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Conspiranews, May 2020
27 Plays4 years ago
Welcome to the end of May, a month which saw numerous conspiracy theories about world leaders such as Kim Jong Un, Nicolas Maduro, Jacinda Ardern, and the man who would be prime minister of Aotearoa New Zealand, Todd Muller. There's the usual COVID-19 news, although #OBAMAGATE seems to be Trump's bon mot at this time. David Icke gets a look in, and we possibly close the book on the VW Emissions Scandal...
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Transcript
Revisiting Past Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
Previously on the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Previously in May's. Three whole episodes on the various conditions which make something a conspiracy and then the urtext of this podcast, MH370. So very 2014. Project Blue Bean, Nikola Tesla, Ben Raisinger and Seymour Hirsch.
00:00:27
Speaker
2015 was ages ago. An interview with David Icke. I mean, May 2016 featured more than that, but it's really all you need to know. Martin Orr, the Koch brothers. That's a weird combo. Trump and his conspiracy theories. Those were the days we pretended Andy Bashiago was president, don't you know? And Red Mercury. Ah, 2017. The year everything changed. Prime Minister's husband mixes with an update on MH370.
00:00:54
Speaker
Only two episodes back in May 2018. I blame Clark Gayford. Finally, QAnon. Who we haven't really covered on this podcast because it's not actually a conspiracy theory that interests me much at all. And Eric Von Denneken. Oh, and not one, but two news episodes. May 2019 was when we changed. And not necessarily for the better. But now it's time for the Conspira News.
Introduction and Humor
00:01:31
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:41
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison in Auckland, New Zealand, and back, back once again in the the Bami Shores of Hamilton, as Dr. Eric presented. Shores? I mean, I know there's a river here, but it's not really the Bami Banks of Hamilton. How's that?
00:02:00
Speaker
OK, I mean, there are an awful lot of banks on the main drag, so I will take it. There's also a casino, which Auckland has a casino and Wellington has a casino. I really don't think Hamilton is big enough to have a casino and also shouldn't have one anyway because Auckland and Wellington shouldn't have one. So, you know, casino.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yes, odd, odd. But yes, so we managed one week.
COVID-19's Impact on Education
00:02:24
Speaker
We managed to co-locate for a single week in between the lockdown ending and then heading back down to Hamilton. Freezingly cold Hamilton. Are the universities open?
00:02:36
Speaker
Well, the campus is open so I can go into the office. There are no students on campus and there probably won't be until the beginning of next year because the university has decided that trimester B, because we have trimesters here, not semesters,
00:02:54
Speaker
is going to be online because if there's any outbreak of COVID-19 on campus, the campus by edict must shut down and go into lockdown. So there's just no point even trying to teach face to face next semester. There will be labs and field trips, but they're trying to work out how to negotiate those in just the right way to minimise risk.
Workplace Adaptations to COVID-19
00:03:18
Speaker
Indeed. Well, my COVID update is that the company where I work has reopened its office, but sort of is rationing our time there. So they sort of have half the staff in for some of the week and half the staff into the other so we can all be spaced out. But I wouldn't know because they've also said, and you know, if you want for now, you can just keep on working for home. So I have.
00:03:40
Speaker
So that's me, still working at home, still business as usual, still COVID-19. COVID-19 all the time. And you know what also is all the time? Age, the specter of death. I was going to go birthdays, but yes, why not go for the more
00:03:57
Speaker
threatening notion. We need to wish a very special happy birthday to someone out there listening to this podcast right now. Drew, we know you're listening and Drew, we love you. Happy birthday. I mean, it was a few days ago. I'm aware of that. But of course, you know, these podcasts are recorded not on your birthday, but according to our own special timetable, we're still taking time out to say, Drew, happy birthday to you.
COVID-19's Overshadowing Effect
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, one step closer to the grave, to the inky void and decrepitude that await us all. Congratulations. Yeah, you've got three years. Now it is the end of the month, which means it's time for a news episode. We didn't do a news episode last month. Why didn't we do one last month? Partly because we couldn't be bothered. It was just COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19.
