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It’s a Flat, Flat, Flat, Flat World
51 Plays6 years ago
What do Pacman, billiard balls and transwarping all have in common? They are associated with the Flat Earth thesis. Join Josh and M as they puzzle over the Flat Earth and Flat Earthers. Along the way they comment on the continuing sore that is the Brett Kavanaugh story, and talk a little about the flipping of one Paul Manafort.
Learn more about M's academic work on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories at:
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Transcript
Mysteries of Pac-Man
00:00:00
Speaker
This week we investigate the computer game Pac-Man and ask, was the seminal 80s arcade game hiding deep, dark secrets?
Is Australia Real?
00:00:11
Speaker
We also challenge the idea that Australia exists, asking, is the platypus really just a marsupial pacman? A good question. Plus, we talk billiard balls, particularly yellow billiard balls. Yellow billiard balls with gaping, gaping maws.
Conspiracy Theories Unveiled
00:00:30
Speaker
All of this is strangely on topic for this week's Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
Meet the Hosts
00:00:42
Speaker
Well, hello there. Welcome once again to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, Master of the Arts. But which arts? That's the question. The martial arts? The NA arts. Yes. And certainly next to me, as ever, is Dr. M.R.X. Dentith, Doctor of the Arts. Hello.
00:01:07
Speaker
Just one art, really. Just one art. How to kill a man. Because actually, interesting, when I got my Master of Arts, I had to ask him to get rid of the S. Luckily, when you get a doctorate, it's just a doctorate in philosophy, so you don't have to worry about art anymore. Or the fact that I'm a fraud and I only have one art. I'm really good at that art. I'm really, really good at that art. But there's only one art. That's a story for another time.
00:01:32
Speaker
It's not another time though, it's this time.
Podcast Format
00:01:36
Speaker
Once again, we're going for the format we did last week. We're going to have the main bit first, and then the newsy bit, and then we're going to record the secret special super extra bit for our... What we like to call in the train a patron bonus episode. Available to you for $1 a month. And yes, we will be going on about the patron things all the time. We've got things to buy.
00:02:01
Speaker
very fancy, I say very fancy, very cheap lapel mics, which will allow us to record audio from our chests, which is just, it just seems so
00:02:15
Speaker
It would be. Because we are sitting here bathed for anyone who's watching this on the YouTube channel, bathed in the glowing light of our glowing lights, which are working this time. A few teething issues last time. One, batteries on the lights turned out to be fine on it. You didn't go for the everlasting battery option, I noticed.
00:02:40
Speaker
Well, I tried to, but they tried to also sell me perpetual motion machine. Frankly, I don't have space in my house for perpetual motion machine. Yes, so there was a bit of that, but they're all charged and I see now except for the one which turned out to be binary and they're going to replace it. Yes, we are getting a replacement factory. This is very exciting news. Our listeners are probably, especially the podcast listeners, they really, really want to know what the quality of our lights are.
00:03:05
Speaker
But everyone, though, could benefit from a better quality mic setup. So if you are one of our patrons to whom we are eternally grateful, that's probably the next thing your patrons funds will be going towards. And if you want us to improve, and you want us to improve,
00:03:22
Speaker
at least i hope you want us to improve then please just think about giving us a dollar a month you'll get access to our patron bonus episodes which have not been described as awesome well i mean they just haven't been described so frankly not they're not awesome they just haven't been described yet yet uh but anyway
00:03:45
Speaker
If we're going to do the main content thing first. We should stop waffling on doing the main content first.
Flat Earth Theories
00:03:51
Speaker
So now we're going to talk about the Flat Earth.
00:03:57
Speaker
So, Josh, I believe the Flat Earthers had a conference recently. Yeah, they did. I assume they have them every now and then, possibly annually. I wonder, from how far across the world people go to a Flat Earther conference, and how they cope with
00:04:17
Speaker
booking flights and the like. Do they get on the phone to their travel agent and go, look, I know that you're committed to pretending the Earth is round, and you've even got this animation of a plane flying across a globe. But frankly, I won't have it. I won't have it. Unless you admit the Earth is flat, I am not flying United Airlines. And that's why United Airlines has so few customers these days, because flat earthers refuse to fly UA. That's probably true, actually.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, where was it that some we said the Flat Earth Conference had drawn in people from all over the globe not realising what they just said?
