Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Conspiracy News for August 2019
28 Plays5 years ago
A bumper crop of news for August: Josh and M start with news about the coronial report into Jeffrey Epstein's death, discuss the fate of Cardinal George Pell, ask what a TV-headed monster is doing with its eggs, lament the fact Ukrainian Nazis are selling that manifesto online, inquire into the Epoch Times' interest in QAnon, and reveal that a time-traveller called "Noah" is actually not a time-traveller at all.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding?
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Nature of News
00:00:00
Speaker
The news. What is it? Where can you get it? And how much should you invest in it? Tonight we answer those questions. What is the news? What is the opposite of the odds? Where can you get it? In dodgy clubs where the lights are low and the music is a soothing tonic to the grimdark reality you face as a drone in that office downtown. How much should you invest in it? Well, depending on which part of the country you're in and your age, at least 12%, if not 12, barrel fills per capita.
00:00:29
Speaker
And thus ends the news. Or does
Podcast Episode Introduction
00:00:32
Speaker
it? Because it's August 22nd, 2019 and this is The Conspirate News. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Imdentive.
00:00:58
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. Sitting next to me is Dr. Edim R. Xtenteth. And sitting sort of next to us in a metaphorical sense, I suppose, at our right hand is our new patron.
Inside Joke: The Pork Board
00:01:14
Speaker
Yes, whose name we'll go of. Unmentioned. Because they claim to be a member of...
00:01:20
Speaker
The pork board, at least they don't claim to be a member of the pork board. But of course, members of the pork board will go around saying they're not members of the pork board, which means it's a tested admission of being a member of the pork board. And the pork board is a very, very deep cut on this podcast and my previous radio career. Yes, no, if you don't know what the pork board is, well, frankly, you should have been paying attention at the time.
00:01:44
Speaker
or put Pork Board into the search bar of Podban, and you will find out more about the Pork Board. Although not everything about the Pork Board. Some of the Pork Board stuff is not listed in the podcast notes, and so you'd have to listen to each individual episode to find out exactly what the Pork Board is doing and who it's not doing. But at any rate, to this person who may or may not be a member of the Pork Board... But no one is. But the Pork Board.
00:02:14
Speaker
We say thank you anyway. You in your pork-boughty ways.
00:02:20
Speaker
That's all we had to say on that particular matter. Now we're going to be doing a
Impact of Current Events on Scheduling
00:02:25
Speaker
news episode. We were going to do a news episode last week, but then the whole Epstein thing. But it turns out it kind of works out OK, because this is a month where there's like five Thursdays in the month. So this ended up being the last one of the month anyway. So maybe instead of saying we're going to do one every four weeks, we should just say the last week of the month will be the news episode. And that way we don't have to worry about any weird entanglements.
00:02:46
Speaker
See, I want us to do a news episode where we're predicting news for the next month because of the way things worked out and the every four weeks, suddenly it turns out we're doing October news in September and also April sun in Cuba. Hey. Well, we could. We could do that, but we're not doing that.
00:03:05
Speaker
Of course, we are going to lead our news with news of last week's episode on Jeffrey Epstein. So, frankly, we were condemned to talk about Jeffrey Epstein in the news episode, no matter which way things unfolded. Yep, it's a total shambles and let's get into it. Indeed. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:03:30
Speaker
So yes, last week we talked all about Jeffrey Epstein and then said of course next week it's the news episode and we'll probably be a whole bunch of updates about Jeffrey Epstein and wouldn't you know it there are.
Epstein's Death and Conspiracy Theories
00:03:40
Speaker
But let's rush through them fairly quickly I think because there's nothing
00:03:44
Speaker
Nothing particularly earth-shattering his cause of death has been officially announced as suicide by hanging, although one little nugget that's popped up is apparently he signed a new will two days before he died. Interesting. I mean on one level that kind of fits the suicide narrative of someone putting their affairs in order because having had a failed suicide attempt they know they're going to try again. On another level it is the classic Agatha Christie case of
00:04:13
Speaker
Isn't it unusual they signed a will two days ago and now they're dead. Which is precisely how Miss Marple speaks. Is it? Dead. It does sound like Angela Lansbury. No, that was Medici Roche. Although she was in a Agatha Christie adaptation with Miss Marple in it but she didn't play Miss Marple. Oh well. Her loss.
