Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Conspiranews for March 2020
24 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the conspiracy news for March. Most of it is COVID-19 or Russia-related...
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and COVID-19 Impact
00:00:09
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Well, interesting times, eh? Interesting times. Yep, you certainly understand why that Chinese proverb
00:00:31
Speaker
means may you live in interesting times, which is to say you don't really want to live in interesting times at all. It's a curse, it's not a blessing.
Supermarket Changes and Panic Buying
00:00:41
Speaker
Yes, so I am Josh Addison sitting here in Auckland, New Zealand. Now we also of course have Dr. Ian Denton
00:00:50
Speaker
uh sitting in Auckland New Zealand I am indeed but not anywhere near me because we're in lockdown baby yep the next 28 days the entire country is in a process of self-isolation as we've moved to alert level four which means that all non-essential businesses are closed and people are sequestered to their own homes
00:01:13
Speaker
and only meant to leave about once a day for a period of exercise and that's about it. Otherwise, we are living the indoor lifestyle 24-7, 28 days a month. Yes, outside for a little bit of exercise or for doing something essential like shopping at the supermarket and I understand our supermarkets. I haven't been yet, but I understand they've been transformed into quarantine zones with perspex screens up between you and the cashiers and limited people going in and all that sort of stuff.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yes, I was in a supermarket on Wednesday, which was the last day before quarantine started. And yes, the plastic screens are now up, so you cannot breathe directly on your checkout operator. And it was, to quote Sheldon Heston, a mad house. It's a mad house.
00:02:02
Speaker
Here, as in the rest of the world, I assume there's been a fair bit of sort of panic buying happening here in New Zealand, despite the fact that the Prime Minister and the owners of all the supermarkets and everyone have been saying, it's fine. We're not running out of food. All the main stuff is made here in New Zealand. It's not going to go away. The only reason why there are shortages is because all of you assholes are going out and buying more than you need right now, completely needlessly.
00:02:28
Speaker
this problem only exists because you've made it exist, but that was actually the case. What's interesting is that people have been panic buying toilet paper, a commodity that we do produce on mass in this country, so there is no shortage of toilet paper. We make a lot of toilet paper
00:02:49
Speaker
There's no shortage of toilet paper in the production chain. There is not going to be a shortage of toilet paper in the production chain. The only thing, which is a shorter job, is toilet paper on shelves because people have panicked and bought it, not thinking that other people might need to wipe their bottoms too.
00:03:09
Speaker
yes in fact you could say the only thing there is a shortage of is good old-fashioned common sense belly what what. Josh are you about to write a right-wing opinion piece with Harold now? I think I have to yes.
Lockdown Lifestyle and Online Education
00:03:22
Speaker
So you're getting pretty close to saying look if we just shoot the losers everything's going to be fine. I assume yes but yes so that's that's life in New Zealand under COVID-19 four weeks of
00:03:35
Speaker
self-isolation with you like it or not. So how's the self-isolation treating you then? Well I was in Hamilton and now I'm in Auckland. So that's an improvement already. Well I mean we'll see what it's like in 28 days after living with my mother for a month. Yes well there you go. I've already had slight issues today about things being thrown out from the fruits that did not need to be thrown out at all but you know
00:03:59
Speaker
early days I'm sure some kind of accommodation will come and there is a cat. Yep, no cats always help. How does it affect universities? Is university just shut completely or are you doing online classes? We're shut until Monday at which point teaching resumes and we transition to online learning environments. Luckily for my large stage one course that's already co-taught as an online paper
00:04:24
Speaker
So basically all the infrastructure is already in place to transition to online as I have to record lectures remotely rather than in front of students. For the graduate level course I'm teaching we're going to do a kind of moderated forum thing where we pose questions and get students to write reflections upon those questions whilst also looking at how they interact with one another.
00:04:46
Speaker
and I'll be doing some pre-recorded lecture stuff for that just to introduce topics and give them the weight of my great wisdom. But no, at this stage, we're off this week. We'll have two weeks of teaching and then we'll probably have a semester break, although it's not entirely clear whether we're moving the holidays around. So we basically have two weeks to go, what works?
00:05:12
Speaker
and doesn't work, and then two weeks of panicking going, none of this works, none of this works at all, we're all going to die as fiery morons. Whereas the schools are moving their holidays forward two weeks, so they're technically speaking school holidays start
00:05:31
Speaker
next Monday. And that's all there is to it. But that, again, since kids are home for four weeks, it's not going to make a massive difference. The boys have actually been, they've been, the teachers have been setting up Zoom meetings. So they've had sort of half hour classes with as many of their classmates can get online and they've spoken to their teachers and everything. So that's been quite nice.