00:04:55
Speaker
I do recall that. I think that was last year's Flats' conference. I think there was a little bit of a storm as to whether that was actually said or whether that was just a very clever joke to put on the Twitters. Well, yes, and a very clever joke is indeed what it sometimes seems the whole Flats' thing really is. Well, right, so let's start with the actual joke.
00:05:21
Speaker
Australia doesn't exist. This was proposed at the Flat Earth Conference that Australia was invented basically to explain the removal of certain populations from Europe particularly the UK and that there is no place called Australia at all part of a myth to make us believe in the southern hemisphere and thus a round earth. Now as far as I'm aware
00:05:46
Speaker
The Australia does not exist theory did start off as a joke on the internet. You'd think it would have to, surely. Surely in any sort of the same universe. I mean, I know there was an issue earlier this year where a adjunct professor in the US corrected someone who wrote a college essay
00:06:11
Speaker
on the state of Australia saying, no, Australia's not a state, it's just a continent. There's no country called Australia. And this adjunct professor had to be corrected by the entire internet and also all of Australia to point out that Australia is not just a continent, it is in fact a country. But most people do accept Australia does exist. They do. Now what would be the utility of denying the existence of Australia?
00:06:39
Speaker
Well, the immediate thing that occurs to me is the lols, quite frankly, that it's an amusing little story to tell and you can have lots of fun with it. But if you really were a flat earther and were really, really committed to it, then maybe, I suppose, you might have some interest in explaining away the existence of the antipodes. If the world's flat, then it's not possible for anything to be antipodal.
00:07:06
Speaker
Anything else? That sounds good to me. I'm often anti-vocal. Yes, I've noticed that. We all have, I think. Intervention. So, I mean, yes, if you were really committed to it and couldn't find any... Because I mean, surely you could just say that Australia is just part of the flat earth sort of over that way. Maybe it's a bit more distant than the other ones, which is why it takes longer to get there or something.
00:07:35
Speaker
But maybe if you'd really drunk just all of the Kool-Aid, you might feel it necessary to justify your flat-earthy opinions to say that Australia didn't exist. But, um... Well, of course, there's a more sinister aspect to this as well, which is...
Australia Myth Explored
00:07:51
Speaker
This is something which I'm always hesitant to talk about when talking about conspiracy theories, but there are instances of conspiracy theorists.
00:07:59
Speaker
who end up believing such a massive conspiracy, which most people find to be implausible, that they bite a lot of bullets. And one of the bullets you might be biting as a flat earther who believes that we're being lied to by government scientific establishments and the like,
00:08:19
Speaker
is that maybe Australia kind of exists as a way to make populations disappear. So as I said before, you might think that Australia was invented to explain where certain parts of the European population went in the 18th century.
00:08:38
Speaker
And thus it allows you to go. That was actually quite genocide. They just went to Australia in the same way that the Nazis just sent the Jews off to holiday camps. Or the much more sinister, larger scale version of the family pet being sent to live on a happy farm.
00:09:00
Speaker
Happy Farm Court Australia, where their prime ministers eat onions live on camera. That's actually true. Did they? When did that happen? Malcolm, no, not Malcolm Turnbull. Who was the one who was before Turnbull? God, who can keep up? So Malcolm Turnbull was the
00:09:19
Speaker
Not the current Prime Minister of Australia, but the previous Prime Minister. Tony Abbott would carry an onion in his pocket and then eat a raw onion in front of journalists. And this sounds like something a cartoon supervillain would do, but actually it was Tony Abbott's bon-mot. I would not be surprised if Tony Abbott ate a live hamster.
00:09:42
Speaker
And because Australia doesn't exist, who can challenge us on this? Not Tony Abbott. He doesn't even live in Australia. He had to be Prime Minister of Australia at the time.
00:09:54
Speaker
But anyway, back to the Flat Earths. I'm a little bit surprised really that we've taken this long to get to it.
Pac-Man Theory and Global Travel
00:09:59
Speaker
I mean, we've mentioned every now and then we sort of mentioned as part of a news update that some, you know, celebrity has been espousing Flat Earthy views, B.O.B., the rapper, most recently, and also... Gosh, what was her name? Another one of the reality TV star types. You know me, I only keep up with reality TV stars from the 1890s.