00:04:35
Speaker
And apart from that, it's mostly just been, the news has largely been how many famous people can we tie to Jeffrey Epstein. So there's been now... So literally or more figuratively? More figuratively, but yeah. Because, you know, one thing we probably should have done was tie a whole bunch of people to Jeffrey Epstein. Might have slowed him down a bit. Might have kicked him out of trouble. Or when they disposed of his body, he just attached all of these other malcontents to Jeffrey Epstein.
Media Distraction Tactics
00:05:02
Speaker
And it's fine. It's all fine.
00:05:03
Speaker
But yes, I mean, more footage has been servicing of Prince Andrew palling around with Epstein. Interesting that the UK papers seem to be largely, it's sort of like, gosh, look at that, Prince Andrew at Jeffrey Epstein's... Wait, wait, wait, wait, Joel. But Meghan Markle ate an avocado. Well, she did. And that Prince, it's, there's been a lot of sort of, you know, he was there at Epstein's, Epstein's mansion. Straight City didn't notice any of that pedophilia going on. Meghan Markle did something.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yes. Basically, the British press is obsessed with an American, but not the American they should be obsessed with, which is now deceased Jeffrey Epstein. There was an article I saw the other day saying that a woman who looks like the daughter of former Australian PM Paul Keating was seen leaving Epstein's, which
00:05:52
Speaker
I'm not quite sure how that's news apart from being able to add an ek forma prime minister into the same sentence. And also given I can't even remember what Paul Keesing looks like. No. The idea that there's someone who resembles him. His daughter. Who may or may not be his daughter. It just seems like a very long bow. It does.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's been a couple more pointing out all your Clintons and your Trumps and the various famous people, but there's nothing particularly conspiratorial about it, really, unless you go into the whole Clinton body count thing and we went into that last episode. We did. The other interesting thing, while doing a fairly half-hearted search for Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy, I did see an article at thenation.com entitled, The Vast Conspiracy Behind Epstein's Death.
US Prison System Issues
00:06:42
Speaker
It turns out this article is basically just talking about the US prison system and how Epstein was treated no worse than any other prison system. He's slightly better. Apparently he was sort of allowed to have his lawyers with him for like half the day or something, so whereas most prisoners have to spend most of their time alone, he actually had company for a lot of it.
00:07:04
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, the prison system where suicide, I believe, is the number one cause of death among prisoners. Yeah, we didn't really talk about this last week, but I think there were around about 22,000 suicides in US custody in the last year alone. So the fact that someone who's under surveillance killed themselves isn't actually that unusual by American standards.
00:07:31
Speaker
So, I mean, yeah, they were sort of saying you don't need to look for a conspiracy to account for his death. The conspiracy is simply the state of the underfunded prison system, which appears to be exactly the way people want it to be. I mean, if you wanted, you could still run the conspiracy angle and say, well, that just means that the powerful people who wanted Epstein killed, they knew they didn't have to get their hands dirty. Just chuck them in the prison system. And it kind of cranks out the outcome you want. I suppose the conspiracy here is
00:08:00
Speaker
no one wants to talk about how badly funded and run the US prison system is. So it's kind of covered up that things are a lot worse than the public are made to think. And these things really only come to light when a notable figure dies in US custody, which then makes people go,
00:08:21
Speaker
I thought they were kind of guarded. No, apparently not. Apparently not. Moving on to another big figure who I don't think we've talked about before,
Cardinal Pell's Appeal and Church Scandals
00:08:31
Speaker
really. We must have touched on parsing the news. So we have mentioned in the past that Cardinal George Powell, who was the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in Australia,
00:08:45
Speaker
was up on historic sex abuse charges and was found guilty by a jury earlier this year, I think it was late last year, but the judgement as to why he was found guilty only came out at the beginning of this year.
00:09:02
Speaker
Now, he's made an appeal, and in a 2-1 decision against George Powell, his appeal has been rejected on basically 13 points, some of which were legal points, some of which were points about eyewitness testimony.