00:05:51
Speaker
And so it's almost business as usual for me, really.
Public Behavior and Breaking News
00:05:56
Speaker
I mean, I'm lucky enough that I work for an IT company where people work from home all the time. So it just so happens that everyone's working from home now. But I'm pretty much just working as usual. I just need to take more breaks than usual to wrangle children from time to time. I hope you're getting some exercise in as well, because otherwise it's going to be a very boring time inside.
00:06:14
Speaker
Yes, I've done the occasional walk around the block, yes, when sitting on my ass gets to be a little bit too sedentary. Well, see, I took a walk this afternoon down to Milford Beach, where many, I had to assume, given the location and the age, affluent middle class people were holding parties on the beach or outside their houses, drinking wine, not paying any attention to the quarantine whatsoever.
00:06:42
Speaker
Hmm, oh well. Supposedly the police are out encouraging people politely to get the hell indoors, so we'll see. Maybe they can do a drive-by. These middle-class people on the north shore will not like it if the police tell them to mend their ways. Well, no, no, probably not. But the police probably should be doing exactly that to that particular class of person.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yes, my parents have moved to the east coast beach town of Omaha, where they have a place and they've found that quite a few other people have had the same idea. So you're saying that your parents have done the thing that you're not meant to do, which is move to a small rural community without much in the way of a health infrastructure system, and thus no real ICU beds, thus putting strain on the healthcare system that shouldn't be happening because people should be staying in their hometowns.
00:07:34
Speaker
Well, to be fair, they do live up there a lot of the time now that they're retired. But yes, I don't quite know where the nearest hospital facilities are, but hopefully that won't be a consideration. You and Josh's parents are evil. Well, who can say? No. So anyway, so basically that's it. We're fine. I think I'm fine. You're fine.
00:07:53
Speaker
Well, you know, but otherwise, yes, everything's fine. Well, just see how this progresses. See whether or not we degenerate into insanity over the next four weeks of forced internment. I'll stop you there. I don't have to degenerate into insanity. I've been insane for a long time. This is just going to be situation normal for people like me.
00:08:17
Speaker
Well, okay, then that's fine, I guess. So yes, everything's fine. In fact, everything's better than fine. Everything's great. I wouldn't go that far. But no, so I guess we can get into an actual episode then, which being the last week of March, it's time for a news episode. And you can probably guess what the leading news article is going to be. Or can you?
00:08:41
Speaker
We're about to say because we've got even more leading news. Let's start off with a sting. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:08:56
Speaker
Right, because yes, normally, up until this afternoon, I was assuming we'd be leading with a bunch of COVID-19 stuff, but that's been put slightly back because the news came out this afternoon that the Christchurch mosque shooter has pled guilty to all charges against him.
00:09:15
Speaker
And this is big news because this was completely unexpected. As far as we were aware, the terrorist in question was going to defend himself in court and try to explain why he had committed the murders, but how the murders were somehow a necessary corrective to what was going wrong in our society. And yet, apparently, as of a few days ago, told his counsel,
00:09:44
Speaker
that he was going to plead guilty which then led to the justice system going that we're shutting down because of the virus so we now need to organize an emergency session in front of a judge which they couldn't tell anyone about because even though the person in question had indicated I will plead
00:10:08
Speaker
guilty to the charges that only takes effect when that's in front of the judge and there was fear that he actually might take that back when in court so no one could be told including the family members of the victims but lo and behold around about 3 p.m. this afternoon he appeared in front of a judge and has pled guilty to all charges and at this stage we do not know why there has been a substantial change of heart
00:10:38
Speaker
and it'll be interesting to see whether we ever find out. Yeah, because I mean, I think we were all assuming that he was going to try and use a trial to sort of, you know, stand up and give his, you know, try and ear his manifesto, although I'd understand that the planes had always been to stop him from doing that as much as possible. And then here comes this reversal. Yeah, it definitely caught everyone by surprise, I think.
00:11:04
Speaker
I mean, I've heard some theories go around that maybe there has been a deal in the background. So this is a hypothetical situation. Maybe the accused was told if you plead guilty, there is a possibility in 20 to 30 years you might get paroled.