00:10:20
Speaker
is uh you know there's been uh they are um unsurprisingly fairly b-listy the um they're really zipping out with this sort of thing although Bob B.O.V did get Neil deGrasse Tyson um to produce a really awful rap fairly rubbish rap on the daily show i think it was yeah yeah that was embarrassing for everyone but let's now talk about black man let's let's do that um because flat eartherism
00:10:47
Speaker
is a thing. It seems to be a little bit like the anti-vaxxer thing, in that it's become a bit more prevalent than it used to be, largely on the back of sort of anti-establishmentism, don't trust those scientists and their science-ing types. There's a certain discussion here to be had about the role of the internet and YouTube, so it's a lot easier to find out about the Flat Earth now than it was in the old days.
00:11:12
Speaker
And if you've actually spent time looking at Flat Earth websites or watching Flat Earth videos, their arguments are not purely facile. A lot of them are very sophisticated. So here we have what appears to be curvature, but there's obviously an optical effect due to the way the human eye works, or due to the way that cameras work, of course, there's going to be curvature appearing here.
00:11:39
Speaker
And it all kind of harks back to the father of Flat Earthism, a gentleman by the name of Parallax, who was a Victorian prankster who basically decided that he could persuade people to believe anything. So he would challenge scientists to try and prove the Earth is round where he would say it was flat.
00:12:00
Speaker
And then he would do ludicrous experiments and then simply have a preordained conclusion. I look through my telescope and I don't see a curved horizon, so in fact it must be flat, to point out that if you say things in the right way, with the right kind of terminology,
00:12:18
Speaker
the public are going to believe you. So flat-earth-ism, as we know it now, the Flat Earth Society, is based upon a prank. Flat-earthers will try to claim that flat-earth-ism is an age-old thesis.
Historical Context of Earth's Roundness
00:12:32
Speaker
The only problem is the ancient Greeks worked out how round the world was. The Polynesians knew the earth was curved due to the sheer fact they spent so much time at sea, etc, etc. People didn't really believe in a flat-earth in the past.
00:12:47
Speaker
And she required quite sophisticated arguments to explain away perception for flat-earthism to become the thing it is today. And the internet kind of aids and abets in disseminating those kind of really interesting but ultimately flawed arguments. Which leads us, of course, to Pac-Man. Of course it does. Everything leads to Pac-Man.
00:13:10
Speaker
So this is something that came up at the latest conference although this is a theory I've heard previously but I think it sort of got a grander earring at the conference which is the guy people explain if the world's flat then how come you can like get in a plane or if you travel in the same direction you'll eventually wind up where you started basically.
00:13:35
Speaker
that that surely suggests we're traveling around a curved surface. I sort of point it out, to quote Bakkaru Bahanzai, wherever you go, there you are. There you've been, previously, or something, if we're talking about coming back to where we were. But anyway, if I had planned this, I'd now pulled out a watermelon from behind my chair. But you didn't. You just went with the Bahanzai reference, wherever one would fit, and I commend you for doing that. Well, I wish I had a watermelon right now.
00:14:03
Speaker
Anyway, and so, someone to try and explain away this thought, I mean of course you can obviously say that it's all, as we'll see when we get into it, you know, the conspiracy theories that they'll invoke to explain this stuff can get very immense to the point that they'll say, you know, any sort of international plane travel is just nonsense and all they really do is get up and circle around for a while and then land somewhere else on the flat earth and so on and so forth.
00:14:30
Speaker
The most recent theory to account for this is basically that we're living in a game of Pac-Man, or indeed any sort of... any one of those computer games where if you go out one side of the screen, you immediately come back in the other side, Asteroids. Why not the Asteroids theory? I would take an Asteroids theory much more seriously than a Pac-Man theory. Maybe it's a really big Bloodhound gang fans. No Pac-Man drugs are bad.
00:15:00
Speaker
So that's his contention, that at some point on the edges of the flat Earth, there's some sort of space warp in effect, where without even knowing it, you'll get to the edge, you'll pass through this warp and be warped to the other end of the Earth without even knowing that it happened, just like Pac-Man, or indeed one of Pac-Man's ghosts. Now you know what the advantage of this thesis is? It's hilarious.
