theme. I think we've had several patron bonus episodes We've talked about sort of artistic forgeries and the like scandals in the art world and we kind of have another one
00:37:44
Speaker
Indeed, and this is an interesting philosophical forgery, and not a forgery which is philosophical in nature. It's a forgery in the annals of philosophy. We're looking at two letters by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.
00:38:01
Speaker
which would appear to be elaborate forgeries, and we're going to look at why people think that, and also the consequences of people taking these forgeries seriously. At one stage maybe we should roll these little ones together and do a proper episode, a full episode.
00:38:21
Speaker
on artistic forgery type conspiracies. I think that's a great idea.
Audience Appreciation
00:38:25
Speaker
But not right now. Right now it's just the mysterious case of David Hume's Letters Plus, a film review. Of a film which came out a long time ago. 2016 or something I think. I finally got round to watching it on the weekend. Conspiracy related.
00:38:44
Speaker
I really wish I hadn't bothered. Mmm. Recy Funds! Recy Funds! That lovely Welsh scamp. Right, well that's all we have for this week. That's all we have for Co-located Josh and Em.
00:39:00
Speaker
There'll be another one of these co-locations next week where we'll be talking about the preliminary results of that American election. I think we'll have to. It will be something pretty damn significant to knock that off. Especially since by the time we record we'll probably already know whether there are going to be challenges to particular results.
00:39:22
Speaker
Right, so you've got that to look forward to, and if you're a patron you have a bonus episode to look forward to. If you're not a patron and you'd like to look forward to a bonus episode, then you can just simply become one. You can. Just like that. Just go to patreon.com slash podcasters guide to the conspiracy, I think, or just search patreon for the podcasters guide to the conspiracy, we'll show up.
00:39:45
Speaker
um and if you don't want to be a patron but you just like listening to us anyway well thank you anyway indeed because you're our audience and without you we're not actually a podcast in fact without you we are nothing we are literally nothing we are faceless i mean jobless children and yet he still finds doing this podcast to be the best thing he has in his life it's it's really all that i have going for me it's true
00:40:08
Speaker
I mean, I've got hopes, dreams, aspirations, and things going on, but Josh? No. Just a wasteland. An absolute wasteland. Just, yeah. Without this, I'm just a shade. So those of you who may watch the video may be aware that as soon as we turn the lights off, Josh just goes into a fugue state until such time I reactivate him. Basically, it's true. Now, sad but true.
00:40:29
Speaker
So I think we've come to the end of this episode. So just before I deactivate and just sit here, become dormant until next week's recording, all we can do is for me to say goodbye. And for me to say goodbye.
00:40:57
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:41:58
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it. Do we? Yeah, we've always had a new sting. Oh, so I thought you said a new sting. No, no, new sting. Right. I mean, I know Kiwi vernacular is hard to understand, but surely it's someone who's lived here all your adult life.