00:04:54
Speaker
And I think we had something more interesting to talk about, so we did. I can't remember what that was now. I believe it was actually the interview with James today. Oh, the interview, of course. Yes, yes, had an interview, really ripe and rearing to go. So, yeah. But, yes, no, we should get back to it. Our patrons who tune into the bonus content will have been getting various news updates over the last couple of months.
00:05:14
Speaker
um and we have some of them to follow up on and looking at our list a bit of new stuff as well so why don't we pile straight into it then yes let's head straight into the news breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news
Political Shifts in New Zealand
00:05:35
Speaker
Right. Shall we start locally then? Yes, let's go. It's actually a bit of a theme to our first few news updates. They're all about leaders and what better way to start than the fact that our country has a new leader.
00:05:49
Speaker
of the opposition. Yes, earlier this week Todd Muller replaced the current leader of the opposition Simon Bridges. Todd Muller, a man no one in the country had heard of as far as I'm aware. So I was aware of him for a few things prior. The the hat which we'll be talking about at some point in this discussion was actually brought up in a spin-off piece sometime last year. But also Muller
00:06:18
Speaker
kind of got into the news last year because he didn't like the fact that Te Papa had exhibits on climate change, claiming that they were anti-farmer, which is kind of interesting because he is trying to present himself as being the blue-green leader, despite the fact that all of his credentials, credentials? Credentials. It is credentials.
00:06:46
Speaker
indicate that he's actually pretty much a farmer through and through and the greenery of his blue livery is basically a hastily painted on facade. Now this is a conspiracy theory podcast but there is of course the conspiratorial angle because this is all, it came out quickly, could it be referred to as a coup?
00:07:11
Speaker
I think you will. Right, so herein lies the issue. So the basic facts of the case are, last week there were not one but two disastrous polls for the opposition party in our country, where they've gone from basically being in the mid to high 40s in popular support to now being at around about 27, 20%.
00:07:35
Speaker
So yeah, 27, 28% support. So it turns out that actually under the leadership of Simon Bridges, Nationals gone downhill quite a bit. And this then leads to the notion that Bridges ought to be rolled. And then a whole bunch of names were being put forward for potential new leaders of the party, of which Todd was one of them.
00:07:58
Speaker
and Bridges basically lost a vote of confidence in his caucus which triggered a leadership election and Todd is now the new leader of the national party. The thing is whilst he is going oh no it was a spirit of the moment thing I've never had any particular plan for being leader of the national party everyone else is going
00:08:20
Speaker
That's not true. You've talked about wanting to be leader of the national party for quite some time. When there was the last leadership contest, you were contesting for deputy leader of the opposition. And it was quite clear from what you were saying at that particular point in time, that was your test run for wanting to be leader. Actually, you've wanted to be leader for a while. Maybe the poll result has forced your hand earlier than expected.
00:08:47
Speaker
But actually, when you say, I never wanted to be leader, it was thrust upon me, that's kind of a lie, covering up the fact that actually you've wanted this for a while. Yes. And if that's the story, then it's a coup. And that coup has elements of conspiracy, because basically political coups are conspiratorial by nature. Yes.
00:09:11
Speaker
It would be hard to think of a spur-of-the-moment coup that just sort of happens on the spot without some amount of forethought, which would have to be kept secret at the very least from the people who you're going to be replacing.
Kim Jong-un Health Speculation
00:09:23
Speaker
So I think we can justify talking about it. And then things have gone a little bit wonky right from the start. There was, yes, as you say, it had been noted that Mr Muller keeps a Make America Great Again cap
00:09:36
Speaker
sort of proudly on display, it seemed, and was it his office or his home? And his office. Yes. So there was a bit of a bit of back and forth about that. Is it just an interesting piece of sort of, you know, political memorabilia? I mean, obviously, if you say what you want about Trump, it's certainly a significant moment in American history. But given given given his other political leanings, it seemed possibly more of a
00:10:01
Speaker
more of a signal, more of a... Well, especially since Judith Collins, now number three or four on the National Party list, is now going around saying, I don't like being demonised for being white. It does indicate that maybe elements of national are going to resurrect their rather conservative views on race again. Yes, so we'll have to see how that goes, but
00:10:30
Speaker
Speaking of speaking of leaders who are dead or perhaps not quite, I'm pretty sure we must have in the the news news episode a couple of months ago talked about Kim Jong-un, who was maybe dead, maybe sick, maybe dying. We don't know. Definitely disappeared from public life.