00:15:25
Speaker
It is hilarious, but it also means you don't have to believe that large numbers of people are complicit in the conspiracy. So if you believe in a flat Earth and you don't believe in the warping hypothesis, you have to kind of go, well, pilots must know the Earth is flat because they fly up so high and they travel and have to do these weird maneuvers and the lion can
00:15:48
Speaker
You know, engineers have to know this because when they're building things, you know, building pipes taking the internet from one part of the world to another, they can't be going around the globe because there is no globe. This way, you can go, well, look, these people are all Jews. They don't realize there's this flag because they're experiencing a warping effect.
00:16:07
Speaker
So it allows you to say it is a conspiracy that the Earth is flat because it's been kept from us, but the number of people involved in keeping the conspiracy is actually dramatically lower. So it allows you to go, well, look, most people aren't aware of it because most people aren't experiencing it.
Theoretical Physics of Flat Earth
00:16:26
Speaker
Well, if you live in a purely flat earth with no warping, a lot of people who should know are complicit in keeping the secret from us. So I guess it is superior in that respect, although I don't know the exact mechanism by which they say these space warps work. I think in the more theoretical, physically stuff, when they talk about the warping of space and so on, it's often to do with that sort of space being curved in a higher dimension than the three dimensions we're capable of perceiving.
00:16:54
Speaker
so that what we think is sort of, quote-unquote, flat three-dimensional space is curved in another dimension and the spacewarp allows you to sort of hop through this higher dimension and bypass the curved section of the space and so on and so forth, which kind of suggests that perhaps the flat earth theory is saying that the world is flat, but only in three dimensions.
00:17:19
Speaker
that in higher physical dimensions the curvature of space-time is still in effect. Would that be a violation of all that flat earth is holding dear? I think that he probably thought through it far too much. Well that's entirely possible when it comes to the flat earth isn't because basically the problem and the reason why this conspiracy theory is there in the first place and why they just get so elaborate and complex is that there is so much you have to explain away. Gravity!
00:17:47
Speaker
Where does, you know, science says that gravitational force is generated by large masses and that the gravitational force is something of a planetary body being consistent means it's going to be, the laws of physics say it must be formed into a sphere like shape. Are you forgetting your Aristotle? Yes, I literally am. Because of course, like attracts like. Yes. So we are earthy beings?
00:18:15
Speaker
we live upon an earthy plan we are attracted to the earthy thing like a trance like simple Aristotle don't you give me a fancy 16th century physics or your 17th century physics or your 18th and don't even think about your 19th or 20th century but yes they are probably relying upon a more
00:18:39
Speaker
basic understanding of the physical world. Exactly. Magnets. How do they work? I don't know. The insane clown posse doesn't know, and neither do I. But that's been one kind which I think did come up at this particular conference as well. The gravity doesn't exist. The attraction that physical objects appear to have towards the ground basically is due to some sort of electrostatic charge connection. May I?
00:19:07
Speaker
Thank you, poor Abdul and DJ Scat-Kat. I forgot it was Scat-Kat. It was Scat-Kat. Don't question me on late 80s musical references, thank you. Scat-Kat. Scat-Kat's early 90s. Scat-Kat. The both of me. Scat-Kat. Possibly early 90s. Boom! Yes, so that's one theory. I've heard other ones that say there's no such thing as gravity, it's simply buoyancy.
00:19:31
Speaker
It's in the same way that these dense objects will float to the top of a fluid and denser objects will sink to the bottom. We are simply denser than air, therefore we sink to it and the air is above us. But isn't buoyancy just the interaction of different densities with gravity? I believe so. I think in order to explain, I am a doctor, but I'm not that kind of doctor.