00:11:24
Speaker
But if you plead not guilty, you might end up in a situation where they give you a sentence where you will be in prison for the entirety of your natural life, no parole whatsoever. And you probably need to think about whether you ever want to leave this place. But that's a complete hypothetical. No one at this stage had any idea
00:11:45
Speaker
as to what went on the background it might even be the case no deals have been made maybe he simply decided i don't want to go through a trial and decided to say yep i'm guilty of all charges it'll be interesting to see as i said if we ever actually find out what really happened
00:12:03
Speaker
Yes, I mean a lot has been suppressed. I understand some of the family members of some of the victims weren't actually too happy about this because everything was suppressed right up until the point, so they were also taken by surprise. But yeah, I don't know. I'm sure certainly everybody wants to know more, but whether or not they will is perhaps a bit up in the air.
QAnon Conspiracies and Celebrity Rumors
00:12:27
Speaker
So shall we talk about that virus thing? Yeah, it's all the rage these days. All the kids are talking about it. Actually, all the kids are ignoring it, it sounds. And so all of the old, no, it seems like a lot of people are ignoring it and a lot of people are taking it very seriously. So I guess on average,
00:12:44
Speaker
we're getting something right but um let's start with the silly frivolous stuff to begin with because because QAnon QAnon has been loving this to some degree which is mostly because QAnon hasn't had much to do recently up to the demise of 8chan
00:13:01
Speaker
So there's been a fair bit of, oh, this is it. This is the start of the storm, the whole COVID-19 thing. It's all just a cover. Just get everybody indoors, make them all isolate in their homes, and then we can go out and arrest all the satanic, pedophile, child trafficking, swamp draining people, whatever they are.
00:13:21
Speaker
And for whatever reason, for why these things happen, the first person who sort of started seeing claims that they were being rounded up was Oprah Winfrey, strangely. Yes, this is a kind of weird little story claiming that Winfrey's home in Booker Iton in Florida
00:13:41
Speaker
had been cordoned off with caution tape because authorities were excavating the property and digging up the tunnels, which apparently was all related to some kind of pedophile network.
00:13:54
Speaker
Well, yes, I think everything seems to be these days with Q&A. I'm not quite sure. But we had somebody on Facebook was posting photos of our villa with caution tape around it saying, this is Oprah's house. Somebody on YouTube, a man calling himself Tank. I wonder if that's a Matrix reference. They do like their red pill things.
00:14:17
Speaker
claimed to give a live dispatch from some parking lot somewhere, saying that he had received word that Hollywood pedophiles are being arrested and Oprah Winfrey's house was supposedly some sort of child trafficking nexus, I don't know.
00:14:32
Speaker
Someone else posted a video of police officers raiding a house that didn't look anything like the house that was in the photos with the caution tape, but claiming that this was footage of a raid on Oprah Winfrey's home. Eventually, the noise got to the point that Oprah Winfrey herself actually heard that these weird rumors were going on about her and took to Twitter to say, no, actually, I'm not being arrested.
00:14:52
Speaker
Although of course it's proof positive that she has been and has been instructed by council to deny everything in the media because a prison ankle bracelet will explode a plot line from fortress. Or maybe even fortress too. Well let's not go that far.
00:15:09
Speaker
So there's been some other stuff. Apparently at one point the Surgeon General of the United States was giving a talk, giving a press conference, and as he walked off he said what might have been, donate blood, donate blood everybody we need it.
00:15:27
Speaker
Or, did he actually say, don't eat blood, don't eat blood, don't eat it? You've done this the wrong way around. You should have walked off the stage and said, don't eat blood, and then go, or maybe, maybe just possibly, what he actually said was donate blood. But no, you led with what he actually said. I did, I did. And then suggested what he might have said. We should have led with what he might have said, and then made the zing what he actually said.
00:15:56
Speaker
Possibly for comedic value I should have, but I just didn't want to humour the QAnonners in any sort of way in this case. You never want to humiliate the QAnonners, actually you want to humiliate them all the time. Never want to humour them and drag them into our nexus.
00:16:13
Speaker
No, so yes, apparently some people were saying this was this was look, there he is, he's giving his message to the blood drinking satanic pedophiles. But he almost said he wasn't. And then now this was a weird one. And I don't think this is this is this is a strand of QAnon that I had actually hadn't been aware of, because I
00:16:31
Speaker
make a point of being aware of QAnon as little as I can get away with. But it started for me, somebody, I don't follow actress and comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter, but people I follow do, obviously, because somebody retweeted one of her, she apparently is in hospital at the moment. And it wasn't clear
00:16:50
Speaker
if she had been hospitalized due to COVID-19 type symptoms, or she'd been there for other reasons, but because the ICU was sort of being overwhelmed with COVID-19 victims, she was in there with them. But at any rate, she had a tweet from the ICU ward of some hospital.