00:10:51
Speaker
And North Korea being North Korea, who the hell knows what's going on in the air, so largely it was just speculation. It seemed to point that something was a bit wrong with him, but whether or not he was actually dead or not, who the hell knows. But then it turns out he's not dead after all.
00:11:10
Speaker
He just turned up with no explanation as to why he's been away for a while. And there were conspiracy theories about what had happened to him, including the idea he was dead and the regime was managing the transition, or had suffered cardiac arrest during heart surgery and was in a vegetative state not likely to wake up.
00:11:34
Speaker
which would have been a problem for the regime you have to work out do we rule in his stead do we appoint someone to rule for him do we claim he's kind of dead so we want to replace him and now of course isn't isn't north korea still technically ruled by kim jong-un's grandfather i'm pretty sure the original one the original kim sort of died and then who was the previous one kim il-young
00:12:00
Speaker
was supposedly just sort of looking after the country until his triumphant second coming or something, and Kim Jong Un's the same. So they could probably manage a leader bumping off and just say, oh, he'll be back.
00:12:15
Speaker
Like Scientology, just waiting for L. Ron Hubbard to return. But he's even when Kim Jong-un reappeared, people started having conspiracy theories about what he'd been up to. And the thing is, we do not know, and we probably won't ever know what happened in that six-week kind of weird interregnum in North Korea.
00:12:40
Speaker
And in the absence of any solid information, people are theorizing like it's going out of fashion. Yes, there's a lot of talk about his sister, a lot of people saying, you know, she is the one who'd probably take over. So if you start seeing a lot more of her on the television, then that means she's gearing up to take over and something must be wrong with him. But I don't know. It's North Korea. That's all you can say. It's North Korea.
00:13:04
Speaker
Indeed.
Venezuelan Political Drama
00:13:05
Speaker
Now, going from the north to the south, what's been happening in Venezuela, Joshua? The south of the Americas, yes. So, I know we definitely talked about this in Patreon episodes.
00:13:18
Speaker
there seems to have been something resembling a coup slash assassination attempt slash something. I think AC they were trying to abduct rather than abduction against Nicolas Maduro, the current president of Venezuela. So
00:13:40
Speaker
In early May, a bunch of mercenaries were captured coming in via sea from Colombia, and supposedly they were there to overthrow and capture Nicholas Maduro and presumably take him back to the States. Yes, because he has been labeled by the US as a narco-terrorist.
00:13:58
Speaker
And there is a $15 million US bounty on his head if they presumably bring him in alive, not dead. Although I actually don't know whether that's a dead or alive bounty or bring him in to be tried, but definitely get rid of him from Venezuela.
00:14:16
Speaker
Now it turned out the people behind this attempted overthrow, which failed, some of them were killed, some of them were captured, the whole thing came out. It sounds like it was all a little bit of a cock up really, and that I think people they were supposed to be working with sold them out straight away or something. It does sound like the mercenaries thought that they would be celebrated as liberators, and actually it turns out as soon as they arrived on soil, the Venezuelans went, oh god, it's the Americans again, what are they going to do?
00:14:46
Speaker
these people under citizens arrest immediately whilst we get the military police to come and sort this all out.
00:14:52
Speaker
So the fellow behind it was a guy called Jordan Goudreau. He's a US military veteran who now runs a private security company called Silver Corp USA. Or is that a silver core? Actually, yeah. Hard to tell with the US, isn't it? It might be silver core USA. Yes, you never know. So he has a slightly spotted past. So there's a federal investigation for arms trafficking for one thing.
00:15:19
Speaker
And apparently was involved in a conspiracy with a former Venezuelan army general to train Venezuelan military deserters in Colombia to then get back at Maduro. It seems like he was in it for the money. He had taken it upon himself to do this.