00:19:57
Speaker
So, I mean, yes, they do seem to be reaching a little bit and don't seem to, well, I mean, certainly don't rely on modern scientific orthodoxy, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? I mean, if you believe in a flat earth theory, you kind of have to believe that large chunks of the scientific establishment are deliberately lying to us and concealing from us the nature of the world. It is a very all-encompassing conspiracy theory, one which seeks to explain away a lot of oddness
00:20:25
Speaker
were the hypothesis that indicates that we're being lied to epically by people in power, particularly the scientific elite, which of course means that this is one of those conspiracy theories which is tightly connected to other anti-scientific conspiracy theories, like anti-vax theories and the like, which is not to say that all anti-vaxxers are flat earthers, but flat earthers are more likely to be anti-vaxxers.
Scientific Misunderstandings of Flat Earth
00:20:53
Speaker
and the sorts of things you see on the YouTube videos that you were mentioning earlier. Some of them are fairly sophisticated. Some of them are almost sort of childlike. In their scientific naivete, there was the one guy who took a spirit level onto an aeroplane.
00:21:13
Speaker
which I'm not quite sure what he thought he was even showing with that, because surely, I mean, the plane was taking off, it would have been like that, but during the entire flight, it was leveling. And it looks like, see, the spirit level is level, and so that means we can't be over the curve. And then I think there's some pointed out to them, but no, because the plane is also moving over the curve, so it would always be parallel to the ground that it's on. So surely you would expect it to be flat, and he sort of said,
00:21:39
Speaker
That's an interesting point. But there are a lot of, to be honest, I have not troubled myself overly to really investigate the ins and outs of flatter theories. But from what I've seen, there's been a lot of that's what it looks like from here. A lot of this is what my limited high school understanding of science tells me the world should look like. And it doesn't quite, therefore, it must be wrong.
00:22:03
Speaker
Not a lot of hardcore science, would you say? No, there is a lot of, my gut tells me. And unfortunately, one of the things we learned over the 18th, 19th, and 20th century is that our gut is not a reliable indicator of scientific truths.
00:22:20
Speaker
the world is a lot more complex than it appears to be, which is why we have to come back to billion balls. Yes, yes we do, because I think a lot of the motivation perhaps, in the same way that say a lot of 9-11 conspiracy theories, right at the beginning,
00:22:39
Speaker
seem to come out of the fact that the collapse of the Twin Towers just didn't look the way we thought they should. They didn't look properly, the airplane impacts and the collapsing buildings didn't quite look enough like a Michael Bay movie to satisfy us and so we've got something else to bend off. Again with the flat earth,
00:22:55
Speaker
Things just don't quite work the way people think they should, but a large part of that is possibly just because people don't really, really appreciate and possibly aren't capable of appreciating the scale of the world that we live on. The world is bigger than we can understand. I think even if you're one of the handful of human beings who's been out into space and looked back at the Earth from space and seen the entirety of it,
00:23:24
Speaker
it's still hard to comprehend exactly the distances involved. And so things people like to talk about is the fact that if the scale things, if the earth were the size of an apple, then its atmosphere would be the thickness of the skin of an apple. So, you know, from the ground up until the highest stratosphere is basically nothing compared to the actual size of the earth.
00:23:51
Speaker
Mount Everest, four kilometres up from sea level or something like that, is basically a statistical blip. Compared to the entire size and shape of the earth, Mount Everest might as well not exist. Now that it's given rise to the claim that if the earth were the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother than a billiard ball.
00:24:11
Speaker
Now, apparently, that isn't actually true, which is unfortunate, because it's really nice. It's one of those nice little sounds. It is. It sounds fantastic, even though it would also be really watery compared to, believe it or, due to 80% of the surface being water. But again, the surface is practically nothing. The depths of the ocean are really that much deeper than the height of our eyes.
00:24:39
Speaker
So in that particular case, I think there was a misunderstanding that someone read the specifications for billiard balls and said that there are not allowed more than a, I forget the figure, a 0.05 millimeter variation or something.
00:24:53
Speaker
and then worked out that if the earth were the size of a billion ball, then the ups and the downs and the mountains would actually be smaller than that 0.05 millimeter and therefore it's smooth. But what the figure was actually talking about was the tolerances allowed in the roundness of the ball. That figure was how far off perfectly spherical it was supposed to be and it was nothing to do with variations of the surface and things like that.