00:17:09
Speaker
And looking at her replies, a bunch of people were like putting up Wikipedia definitions of adrenochrome and talking about adrenochrome in a couple of places. And I'm like, what the hell are these people talking about? And I made the stupid mistake of actually trying to find out what they were talking about and came to realize, which I did not know, that one of the tenets of some QAnon people's is apparently that these elite blood-drinking, pedophile, child-trafficking Hollywood elites
00:17:37
Speaker
One of the things they love more than anything else is to take adrenochrome as a drug, which they extract from the adrenal glands of the children they traffic. And so apparently stories are going around in QAnon land that the celebrities who have been catching COVID-19 have done so because some white-hatted
00:18:01
Speaker
Patriot out there managed to taint a batch of their adrenochrome with COVID-19, and that's why celebrities are getting it. And that is presumably why QAnon is, I go, ooh, adrenochrome, adrenochrome, shouldn't have drunk that adrenochrome when a celebrity posts their COVID-19 positive online.
00:18:17
Speaker
So that explains why Prince Charles has COVID-19 in to rest. Adriana Chrome, yes. And Idris Elba, actually the other one I saw was people saying, claiming that celebrities are being paid to say they're COVID-19 positive, presumably just to drum up awareness of it or something. And Idris Elba sort of said, don't be so bloody stupid.
00:18:42
Speaker
Yes, that does seem like the kind of thing that if someone found out that you were faking it would end up being really, really bad. So I like to say, as soon as every time you say adrenochrome, I think Lisa needs braces, adrenochrome, Lisa needs braces, adrenochrome. So I think that's enough for QAnon for now. But we still have a bunch of COVID stuff, don't we?
00:19:08
Speaker
Well yes, so this is a story that we mentioned to patrons earlier on in the month and we're now mentioning to you our delightful non-patron listeners.
Controversial COVID-19 Responses
00:19:19
Speaker
Apparently Donald Trump might have tried to buy exclusive rights for a COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Germans in the UK. It's all a little bit
00:19:33
Speaker
A little bit shaky. Is this actually true? Is it something that somebody said and someone's taking out a context or so on?
00:19:44
Speaker
Yeah, but the story that went around, as Trump said to this German company, hey, can you make us a vaccine and and only sell it to us and no one else? And so we said, well, maybe he did approach them, but didn't actually say only for us. He just said, can you make it for us? But then tried to cover that up because America has been doing a bit of a show at the moment. I understand of, you know, we won't be beholden to any foreign nations. We won't supplicate. We won't be supplicant to a foreign nation or anything. I imagine if a wrong developer covered my team. Yeah.
00:20:15
Speaker
So, yeah, what was the company's name, Curevac? Some people have said, was this a funding stunt by Curevac themselves? Is that where the conspiracy was? Curevac himself have denied pretty much everything, but apparently they have had, over the last month or so, they had three CEOs in less than a week. Was this a sign of
00:20:37
Speaker
potential dodgy dealings causing people to get kicked out or was it just a bit of uncertainty which resulted in stories like this going around because nobody quite knew what the hell was going on? Or is it the case that the new CEO isn't aware what the previous two CEOs have done and those have honestly said there has been no approach because they literally have no idea what's been happening up until a week and a half ago?
00:20:59
Speaker
Now, as you point out, this isn't really a conspiracy, per se. It's a series of rumors going around about what might be happening. But this does tie in quite nicely to something which also isn't a conspiracy, but has been labeled as such, which is Trump buying the old snake oil from his son-in-law.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yes, so Jared Kushner, apparently, well, not apparently, we know full well, has the year of Donald Trump. And supposedly he's been telling Trump about these experimental COVID-19 cures that his Silicon Valley entrepreneur friends are into.
00:21:41
Speaker
which from what I hear, not quite as bad as the you should drink bleach to cure COVID-19, but I'm not a hell of a lot better either. But that could be the reason why Dr. Fauci, Fauci is it? I assume the C is a ch, I've only actually seen it written down.