00:15:36
Speaker
do this thing which he believed he thought the American authorities wanted to happen. And he took it upon himself to make it happen to get that sweet, sweet $15 million reward money. And the question is, was he acting with the approval, tacit or otherwise of the American government, the American government claims, I believe,
00:15:58
Speaker
to have nothing to do with this, and certainly, you know, when it went south straight away, they certainly would have wanted to have nothing to do with it. But it's all a little bit odd. Down to the fact that one of the mercenaries who was captured has said in a public statement that he was working under the orders of President Trump. Now, is that in the same way that that QAnon dude who shot the Gambino family crime boss
00:16:19
Speaker
thought that he was working under the orders of President Trump in a sort of a weird QAnon-y kind of way, or did he mean that more literally, we're not sure, but obviously Trump denies any knowledge that anything happened, or that anything was going to happen.
00:16:32
Speaker
Well, yes, and it doesn't help that Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has said there was no direct US government involvement in this incursion into Venezuela. Now, that might just be a turn of phrase, or it might be a tacit admission that the State Department knew about the raid and had gone, we're not going to explicitly say you should do this, but at the same time, we're also not going to say you shouldn't do it.
00:17:01
Speaker
There was a question here as to whether the State Department knew this was going on and didn't do anything to stop it, because it's advantageous to the US if Maduro is ousted from power, or whether the State Department actually aided and abetted in the raid. What is interesting
00:17:23
Speaker
is that the U.S. response to mercenaries going into a foreign state to abduct the leader of that state, although I am aware that it is contested by people outside the U.S. as to whether Maduro is the legitimate president of Venezuela. It is interesting that the U.S.'s response was not to go, that's terrible, they shouldn't have done it. Their response was to demand that the Americans be returned home.
00:17:48
Speaker
I very much doubt America would return, say, Australian soldiers who invaded the US to get rid of Donald Trump and go, oh, yes, we should definitely send them home. I mean, I mean, it was a jolly jape and it didn't work. So off you go back home with you.
00:18:06
Speaker
And in a final little wrinkle, it gets a bit of false flag conspiracy theorizing going on, because always. The opposition led by Juan Guaido, is he one who claims to be the legitimate president? He's the leader of Congress.
00:18:23
Speaker
which is claiming to be the president. There's a really, really tricky story which actually makes him illegitimate now because his term's only meant to be 12 months and it's been longer than that. So actually he's holding on to power illegitimately anyway in his congressional role. It's very complex.
00:18:41
Speaker
But he has made the claim that this whole thing was actually orchestrated by Maduro to sort of set this thing up to fail so that he could say, you know, look how, look how embattled I am. Here's America sending off people to try and get me.
00:18:59
Speaker
And actually that has elements of the mihop and lihop
Conspiracy Theories and COVID-19
00:19:03
Speaker
hypothesis because you can either go Maduro knew about the raid and prepared to stop it or he organized the raid and was responsible for it as a PR stunt.
00:19:14
Speaker
However, given that Juan Guido was only recognized as president of Venezuela by a few countries overseas, you might also think it's in his interest to claim it to PR stunt to distract from the fact that there was a disastrous coup he may have had knowledge of, which completely failed.
00:19:33
Speaker
Yes, so just generally murky all around. Now, let's come back home then. To our local leader, Jacinda Ardern. And dealings with Richard Prosser. Tell us about Richard Prosser. Oh, where to start Joshua? Richard Prosser is a... Sorry, I should have said sigh deeply and then tell us about Richard Prosser. I'll do that again then.
00:19:55
Speaker
Richard Prosser is a former New Zealand First MP. Now, New Zealand First is one of the minor parties in our government. It often actually ends up being a support party to whoever is in charge at any particular point in time. It's led by this guy called Winston Peters, who for some reason is particularly popular with people over the age of 65.
00:20:21
Speaker
I think it's because he quite clearly cannot die and I think is an aspirational figure for every one of advanced years. That is true and the thing about New Zealand first is by and large people vote for Winston Peters. The party does well and due to MMP a whole bunch of other MPs come in and then people discover that Winston Peters might be a charmer but the people he attracts to the party aren't and Richard Prosser is one of these people.