00:25:16
Speaker
apparently people have done the sums and that if the earth were the size of a billiard ball it would sort of be like a very fine grained sandpaper. It's a little bit rough, not not not not glassy smooth but not too clear of either. Also if the earth was the size of the billiard ball
00:25:31
Speaker
Our population issues would be a lot worse. Because we stayed the same size, but the Earth was that small. Yes. Overdrowned. Lots of people stacked on each other's shoulders. Or presumably in a jar. It would be solid green time. Make room. Make room. Yes.
Flat Earth: Real or Satire?
00:25:50
Speaker
So that's flat-eartherism. It's fun to point and laugh at. The question I always keep coming back to, and it's a question you've already asked, is how much of it is just taking this? And that's a good question, because it was started as a hoax.
00:26:05
Speaker
it has had some fairly, so the Flat Earth Society, the official venue for Flat Earth Rism, has had some fairly interesting presidents in its time. And so you can't help but feel that the population of the society from time to time is more people who go, I've got a Flat Earth card, I don't remember the Flat Earth Society, rather than people who actually believe in Flat Earth Rism.
00:26:34
Speaker
And maybe it is a kind of protest vote against current understandings of science, which make the world so hard to understand that even the experts, your physicists, your biologists, and your chemists understand a small proportion of what we might call earth sciences.
00:26:55
Speaker
Certainly, if you look at the YouTube videos and watch some of the words, some of these people do genuinely seem to be taking it seriously, and yet you look at stuff like the Australia doesn't exist hypothesis, and in the way most of them are phrased, it seems fairly clear that they
00:27:12
Speaker
at the very least started as a joke. I mean, of course, it's entirely possible that some think, well, we seem to be saying that about flat eartherism as a whole, but particular theories started out as a joke. But then people who already believed in the flat earth jumped on them and said, oh, there might be something to that. And so something which initially was completely fatuous ends up being taken seriously. But it does really seem to be somewhat blurry as to where the line between hoax slash parody and genuine conspiracy theory is.
Is the Podcast Part of the Hoax?
00:27:42
Speaker
just like this podcast. It's difficult to tell who this podcast is or the line that separates this podcast from hoax and parody. Both. Fact and reality. Both. I mean, we're kind of south of Australia and Australia doesn't exist. Yeah, what does that make us? So if something's south of a place that doesn't exist, is it actually south of anywhere? Are we in limbo? Is this a void? Probably. There's only one thing we can do.
00:28:14
Speaker
I already started to say. But I was thinking we should just go to the news. Ah, yes, no, that's what I was going to say also. Yep, let's go to the news.
Paul Manafort and Mueller Investigation
00:28:24
Speaker
Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news. Big news in Trumpland. Paul Manafort has flipped on the president. Oh, that's right.
00:28:35
Speaker
Well, maybe, maybe not. What we can say is that Paul Manafort has agreed as part of a plea deal to help with the Mueller investigation, which must be quite displeasing to Donald Trump, who was praising Manafort just a few weeks ago for not aiding in a beating Mueller and that pesky Russian probe. Yes. Now, while Manafort's plea mostly concerns his role consulting with the Ukrainian government before his role in the Trump campaign,
00:29:03
Speaker
Manafort was also one of the attendees at that awkward meeting with a Russian operative at Trump Tower. And this means it's likely that other members of that meeting will be just a little bit worried as to what might come out. What might come out indeed. Does this mean it's case closed on the Trump saga? No.
00:29:24
Speaker
But it's evidence that the investigation into Russian meddling in the US election is picking up steam. Other evidence of this is a new raft of sanctions the US have just placed on Russia for meddling in the election. And yet, President Trump continues to claim this is both fake news and that the real meddling was at the behest of the Democrats. So either it's a conspiracy or
00:29:55
Speaker
It's a conspiracy. Nice to know. And speaking of stories that just will not go away, we return now to the continuing saga, which is the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, with the news that he has been accused of sexual assault dating back to his college years. Oh dear. Yeah. Whilst we could talk about how, if these allegations are true,
00:30:21
Speaker
inherit the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, we always give the benefit of the doubt to victims in these such cases, because the cost of accusation is so high. Now, either Kavanaugh has lied about his past, or the people who were meant to do background checks on nominees to the court have spectacularly failed in their duties.