00:09:18
Speaker
And so at this stage, Cardinal George Pell will be serving a six-year prison sentence in Australia. It has one more chance of appeal to the High Court, but there's no guarantee that appeal will be heard. And this is all just kind of building into or flowing into the whole historic sex abuse issue the Catholic Church has been dealing with and the fact that covered it up for quite a long time.
00:09:47
Speaker
What does the church have to say about Pell? So, the archbishop for, sorry, I should say, I've got to say the archbishop for us straight, it doesn't quite work the way, but Pell's immediate successor, who is an archbishop, has gone, well,
00:10:03
Speaker
You know, I believe the victim, but I also believe George Powell. So I think it might have been a different clergy member who sexually assaulted those fine boys. I mean, I believe that they were assaulted by a member of the church, but Powell keeps on telling me he's completely innocent of the charges and I believe him. So obviously both accounts must be true. And the Vatican's responses until such time that Powell has exhausted all of his appellate rights,
00:10:32
Speaker
they're not going to do anything such as investigating whether they defrock him or remove his princely status in the church because of course cardinals are the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, the red hats, and it's actually quite a vexed issue as to whether when you become a cardinal those things can be stripped away from you. It's actually a murky area in canon law. Right.
00:10:59
Speaker
We have some more dark and heavy things to talk about, but as a bit of a palate cleanser, the television headed individual dropping televisions.
Virginia's TV-Head Mystery
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, so this isn't really a conspiracy per se, but in Virginia, week before last, an entity with a TV for a head
00:11:19
Speaker
was leaving TVs on at least 60 porches in Virginia. Now, the news media have erroneously referred to this as the TV-headed man. We don't really have any reason to assume this entity's gender at all. And also, it's a TV with a human body. I mean, it's a monstrous thing leaving its eggs on porches throughout Virginia. Very mysterious. It is.
00:11:49
Speaker
Probably actually a person in a jumpsuit in a hollowed-out television mask? Prove it to me. Well, I can't, obviously. No one could. Precisely. It's a TV-hit monster laying eggs. Well, she's carrying it. Don't even see the procreation itself.
00:12:06
Speaker
We just see the monster taking the eggs from some distance and placing them on porches, presumably as a gift to the people inside the homes. But it turns out the people of Virginia don't want CRT-based TV eggs. They want the latest LCD or LED displays. I mean, frankly.
00:12:26
Speaker
Frankly, I am shocked by how impolite the residents of Virginia are by not accepting the gift of a TV that will one day grow up to be another TV-headed monster that will destroy its eggs throughout Virginia as well. Well, that's true. And it's nice to see at least that the variety of cryptids are becoming a bit more modern for various
00:12:55
Speaker
They're moving with the times. Right. That was the silly news. On to the depressing stuff.
International Concerns: Christchurch Manifesto
00:13:01
Speaker
It's come to light recently that Neo-Nazis in Ukraine are selling the manifesto of the Odatahi mosque shooter, the manifesto, which of course is... Is it just banned here? Or it's objectionable material, isn't it?
00:13:14
Speaker
Yes, so it is prima facie banned unless you have an exemption like myself. So yes, so publishing it certainly would be completely against the law here, but not in Ukraine on account of it being a completely different country on the other side of the world. And our government has admitted we can't do anything about that because it's been published in a foreign jurisdiction. We're simply frowning about it going, why are you publishing a terrorist manifesto? Oh, that's right, because you're neo-Nazis.
00:13:43
Speaker
That's why you're publishing it. You're neo-Nazis. Which is not to say that all of Ukraine are neo-Nazis, but the people within Ukraine publishing this document almost certainly are. But apparently, yes. The Prime Minister has sort of said, yes, I'll definitely ask our Ministry of Foreign Affairs to talk to the people in Ukraine and say, hey, guys, what the hell? But legally, there's nothing we can actually do about what goes on in another country. What are we, America?
00:14:10
Speaker
Thankfully, no. A bit of political commentary there.