00:20:49
Speaker
So, he's been in trouble before, so he was an MP, he's not MP now. He blamed troubles in the country on Islam, has claimed that feminism means that Western society has been hijacked by a conspiracy of silly little girls, had huge issues with Sikhs,
00:21:12
Speaker
and the way that they carry a ceremonial knife and are allowed onto planes, which turned out to be due to the fact that he carried a pocket knife onto a plane and had it confiscated. So basically he was just pissy about not following the rules and took it out on an entire group of people in the country as a result. He's no longer in parliament.
00:21:34
Speaker
which means he's probably spending too much time on the internet and writing blog posts because he's written a blog post on his own personal blog, richardprosser.com, about how Jacinta Ardern is enabling the plan-demic.
00:21:50
Speaker
Why, that's the title of that COVID video that's been going around in footballers. You wouldn't let us cover on this podcast. You didn't want to give it any airtime. Well, that's true. Because on you, we're talking about now because of Richard Tulsa Prosser. Son of a bitch. So yes, he's claimed that Jacinda Ardern, former president of the International Union of Socialist Youth,
00:22:14
Speaker
which is true, but emphasis is mine, right before she first became an MP and not long after she had spent a couple of years as a senior advisor in Tony Blair's spin department has been a key player in it for a decade and a half. 15 years in the making. She's been planning along with her other mates in socialism to bring about this pandemic and organised a parent of a virus sweeping the nation and indeed the world in order
00:22:41
Speaker
to engage in a great reduction in the population in the developed world and the virtual enslavement of the remainder with a totalitarian, surveillance, one world police state having one government, one currency and one recognised authority. And they need to do that through the usual mechanisms of force vaccination, microchipping and the like.
00:23:04
Speaker
Have you seen the thing that's been going around the social medias at the moment, the imagined conversation between Bill Gates and his advisor saying, we need to get tracking microchips into everybody. Can we just use a cell phone?
00:23:21
Speaker
yes yeah we could make a make a invent a virus and then invent a vaccine for it and then inject microgenesis we could just use their phones yeah yeah the idea that these devices which for those of you watching the video will now see a cell phone on on screen
00:23:39
Speaker
We can be tracked with those with such aids. You don't need to microchip a population. We've already persuaded people to carry around personal supercomputers in their pockets with GPS units inside. Microchipping is pointless. We've all got cell phones.
00:23:53
Speaker
Anyway, and yes, so Covid, so I understand he calls it Covid-19, is that because it's all a con? It's a con. Right, it's a serious word. And now if you point out, the people who are meant to be behind this plan are ye bog-standard international finance and the old banking cartels, which does seem ever so slightly crypto anti-Semitic, given that those are usually the coded phrases we use for saying
00:24:20
Speaker
it's the Jews, and it kind of fits in with something I've been saying a lot in the media. Not many of the COVID-19 conspiracy theories I've seen, and when I say not many, none that I've seen thus far, seem novel. They all just seem like repackaged theories that use the pandemic, not the plan-demic, the pandemic as the latest crisis, which is
00:24:46
Speaker
evidence of the supposed end goal of these nefarious conspirators. Yes, well, now another thing that these conspirators have been saying, conspirators, possibly including the President of the United States as well. I suspect you mean conspiracy theorists, otherwise you're saying conspirators have been saying it. Josh, we're not meant to talk about the actual conspirators. We need to be here making fun of these conspiracy theories, not revealing that we know what's really going on behind the scenes.
00:25:15
Speaker
Right, you are. Yes, no, sorry. The conspiracists have been saying various dark suggestions have been going on for a while about the exact origins of COVID-19.
Debating COVID-19's Origins
00:25:26
Speaker
Was it made in a lab? Was it released deliberately? Was it released accidentally? Now, there has been
00:25:33
Speaker
some amount of conclusion that no, it was not made in a lab. This is the sort of thing you can tell if you know what to look for when looking at the DNA of something like a virus. You can tell when something like that has been manipulated and they don't see that looking at the COVID-19 virus.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yes, the biologists who have actually looked at the genome of COVID-19 are going, if it has been manipulated, if there's been any kind of gene editing on it, it's been done in a way which those of us who know what to look for cannot find evidence of it. And it does look suspiciously like a virus which is mutated naturally and transitioned from one animal species to another.