00:22:01
Speaker
Anyway, he's the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He's Trump's literal right hand man when it comes to Covid-19. And yet we sort of had the spectacle over the last week of Trump will sort of say something and then Dr Fauci will immediately contradict him. And so it seems that he's sort of being pushed to the side a little bit.
00:22:25
Speaker
And Trump is more interested in listening to what young Jared says than what the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says. Yeah, so once again, this is not really a conspiracy theory, per se. People buying into junk science or pseudoscience or snake oil medical cures happens all the time, usually due to people not having any idea of how medicine works.
00:22:51
Speaker
or being very optimistic about experimental claims that haven't been adequately tested. But it has been labeled as Trump feels he can ignore Dr. Fauci after hearing Jared Kushner's conspiracy theories about coronavirus report. And that might be linking back to the fact that Kushner is one of those people who was kind of downplaying COVID-19 as a threat.
00:23:16
Speaker
which might link into a conspiracy theory, that maybe the media is over-egging that pot. Something which it turns out that a particular world leader, one Jeb Bolisaro, seems to be milking an awful lot. And now I'm going, I've just over-egged a pot, which someone is now milking. I've really mixed my metaphors up there.
00:23:41
Speaker
No, that's how I like them. Yes, so the president is he of Brazil, prime minister, whatever the president wants the country president of Brazil, basically their supreme leader, kind of thinks COVID-19 is a trick. So he indeed is going full conspiracy theorist. He thinks it's
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, just a concoction of the media and that when people are protesting his government for handling the crisis badly, he thinks that's just an attempt by them to bring down his administration and the whole thing's been made up because they're out to get him.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, and he might think that because certain world powers, when I say certain world powers, I mean, a certain world power appears to be spreading a lot of disinformation and misinformation about old COVID-19. Now, Joshua, without looking at the notes, can you guess which world power I might be talking about?
00:24:39
Speaker
Well, you say disinformation and we all know disinformation comes from a Russian word. So could it possibly be Russia? I see. I was really hoping to go. So disinformation comes from the Russian disinformation. So I am assuming the UK. But no, it's not the source. It is in fact Russia. I caught the planet straight today, straight across the line.
00:25:01
Speaker
until I feel like this quarantine thing has really made you a lot more serious, and I don't like it. See, according to the EU diplomatic service, it turns out that they have claimed that Russia is spreading a lot of disinformation about COVID-19, which as I put here in the notes, given they've said outright Russia is spreading disinformation, either the EU diplomatic service is not being very diplomatic,
00:25:27
Speaker
or it's a lot worse and that's the politest way they can introduce this issue. Yes, so yeah, I mean there's been a bunch of stuff. What do we have here? Russian sources drew a parallel between the 19th century Opium Wars and coronavirus implying that it's all a plot for the West to exert control over China. They've did COVID-19 at a little benefit. Pharmaceutical companies will obviously, I guess that's true, but then
00:25:55
Speaker
trying to make that sound sinister, and a raft of the sorts of biological weapon claims that have been going around, blaming the West, I think, more so than China, in this particular instance of disinformation. Yeah, so basically claiming that the part of the world which is panicking the most about COVID-19, which is Europe and the US, are probably the people who engineered the bioweapon in the first place.
00:26:22
Speaker
or at least that's what some sources of Russia today have told me. And I'm now saying I don't think this is true, but it is worth thinking about, which ties into our discussion about Russian disinformation ops about this from a month ago. So basically, this just keeps on rumbling along and Russia is going to do what Russia does best.
00:26:42
Speaker
And of course in Russia, we didn't have it here but another thing, or rather not something coming out of Russia but something not coming out of Russia has been sort of much talk of COVID-19 infection, if you believe the word from Russia, like they've had one death there or something, which people are being very suspicious of, but I did see
00:27:03
Speaker
I saw a thing today of someone saying how it's all obviously a Chinese plot because, you know, isn't it weird that it's sort of under control in these, well, first of all, it's weird that it was in Wuhan but it didn't get to Shanghai or Beijing, which I'm pretty sure was a total lie. And then, you know, it's all over Europe, but how come there have been no deaths reported in North Korea or Russia? To which the answer I thought was because North Korea and Russia are lying about how many cases they have, but I don't know.
00:27:34
Speaker
You sound very suspicious, Joshua. Have you thought about seeing a conspiracy theorist? I don't know, maybe I should. But actually, I think, I think
00:27:43
Speaker
That's all we have to say about COVID-19, but it's not all we have to say about Russia. No, so this has been a running gag almost over the last sort of month's worth of patron bonus updates.