Falun Gong's Media Influence
00:14:16
Speaker
Now, Falun Gong, we devoted, I'd say, a whole episode, half of an episode, really, the episode on Falun Gong and Chinese life organ harvesting on Falun Gong. They've been in the news again. They have. They've been in the news because of their newspaper, the Epoch Times, which I used to sometimes receive in my letterbox when I lived in Ponsonby.
00:14:38
Speaker
No, I don't know why I'm assuming every so often someone decided that they would do a Epoch Times run in the neighborhood. Although why they thought they're going to have influence in a very, very affluent upper middle class neighborhood like Herne Bay. I have no idea.
00:14:56
Speaker
But no, the Epoch Times, it's all going a bit cute. So this is a story from NBC News, and it talks about how Thelong Gong's newspaper, The Epoch Times, which is actually based out of New York and run by a non-profit news outlet, has spent in the last six months $1.5 million
00:15:21
Speaker
on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook. And that's more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself. And actually, more than most Democratic presidential candidates had spent on their own campaigns thus far.
00:15:42
Speaker
Right, so they really like Trump at Falun Gong? They like Trump because Trump is anti-communism. Falun Gong was founded by someone who is anti-communist, which of course led to the persecution of the members of Falun Gong, leading to an increased feeling of being persecuted by communists, by the members of Falun Gong. And so they want to promote Trump as the person who is going to wipe out Marxism
00:16:12
Speaker
in mainland China. Right, by putting tariffs on stuff and pronouncing the word China really weirdly. Everything he does is weird. I don't know whether pronunciation of words is in any way noticeable when it comes to Donald J. Trump. So yes, the ads feature unidentified spokespeople who talk about the deep state and criticize the fake news media.
00:16:41
Speaker
And it's all gone a bit cute. Not necessarily because of the Facebook ads. They also have a YouTube channel. And they have a show called Edge of Wonder, which has featured materials about anti-vaccination, UFO abductions, and pro-cure non-stories. And amongst the other stuff I assume about Falun Gong practitioners being imprisoned and having their organs chopped out.
00:17:04
Speaker
Yes, and actually one thing we didn't talk about when we did our Falun Gong episode is that Falun Gong practitioners
00:17:13
Speaker
They're not the most liberally-minded people in the world. No, I think we did mention that they were particularly, that they were kind of anti-homosexuality. They're not fond of the gays. No, and an anti, what else were they? Anti-anti-drugs. Anti-modern music. So they were certainly conservative in their, in a lot of their social views. But one thing we didn't mention, apparently Jackie Chan is an enemy of Falun Gong because he's a communist.
00:17:43
Speaker
among the more decadent communists, I suppose. I mean, when he's not, you know, splitting his skull open, doing stunts and movies and so on, he's off doing press. He was on Graham Norton a while ago. Was he? Yeah. He had communists on the Graham Norton show, honestly.
Trevor Loudon's Anti-Communist Narrative
00:17:58
Speaker
Graham, Graham Norton's obviously a commie. Well, yes, he's got the beard for it these days. He's also Irish. As you know, all Irish people. Everyone from Ireland is a communist. Or at least science. They should be. What else do we have to say? So apparently in 2016, when it started, when the Epoch Times was covering the 2016 elections,
00:18:23
Speaker
Junior reporters there were told their content was to be critical of China, it was to emphasize the threat of Islamic terrorism, it was to report on illegal immigration, and again focus on these traditional anti-gay, anti-drug type values. So it certainly does seem to sort of mirror, if nothing else, the tone of things we see coming out of the alt-right and the publications. But what's really interesting
00:18:46
Speaker
is that conservative media doesn't know what to make of the Epoch Times, because the Epoch Times is quite obviously partisan with respect to its anti-Chinese position, but also heavily spiritual in a non-Christian way.
00:19:07
Speaker
So, conservative and alt-right media in the US is going, we don't know what to make of these guys. They're pro-Trump, but at the same time, they're weirdly spiritual. It's not Jesus Christ spiritualism, it's some kind of other foreign spiritualism.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yes, weird. And Trevor Loudon, a name that's come up here a few times. Yeah, so I don't know. She mentioned Trevor Loudon in a while. He's a former act party leader, the act party being our most right wing party in our local electoral system.