00:30:45
Speaker
But we really don't need to talk about this. Those stories are out there in the media for all to see. More interesting from our perspective is the story David Brock, one time Republican insider, is telling. Brock indeed. Yes, last week we talked about how Kavanaugh had been known to peddle conspiracy theories about the suicide of one Vince Foster.
00:31:08
Speaker
during Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation all the way back in the 1990s. Brock adds some details to that story in his recent opinion piece for NBC News, noting that he and Kavanaugh were part of a clique of young Republicans
00:31:23
Speaker
who are being trained for future office or use by the party. Use by the party? A conspiracy of political insiders, you might just say. I might just say, indeed I might. Brock wrote a memoir of his time as a Republican operative called Blinded by the Right, in which he discusses the clique watching Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address and how Kavanaugh mouthed the word bitch when the camera focused on Hillary.
00:31:54
Speaker
Brock fleshes out that story by pointing out that Kavanagh has never, never been non-partisan and was even mentored by DCL appeals court judge Lawrence Silverman, who was known for planting leaks in the press to gain partisan advantage.
00:32:10
Speaker
So, that being said, Brock argues that Kavanaugh quite deliberately ran a dirty tricks campaign when he worked as an independent counsel on the white worker investigation. And the real conspiracy, the real conspiracy, is how Kavanaugh and his allies are covering this up and his other partisan behaviour. Which is quite disturbing to think about. Now, will this derail Kavanaugh's ascension to the Supreme Court?
00:32:35
Speaker
Probably not, although the sexual assault scandal might. While some people are claiming it's unjust to punish someone for a youthful indiscretion, we would like to note that getting to be one of the seven lifetime appointments on the US's Supreme Court should come with some assurances that the person in question is as squeaky clean as they come. So this kind is clean, squeaky clean.
00:33:04
Speaker
Also, despite what some people on the right have been saying, not every young man gets into that kind of trouble at school. Don't avoid the not or mem thing, but in this case not or mem. And for that we are eternally grateful. But wait! There's more. Okay. What? Yes indeed, Ulrika. You see, over the last 24 hours there have been rumours spreading across Twitter
00:33:32
Speaker
and at Gateway Pundit that Kevin I was accuser Christine Blasey Ford made similar allegations about Neil Gorsuch, the last person nominated and approved to the Supreme Court.
00:33:48
Speaker
Really, that's kind of interesting. Now, is there any proof? Well, not to put too fine a point on it. No. An anonymous source who was apparently quote-unquote very reliable informed Josh Cornett of this, but there is as of yet no actual evidence. This is true. However, it does come off the backs of, again, quote-unquote in-depth investigations. Those quotes are doing some fairly serious work there.
00:34:15
Speaker
into Blasey Ford, who is of course a left-wing activist. My non-existent god, Gateway Pundit, has mastered using a search engine? There'll be no stopping them now! I can't see how. This all seems a little smear campaign-y to us, but then again that's what they're saying about Blasey Ford's allegations.
00:34:35
Speaker
But if this new allegation about her but true, it would certainly speak to a conspiracy by Democrats to derail the nomination. They really need a conspiracy, surely. But if the allegation is false, then it speaks to people spreading disinformation about Blasey Ford to potentially cover up a sleaze that might be about to become a Supreme Court justice.
Brett Kavanaugh Allegations
00:34:56
Speaker
Conspiracies round. And people say we should just ignore conspiracy theories. Do say that. Put not on this podcast. Neither on this podcast. Someone should rise a book about that. Maybe you already have.
00:35:14
Speaker
Dun, dun, dun!
Patreon-Exclusive Content Teaser
00:35:19
Speaker
But enough news for now. In our Patreon bonus episode this week we discuss a terrible tale of spiders harassing a small English town with nursery rhymes. Yep, that's true. The discovery of even more holes in the International Space Station, also your mum, and death and an unfortunate experiment, and maybe, just maybe, we'll give our thoughts on the season finale of Elementary.
00:35:44
Speaker
Yes, because we are topical. And all this for a mere dollar a month. But until then, it's time to say goodbye. Goodbye.
00:35:57
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It is written, researched, and performed by Josh Addison, aka monkeyfluids, and MRXTenteth, aka Conspiricism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean, and Stitcher.
00:36:22
Speaker
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00:36:45
Speaker
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