Russian Interference and Misinformation
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah, so earlier in the month we reported on the fact that there's that report about Russian interference in the UK that was meant to be released before the general election in the UK at the end of last year.
00:28:08
Speaker
and was all signed off and ready to go, but the Johnson government wouldn't let it be released, which led people to go, why are we having a general election when there might be an unsettled issue about Russian interference in our electoral system? And this then has led to a push, particularly by Labour MPs, but also some dissatisfied Tory MPs, to finally get this report out, because it's been clear this hasn't been released.
00:28:36
Speaker
And so there's been a whole bunch of leaks about this, including
00:28:40
Speaker
testimony by campaigner and financier Bill Browder, who claimed that Moscow's basically been infiltrating UK high society using paid intermediaries for quite some time to ensure that Putin's critics are attacked, ensure that Russian propaganda is spread at all levels, and to help facilitate and conceal large numbers of money laundering operations.
00:29:07
Speaker
Now, of course, this was then followed up the next week on the Patreon bonus episode by the Tory government actually finally admitting that Russia does interfere in the UK and its electoral system, despite the fact they haven't released the report. Josh, why did the UK admit that Russia's been interfering in their system?
00:29:32
Speaker
Um, they kind of had to from the sounds of things, because although this report hasn't been, and still hasn't been released, as far as I'm aware, people used to keep hearing leaks from people who have looked at the report, and especially Labor.
00:29:48
Speaker
Labour MPs who've also seen this have been leaking information. So Labour revealed that Russia hacked the NHS to leak how the UK government might sell the NHS out to get a trade deal with the US. And so having said that, the Tory government has switched from, I think, denying things completely to saying, oh, yeah, it's happened, but still won't release it officially.
00:30:12
Speaker
So is it going to be a case, we wondered, of this keeps up for a little while, and then either they say, oh, well, there's no point releasing the report because everybody knows about it now, or to release the report and say, oh, what's the big deal? It's stuff everybody already knew about. Yes, it does seem they want to basically make this issue go away by making death by a thousand cuts.
00:30:35
Speaker
So I think COVID-19 and Russia were the biggest standouts of the last few weeks of conspiracy news, but we've had a few other interesting little bits and pieces.
00:30:50
Speaker
Actually, we're still at Western Russia, I suppose. Vladimir Putin, when he's not spreading disinformation or talking about COVID-19, he was asked recently about whether or not he ever uses body doubles to take his place in risky situations or so on, which is sort of, there have been real stories and conspiracy theory type rumors around all sorts of world leaders and public figures. I mean, Saddam Hussein was notorious for using bodyguards, but then we've talked about numerous stories about
00:31:19
Speaker
Melania Trump apparently using doubles various other celebrities using them and somebody will say the same about Putin and he's basically addressed these claims head-on what did he say?
00:31:31
Speaker
I have never used using my face on all sorts of makeup impression, which isn't a very good one. I have never actually found this French French. It's my Jean-Claude Van Damme impression. I have not actually been doing a cute flower. I was going to say, I have never used a body double, Monsieur, the little gray cells. They are good enough without the body double.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yes, so he did admit that it was something that had been brought up. People had suggested and talked about it. And I had to continue my Vladimir Putin impression. He said that during the Georgian crisis, he had thought very carefully about possibly using a body double, because it would be much safer for him to do that in that particular time and way. But his little gray cells, they said,
00:32:20
Speaker
you do not need a body double to solve the murder of the mystery grange you will simply get your friend captain histings to go down to the shop and buy
00:32:30
Speaker
a headache and everything will be fine. I believe Vladimir Putin then gestured at the audience with a baguette and said, and then rode away on a bicycle trailing onions behind him. Anyway, so that was one little thing. Now we managed to get back to QAnon again with the latest developments in celebrity pedophile news.