00:19:46
Speaker
He's a former member of Zenith Applied Philosophy, which is a kind of weird combination of Scientology and libertarianism. And he is now rising for the Epoch Times. Now, Trivialalden many years ago was involved in rooting out Marxists and communists in this particular country.
00:20:06
Speaker
Which turned out to be pretty difficult because we're not really American-style afraid of the word socialism here. So he didn't really get any traction. So he now basically lives and works in the States where he...
00:20:22
Speaker
is basically rooting out Marxists and communists in the US political system. And wouldn't you know it, it's all those Democrats, all those secret Marxists and communists in the not-quite-left-wing party called the Democratic National Party. It's all very strange. And his bio on the Epoch Times website is...
00:20:44
Speaker
He specialises in exposing Marx's influence on mainstream politics. He's best known for his book, Enemies Within, communists, socialists and progressives in the US Congress, and his similarly themed documentary film, Enemies Within. Does he? Yes!
00:21:02
Speaker
I didn't know that. No, he's actually not that well known outside of a very small cohort of people who are really concerned about communists in the US. But the local connection here makes a nice segue to our next story. Now, the first time I read this, I thought it said Queensland. And so I was like, oh, those wacky Australians, that's the sort of thing that I do. And then I read it again and realised it's Queenstown. And it was actually something that happened here. Which is a...
00:21:30
Speaker
Part of the country largely owned by Sam Neill and James Cameron largely designed around tourism. So Queenstown used to be a fairly standard holiday town in the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:21:46
Speaker
And now it's kind of the ski resort town of the South Island, which has some of the highest living costs in the country. And that's saying something given we both come from Auckland. And yes, it's largely owned by beloved film actor in the country, Sam Neill. But he's not
Flat Earth Bet in New Zealand
00:22:05
Speaker
involved in the story. What the story is is that two men from Queenstown ended up in court over a $10,000 bet about whether or not the earth is flat.
00:22:15
Speaker
Now it's actually a quite confusing story to read because you're not entirely sure who believes what or who was in the wrong. But basically two men, Jamie Matthew Sutherland, a car groomer, denied threatening to kill Louis Land, who is not given a profession, which makes me think that the writer of the article in the New Zealand Herald was quite taken by the idea of someone whose profession was car groomer.
00:22:43
Speaker
Back in February 14th of this year, and it's all due to a bet over dinner that seems to have gone disastrously wrong. Yes, basically Mr. Lance is a flat earther, claimed he knew the earth was flat, and at one point he said, I'm so sure the earth is flat, I'd bet $10,000 that it is. Sutherland stood up and said, you're on, shake. And then from the sounds of things, they both sort of immediately said, right, you know, only $10,000. It was like,
00:23:13
Speaker
You know, I bet you the Earth is round. I bet you the Earth is flat. $10,000. Fine. Give me $10,000. The world is round. No, no, no. You give me $10,000. Because the world is flat. No, no. The Earth is round. You give me $10,000. But it's flat. Yeah. That seemed to be how it went. And then, of course...
00:23:31
Speaker
if any of them did feel that perhaps they were in the wrong, it was still, well, it was just a stupid joke bed. We didn't know nobody meant it when we said we were really bet $10,000. But apparently Mr Sutherland confronted him at a petrol station sometime later and demanded the $10,000 from him. When Mr Lance refused to pay, he said, quote, if you don't pay it, I'll get a crossbow, I'll shoot you and your father, put you in the trunk and I'll never see you again.
00:23:58
Speaker
Now this led Lance to become a little bit concerned so he talked to his father about it and they laid a complaint with the police which then meant that Sutherland was up on criminal charges and all went to court where they hashed out their disagreement about the curvature of the earth in court.
00:24:20
Speaker
So apparently Sutherland's lawyer tried to argue that Mr. Lance was no longer a flat earther and indeed now agreed with Sutherland that the world is round because they posted an image of a spherical earth. But Lance's lawyer apparently claimed, no, no, no, the reason he put the picture of a spherical earth on in a post where he was saying, look how ridiculous the idea of a spherical earth is.