00:26:19
Speaker
Now, a lot of this debate about COVID-19 being developed in a lab has centered on a lab in Wuhan in China, which does do studies of coronaviruses. And they particularly look at coronaviruses in bats because it has been suspected for a while a disease of this type will make the species jump. So people have been trying to research these things in advance of that jump so that when we get a
00:26:49
Speaker
pandemic of this particular kind, we've got information to work with. Now, the lab in question has said, look, we do have three strains of coronavirus, which comes from bats. But the closest match to a COVID-19 strain is 78%, which might seem high, but actually is nowhere near close enough
00:27:11
Speaker
to think that it's going to be the origin state of COVID-19 as we're seeing it in the wild at this particular point in time. So intelligence agencies, scientists, and the like have all said, look, there really isn't any evidence COVID-19 came from a lab, but that hasn't stopped elements within the US administration from making that claim regardless of the evidence, has it, Joshua?
00:27:38
Speaker
It has not, no. I mean, we've seen the Trump tweets darkly suggesting as much. And then Mike Pompeo, when we were talking about him again just a minute ago, Secretary of State, apparently made the claim there is, quote, enormous evidence, unquote, that the coronavirus outbreak originated in a Chinese laboratory.
00:27:59
Speaker
as is becoming familiar with a lot of these things and people said that's interesting, what is that evidence? That never actually turned up. Indeed, when he was reminded on TV in the US that actually the intelligence agencies had denied that claim, he seemed to immediately turn on a dime and agree with them. Yes, I mean it's all the the appearance is that
00:28:25
Speaker
the Trump administration is desperate to blame the entire thing on China. So they themselves cannot be blamed for it, given that there's an election coming up in November. So how successful that strategy will be, we'll just have to wait and see, I suppose.
Understanding 'Obamagate'
00:28:41
Speaker
However, a more successful strategy, or maybe not so much, is Trump's recent claims about Obamacare. Now, Josh, what is Obamacare?
00:28:50
Speaker
Ah, what isn't Obamagate, quite frankly? It's all you want it to be and more. So yes, a couple of weeks ago now, Trump started tweeting about Obamagate, hashtag Obamagate. All caps. About how, all caps, yep. And about how this is a massive thing. It was apparently Obamagate makes Watergate look small time. Apparently it's the biggest political crime in history. Didn't actually give any details to what it actually is. Now it was noted that
00:29:19
Speaker
that the initial flurry of Obama great tweets started not long after Obama, comments from Obama had come out where he had been talking about the anarchic state of the administration and basically had stated that Trump was doing a bad job. And if there's one thing guaranteed to set Trump off, it would be Obama bad mouthing him. So originally these sort of darkly portentous tweets
00:29:47
Speaker
didn't have any meaning attached to them themselves. So people immediately started running around attaching meaning to them. So like the likes of the QAnon folks who believe that Trump is some sort of infallible demigod and that everything he says has deep and profound meaning.
00:30:05
Speaker
immediately decided that this was talking about something probably those claims we'd seen before that Obama and Biden were sort of planting stories about Trump and Russia to influence the 2016 election. The Q people got got all excited about the fact that obviously, obviously, the fact that Trump is mentioning Obama like this means Obama is just about to be arrested, that that oncoming storm must be oncoming.
00:30:31
Speaker
But still no actual details. Reporters eventually quizzed him on it. Someone from the Washington Post asked him, what is, what's Obama, what the hell are you talking about, man? At which point Trump said, it's been going on a long time. It's been going on from before you've got elected. And it's a disgrace that it happened. And if you look at what's gone on and you look at now all this information that's being released, and from what I understand, that's only the beginning. Some terrible things happened and should never have been allowed to happen in our country again.
00:31:00
Speaker
You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours. Except yours, yes. So yes, it's so obvious. There's no need to even say what it is. Now we have some idea of what it's meant to be. So the claim is kind of solidified into Obama's administration was spying on the Trump campaign during the election, which
00:31:27
Speaker
is kind of true. It is the case that there was worry about Russian interference in the 2016 election, which led to agencies like the FBI going we should probably also the CIA going we should probably actually look into this.