00:32:54
Speaker
Oh god, we had to do celebrity pedophile news again. I'm afraid we do. Okay, so the fatuous one, before we do the serious one, a weird one I noticed, now a person I do follow on Twitter is the actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, and a few weeks ago I noticed he'd put out a tweet about something, whatever,
00:33:17
Speaker
And then people, QAnon types were filling up his mentions with claims that with sort of TikTok, TikTok pattern and photos of handcuffs and also photos of a Q drop from
00:33:35
Speaker
uh almost no more than a year ago um where Q uh put tweets of Patino put screenshots of Patino's tweets um implying that he was he was next for the whole celebrity pedophile thing and of course the tweets that they chose to um
00:33:54
Speaker
chose to publish tweets of this professional comedian were of course ones with him making weird, weird statements in an obviously joking way which they are choosing to not take as a joke. So he had one, there was one thing, one thing just sort of a random one he did, he was talking about people with weird feet for some reason and people pushed back and so then he
00:34:16
Speaker
He put on Twitter, the angry ant tweets from my haematode followers opened my eyes. Piddo-phobe shaming hurts us all. I'm a proud Piddo-phile. Which obviously is a play on words and a joke, but for some reason. And also, now I think about it, a joke that doesn't really work in a Kiwi accent. Because basically, both those words, the one you didn't say and the one you did say, sound exactly the same. Yes, yes.
00:34:44
Speaker
He had a few other ones, and Oswald has in the past done a series of tweets that look bad taken out of context, but if you see the joke or read the hashtag, then they do make sense. So it seemed weird that A, they were piling on him as saying you're next, and B, that they were doing so on the evidence that Q had first brought up over a year ago, but then I guess the whole
00:35:11
Speaker
stuff's going to happen any minute now and then saying that for three years um is actually is actually kind of the emo yeah unfortunately shall we talk a little bit about a art bipolarly situationy thing just before we do let's get this out of the way um trying to avoid more pedophile news well
00:35:34
Speaker
I figured we have to mention it, the Corey Feldman issue. Corey Feldman said a week or so ago, he was releasing this documentary where he would finally be naming names about people who have used both him and Corey Haim when they were young, said that one of those names was going to be a household name who you'd all heard of.
00:35:51
Speaker
put on a slightly weird event where the video didn't work and they suggested though being hacked but more likely it was just technical issues and eventually it came out that the big name who he was accusing of sexually assaulting Corey Hain was Charlie Sheen which actually isn't a new claim that had been made but there you go. So that is of more substance than random QAnon people but depressing all the same. Yeah.
00:36:19
Speaker
Anyway, this is more of an update to a patron bonus episode that people now have a chance to listen to because of course, as we know that a lot of people, including ourselves, are now self-isolating and thus people need forms of entertainment to keep them occupied.
Historical Artifacts Scandal
00:36:39
Speaker
Like many podcasts, we've gone back through our archives
00:36:42
Speaker
and taken the patron bonus episodes that normally go with the news episodes, where we do novel content for our patrons, and made those free for people to listen to. And last week, last week, last month, we had a very interesting discussion about one Dr. Dirk Obnik,
00:37:03
Speaker
who may well have been a very very naughty man when it came to selling near mint couple couples, near mint copies of the gospels to dodgy Americans. Yes, so Dr Dirk Obink is a paparologist. He's saying that three times fast. Paparologist, paparologist, paparologist. Fine, you don't have speech disfluency. That's true. You can say that three times. Throwing it in your face there.
00:37:31
Speaker
No, so he it's his job. He worked for Oxford, wasn't it? Oxford University and his job was basically to decipher tiny scraps of papyrus and particularly was one one trove unearthed some years ago. People found an old
00:37:47
Speaker
basically a dump essentially which an ancient Egyptian dump that had millions I think of scraps of papyrus in it and so he uh conducts the painstaking job of taking these fragments uh trying to read what's on them trying to decipher you know understand what's on it once it's been read trying to see if they can match them together and so on and so forth
00:38:10
Speaker
And there was a bit of a scandal when it appeared that someone, and he appeared to be the only person who's had the know-how and the knowledge to do so, had been selling some of these scraps of biblical-era papyrus to people around the world, including the owners of Hobby Lobby, the American chain store organization who'd gotten trouble in the past for dealing in dodgy
00:38:36
Speaker
ancient antiques out of Iraq. No, Josh, you forget. When they did get in trouble for dealing in dodgy antiques from Iraq, they got in trouble because they were also inadvertently funding terrorism. Yes, yes. The people who they were paying for these illicitly obtained antiques essentially were giving the money to ISIS. So Hobby Lobby was pretty much funding ISIS.
00:38:57
Speaker
Now Hobby Lobby were buying all these bits of papyrus for the sheer fact that they've opened up a museum of the Bible and that's where our new story comes in because it turns out that among the things they bought to put on display were not just a lunar Bible, a Bible which has been to the moon and back, but 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and it turns out they're all fake.