00:24:41
Speaker
talking about the idea of a ball of water being complete nonsense, which I don't think he understands what people think the world is. But no, that's okay. And then you get this weird thing where the judge takes lands to task.
00:24:58
Speaker
And Lance being the one who has been threatened with death, we should point out. Because it turns out, Lance also believes that Nasser is hoodwicking people about the earth being round, as was Albert Einstein, and that the New Zealand government was involved in the Christchurch mosque shooting. So the judge is going, look, your words have ramifications to the person who's been threatened with death by a round earther.
00:25:24
Speaker
It's all very confusing. But it all turned out nicely in the end. I didn't read anything about any money changing hands. I assumed the judge basically just sort of banged their heads together, said, stop being so silly now, shake hands and make up. And they pretty much went on their way. And no one got shot with a crossbow. So I guess you called it a win. At least not yet. Now, more local news.
Pharma Lobbying in New Zealand
00:25:45
Speaker
Here in New Zealand, we have an organisation called Farmak. Farmak is what I believe is known as a monopsony, which is the opposite of a monopoly. Rather than having one business supplying all the customers, you have a single customer that all the businesses have to go through. So we have a single buyer system when it comes to pharmaceutical goods. If you want to sell your drugs in this country, you must go through Farmak. You can't go through individuals only through one company.
00:26:10
Speaker
And that means it's a government run organisation that means they're able to negotiate for better deals for us and keep the price of pharmaceuticals down. That's why we have one of the most effective healthcare systems in the world when it comes to operating costs.
00:26:25
Speaker
The problem, of course, is that money is not unlimited and far has to make decisions about what drugs it will fund and what drugs it won't. And they have to, you know, you end up having to do a bit of that slightly distasteful moral calculus around, but, you know, they want to save as many lives as possible. But that means saying, well, this drug
00:26:43
Speaker
only has the potential to save a few people, so maybe we should not fund it and instead fund this drug that has the potential to save a lot of people, which doesn't work out very nicely for the people in the first group. And so you get these campaigns for people trying to say that Pharmax should be funding this particular drug that I'm interested in.
00:27:03
Speaker
And sometimes the campaigns are on the level and sometimes of course the astroturfing campaigns where a pharmaceutical body or set of companies will create what appears to be a groundswell of support for change.
00:27:20
Speaker
And then it gets revealed that actually the Groundswell support is entirely funded by overseas money and there's no grassroots campaign whatsoever. Now this all comes into the fact that NewsHub, which is one of our many news sites we have here, ran a whole bunch of articles
00:27:40
Speaker
which is sponsored content by an organization called Priorities NZ, which focused on patient stories, which called for funding of new medicines, treatments, or devices. What we weren't aware of at the time was that Priorities NZ is owned and managed by Medicines NZ, which is a pharmaceutical lobby group with connections overseas.
00:28:08
Speaker
And then this, it came out, I believe, in, actually, did NewsHub fest to it or not? They've pulled all the sponsored content, is the thing. I don't know if they actually made a noise about having done so or if they just did quietly, because it was an article from another news site, newsroom.co.nz,
00:28:30
Speaker
that first sort of brought to light in a sort of opiate talking about how this lack of transparency is a problem. Lack of transparency from FARMAC on one hand and lack of transparency from the people organizing these astroturfing campaigns. And at the end of it pointed out that NewsHub has dropped all of the sponsored content. I don't know.
00:28:48
Speaker
Was that the first people heard about it? I mean, I know that Russell Brown, who's a media commentator in this country, had been talking about it months ago. So it's kind of been known for a while about dodgy connections between priority NZ and medicine NZ.
00:29:07
Speaker
But yes, it does seem that NewsHub has quietly retracted things. And another news organization go, haha, you were running sponsored content being run by an AstroTurf campaign. Now, the reason why this is important is that we are now in a situation where the opposition and the government
00:29:26
Speaker
Both are talking about massively increasing funding for cancer care and medication in this country, which is money they'll be taking out of the health budget to achieve. And it does seem that this push for new specialized cancer care is largely in part to articles like this, which have been advocating for changes claiming to be New Zealand based patient stores.