00:31:46
Speaker
advising the Obama administration that they thought there was incursion into the Trump campaign. This was put into a letter by Susan Rice to Obama and then
00:32:01
Speaker
the Obama campaign contacted the Trump campaign, Obama's Trump, the Obama administration. Oh dear, that's a little bit of a burp there. That wasn't very delicate. You are worse than a beast. It's true. So the Obama administration contacted the Trump campaign. That's not quite the story that's come out in the media, though, is it?
00:32:27
Speaker
Well, I mean, there were redactions to this email and then the redactions became unredacted, basically. And so while this email initially looked like, yes, let's spy on the Trump campaign and very damning, once you read all of the email, it was
00:32:47
Speaker
Yes, let's investigate the Trump campaign and make absolutely certain that you do everything by the book and make sure it's all proper and legit and official. So without the redactions, it actually looks much less damning towards the Obama campaign than it might have originally. Yeah, without the redactions, it actually looks like it was what you would expect in a situation where a foreign nation is meddling in your elections.
00:33:15
Speaker
Now, instead of meddling in elections, let's meddle in David
Censorship and Misinformation
00:33:19
Speaker
Icke. His YouTube page is gone. It's a shame. Yes. Well, so Icke has been having a bit of issue with the social medias in the same way that Alex Jones had issues with the social medias as of last year. So Jones famously lost his YouTube channel, his Facebook and the like.
00:33:39
Speaker
David Icke has now lost his YouTube page, and he's lost his YouTube page because he's been spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19, which have been decided to be the kind of thing which is going to have disastrous public health results, given that David Icke thinks it
00:33:58
Speaker
COVID-19 isn't real and is part of a plot to bring in a new world order and people should ignore social distancing. They should definitely not get a vaccine if it's made available, etc, etc. And his YouTube page basically went after Facebook had removed his page for similar issues the week before.
00:34:19
Speaker
Now, Ike is annoyed by this, because David Ike gets annoyed by being denied a platform everywhere, and has claimed that in retaliation, his fans are now spreading his videos by email and the like in the tens of millions, which is a hard metric to get to, given that if you don't have a centralized platform where you can actually see that people are viewing things, you're kind of just making numbers up
00:34:48
Speaker
out of the air and Ike wasn't getting tens of millions of views on his videos prior to losing YouTube anyway so it'd be quite surprising if his fandom went up after this rather than down but it doesn't matter to Ike because Ike now has his own video platform and I know we did this joke last time and you already know what the answer is Josh but what do you think the name of David Ike's video platform is?
00:35:15
Speaker
Well, it would have to be something that involves his name. Yeah. It would have to be something sort of meaningful and significant. Yeah. So I'm going with Econic. You are completely correct. This is his own video platform called Econic. And that is where you'll get all your David Icke meme-able videos from now on. Yes, I'm assuming it's probably meant to be iconic.
00:35:44
Speaker
But because Ike is Ike with a CK, it's iconic spelt with a CK and that reads iconic in my books. Indeed, I agree with you entirely and we are the masters of the English race. We sure are. I meant to say language.
00:35:59
Speaker
that muscles the English race is a really really weird thing for me to have said. How's that Hitler spread? Let's move on to Dieselgate.
Volkswagen's Legal Troubles
00:36:11
Speaker
So this one's been going on for a while. Where did this start? Several years ago now I can't even remember. 2015?
00:36:19
Speaker
2060? Yeah, I mean, no, actually me, I think it is 2016. So I do mention it in the new book. I think it is 2016. So I mean, you may well have forgotten by now, I'm sure Volkswagen hopes you have, that they got caught cheating emissions tests in a bunch of their diesel vehicles. And there were a bunch of court cases and so on and so forth. But the latest one is that they've lost a battle around compensation.
00:36:47
Speaker
for people who bought their emissions cheating vehicles. So apparently, but not just that, not just people who bought them, people who bought them secondhand.
00:36:59
Speaker
Ah, oh yes, secondhand minivan, yes. So basically it turns out you can get compensation from VW if you bought one of their vehicles that had a cheap device in it before the whole dieselgate scam was revealed, but presumably if you still bought one after it was revealed, they're going to argue you knew what you were getting and so there's no compensation there.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, so basically it turns out that the punishment for VW in Germany is, well, the person who sold the car wouldn't have known you put a cheap device in it, so they sold it honestly thinking it was an emissions efficient vehicle.