00:39:27
Speaker
the 16 Fragments and Dead Sea Scrolls and also the Lunar Bible. So yeah, actually if you haven't listened to our recently declassified Patreon episode about this, I think it was quite a good one. It was one of the more interesting little stories we've come across and the story and the bit of sort of high stakes
00:39:51
Speaker
detective, international mystery detective work of finding out what had happened to these things, and the murky world of papyrus wandering, I suppose, that involves ancient mummy masks. And cartilage, no, you know, cartonnage. Cartonnage. Or cartonnage, if you're fancy. Not cartilage, although I imagine there probably was some cartilage being broken by those Indiana Jones-style fisticuffs. I managed to save it.
00:40:18
Speaker
You did. So, yeah, interesting little follow up. So I don't believe any of the, I think the problem with these particular papyrus fragments that had gone missing, about 120 of them, was not that they were fake, they were very much genuine, but were not supposed to have been removed from the collection they were in.
00:40:36
Speaker
Well these 16 fragments that did see scrolls were modern-day forgeries made apparently from bits of Roman sandals, literal Roman sandals from Rome, not the Roman sandals you might buy to take to school, and had all been written in the same hand. And what's interesting is that even though they were all faked by the same person,
00:41:01
Speaker
they were all sourced from different dealers. So it actually seems that there's actually a quite elaborate conspiracy in the background to generate this product and then sell around unscrupulous people like the owners of the Museum of the Bible using different dealers to try and hide their prominence.
00:41:23
Speaker
And there you go. And that, I believe, is all the news we had to talk about this
Engagement and Bonus Content
00:41:28
Speaker
month. But our patrons can stick around for a bonus episode. We'll be returning once again to the world of art and art academia.
00:41:38
Speaker
Now, we did release the previous patron bonus episodes to everyone last week. To make sure our patrons have at least some degree of exclusivity, we won't unlock this week's patron bonus episode for about a week or so.
00:41:56
Speaker
This is probably a good time to talk about, Josh, why haven't you joined our Discord channel? Oh, because it's a bloody... Do you know how many times I've been on a website or something and they're like, they talk about this more, join our Discord channel. I don't want to join your bloody Discord channel. I have enough apps and social medias and crap like that in my life and I don't, to be perfectly honest, really know what Discord is and I don't care to.
00:42:21
Speaker
Josh, we have a Discord channel now for the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. Discord is a... well, it was developed for gamers, which means I have this horrible feeling it's a gamergate conspiracy of some particular kind. But it's like IRC, Josh. Do you remember IRC? I remember Relay Chat. I remember hating IRC and never using it, yes.
00:42:44
Speaker
Well then you can hate and hate and use Discord channel. So Discord is basically an online discussion group which also has some voice technology so you actually can host chat. So I am thinking that maybe we might even live stream an episode as it's being recorded on Discord. But Josh that requires that you join Discord
00:43:06
Speaker
Whilst if other people want to know how to get access to our Discord channel, if you become a patron of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy via Patreon, you are automatically enrolled in our Discord channel and can engage in the exciting chat we are planning to have online. We'll be talking about upcoming episodes, taking episode requests from our patrons, and maybe, just maybe,
00:43:33
Speaker
answering questions live on the podcast as they're posed to us by our Discord users. Right. You did actually put the link to it on Twitter last week, didn't you? Not for the Discord, no. That went out via a special email. I was then an email that I saw it. Okay, well that's all right then. Then it is properly exclusive. So yes, I suppose I have no excuse to not get on the Discord.
00:44:02
Speaker
And maybe you should too. And if you want to, you'll have to be a patron. If you want to be a patron, you can go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or you can go to conspiracism.podbean.com and use Podbean's native patronage system.
00:44:18
Speaker
And and that's all we have to say to you. So our patrons, we are shortly to receive an episode about the Salvatore Mundi, the lost and then re-found work of Leonardo da Vinci. Well, there's a bit of that. There's a bit of everything, actually. So I think we'll go off and record that to all of you who are sensibly and safely isolating yourselves from
00:44:45
Speaker
in the bid to slow the spread of COVID-19. Good for you, hope it all goes well but as I say for the time being we're fine so don't worry about us and we will all talk to you next week. We will indeed at the beginning of what essentially week two of New Zealand's Great Experimentation in Saif Isolation. Goodbye.
00:45:11
Speaker
The End
00:45:17
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:46:18
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.