00:29:55
Speaker
And I mean, there is always a human face to it. The stories themselves are genuine. There will always be, you know, this individual here has a rare form of cancer and it's not curable with pharmac-funded drugs. But this other drug, which is looking very promising, could potentially save their life. Only the government won't fund it. So please give us money to save this person's life. The story of the person is always true.
00:30:20
Speaker
It's not like they're making up cancer sufferers, but they do make a point of sort of putting them front and center and giving them all the press they need. And yeah, the human interest angle is a very good way of swaying public opinion, and therefore swaying government opinion.
00:30:38
Speaker
Now, we're almost out of time. We have one more story, and as you'd probably expect, it's about time travel. Of course it is.
Apex TV's Conspiracy Content Hoax
00:30:45
Speaker
Now, I don't know if we've actually talked about time travellers for a while. No, we haven't mentioned it in the past once or twice. So we've never actually covered this particular story, but it does have an interesting ending.
00:30:57
Speaker
So back in 2016, a time traveller called Noah made contact with our time through broadcasts on Apex TV, where he made some rather unusual claims. Time travel apparently became possible back in the year 2003, but it's only being used by top secret organisations operating at the highest level of government.
00:31:21
Speaker
News about time travel will not be officially released to the world until about 2028. One future president of the United States of America is Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King. Donald Trump is going to be re-elected.
00:31:40
Speaker
Bitcoin will still continue to destroy the world's ecology until 2030. Designer babies are going to be very popular, but also very expensive. The Internet of Things is going to make human interaction at home completely worthless. And also, apparently, when you travel in time, you gain time. But luckily, the pharmaceutical industry has stepped in and provided a pill to ameliorate its worst effects.
00:32:07
Speaker
Now, I'm sorry to break this to you, but it turns out that this man isn't actually a time traveller from the future.
00:32:15
Speaker
He is indeed a teenager, now 16 years old. Was 16 at the time of the first broadcast, he was now 18. Called Dennis, who's finally fessed up and said, yeah, hey, actually, apparently I haven't seen these videos. Apparently he did sort of hide his appearance. But now he's coming out and said, hey, yeah, look, it was me. I can't do this anymore. It's not fun. You know, it was a bit of fun. It's not really fun anymore. Now I keep worrying about getting found out or whatever. So, yep.
00:32:44
Speaker
I'm giving up my Noah persona, gonna go on and do something else. And the conspiracy angle here is the original broadcaster of these Noah segments, Apex TV, have slapped copyright infringement on his expose of what he's been doing.
00:33:03
Speaker
because they want to cover up the fact he's revealed that he's actually a hoax because Apex TV is showing videos by other time travelers and have a kind of inbuilt audience who want to believe that Donald Trump is going to be reelected so they don't want it to be revealed that their premiere time traveler Noah is in fact an 18 year old called Dennis who hasn't traveled a day of time in his life
00:33:33
Speaker
But he is. Which is made physically impossible because we're all travelling through time slowly. Noah just isn't real in the sense that Josh and I are travelling through time right now. At one minute per 60 seconds, other way around. You know what I mean. Time travel, it's complicated. I've seen Looper.
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah, the time travel in that film is a bit weird, but anyway, we won't get into that right now. No, I think it's time to wrap
Conclusion and Patreon Invitation
00:34:02
Speaker
up the news episode. That's all the news we had to talk about. We will shortly go and record a bonus patron episode, which won't contain any news. Four members or non-members of the port board.
00:34:13
Speaker
Instead, we'll talk about what wacky hijinks the good doctor did. There's been no two reasons. True. I've had two pieces published recently, and we're going to talk about that in the Patreon bonus episode. So if you want to hear about that stuff, why not subscribe and find out more? But until then, we'll let you go about your business. You're now informed of what's been going on in the conspiracy world. So you can rest easy. And you won't need to be informed for another month. Funny how that works out.
00:34:42
Speaker
Yeah. So until next week, good very bye. Toodly pep.
00:34:56
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster'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 podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:35:57
Speaker
And remember, silent green is meeples. Good theory by, does that make sense? No. No, it doesn't. Can't be helped.