00:37:41
Speaker
You can't really claim compensation against someone who wasn't aware that they had a car that was cheating. So basically, not only do you have to pay compensation to people who bought vehicles from you brand new, if someone unsold the vehicle, you have to pay for that as well, VW. This is the punishment for engaging in a conspiracy. You must face the highest legal hurdle. You must give money to everyone.
00:38:09
Speaker
Now, this is most likely the end of the litigation related to this case, but as we've said in the past, this is not the first time car manufacturers have been caught cheating on their emissions test. It goes all the way back to the, when was it? The 70s was the first time? Cars and trucks. Basically, if it's got an engine in it, someone who manufactures it has cheated about emissions at some point in time.
00:38:40
Speaker
So it would be nice to think that manufacturers have learned their lesson over this and will actually work harder to get their cars meeting the emission standards they claim that they meet. But if history is any guide, we may well be back here in a few years' time having a similar argument over a similar thing
00:38:59
Speaker
Probably with a different company, who knows? But yeah, it would be surprising if this were to be the end of it. No, basically they've conspired in the past. We've got no good reason to think they won't conspire again in the future.
Patron Bonus Content and Teasers
00:39:14
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of our news updates. Those were all the things we felt like highlighting this month. Actually, one thing that just came up the other day, which you haven't gotten our notes, the whole Trump, Joe Scarborough, Kilda Woman conspiracy. Did you see it? Yes, I was thinking we'd probably talk about that in the bonus episode next week. Yeah, but that's fully developed because...
00:39:36
Speaker
new stuff in the last few hours basically where the Guardian had a piece on how quite a lot of Trump's media allies in the US
00:39:49
Speaker
are chastising the president for continuing to insinuate but not claim directly that a news host killed someone. So people are going, yeah, this is gone from something that we can ignore to he keeps on doing it and it's newsworthy and we're kind of Republican aligned, but at the same time, you're taking our own here and that's just not right.
00:40:15
Speaker
So you suspect there'll be a lot more on this next week after Trump has burnt bridges with every single media organization in the US. So that's all for now, for the main episode, of course. Now, as is our want, when it's a newsy episode in the main episode, the Patreon bonus content will be not newsy, although it's kind of current events.
00:40:40
Speaker
It is and it's rather interesting in its kind of Germanic focus. It's a little bit alt-righty, it's a little bit freemen on the land and it's a whole bunch of a supposed king of New Germany. Now I do want to point out that we have been releasing this bonus content to people
00:41:01
Speaker
who aren't patrons, I don't know why I put a really long pause on there, during the lockdown for the share fact, the more content, the better when people are locked down. But given that we're all kind of coming out of lockdown now, this will be the last bit of bonus content we'll be giving away for free. If you want the bonus content, you will need to become a patron, either via the Podbean patron system or the Patreon system. But this bonus episode will be available to non patrons in a week's time.
00:41:31
Speaker
But it's the last time I tell you and it's of course we get another outbreak of COVID-19 and then who knows? So yes, if you want to hear about Peter the First, the new king of New Germany tune into our Patreon episode but otherwise it is simply time for us to say goodbye. And there does she wrote? Is that your new catchphrase?
00:41:56
Speaker
Yeah. It's not very good, is it? Okay, fine. All right. It's fantastic. It's all very Magnum PI. They did a crossover, you know. Maybe she wrote a Magnum PI. Yes, yes they did. And then Tom Selleck's Mustache guest starred on the episode of
00:42:15
Speaker
Knight Rider. I'm just making stuff up now because it's the end of the episode and we've run out of things to say. You know, so Tom Selleck's moustache did guest star in Friends. And then that was when Tom Selleck shaved it and everyone was like, what the hell's going wrong with your face, man? It's true. I mean, basically, his fame was basically the moustache. I think so, yeah. Anyway, we're rambling now. Time to turn to knock this thing on the head and simply say to you goodbye. Murda suret.
00:42:42
Speaker
The End
00:42:47
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extenta, 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 podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:43:48
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you Barbara.