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2019 in Review
20 Plays5 years ago
It's the end of the year, and the final episode of The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy of 2019; Josh and M will be back in mid January. So sit back (or stand/lie down/suspend yourself from the rafters/drift through the endless void) and relax (unless using heavy machinery) and let your podcast hosts talk about their favourite* episodes of the year.
*. "Favourite" here is an ambiguous term.
—
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 Year-in-Review Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the end of the year and you know what that means! Listicles! Lots and lots of listicles. We highly did any listicles this year and boy how did we have a backlog. Here's one. Ten things you didn't know about JFK's tie. Or this one. The 32 signs your government is controlled by eels. No Josh. The time for listicles is past. Or has been shunted into the future? No. It's time for the yearly year in review.
00:00:28
Speaker
Really? Again? It's supremely lazy content. But it's so soothing. In fact, the promise of a soothing year in review episode has lured out one of the many conspirators we have been trying to uncover. Yes, Gillies P. Cam. If that is your real name.
00:00:48
Speaker
Your migraine might have passed, but in falling asleep to one of our podcasts, you made the tragic mistake of leaving your mentions open. We were finally able to reveal your part in the conspiracy. Yes, we now know that it is you who buys the pants. For what reason we still aren't entirely sure, but we know.
00:01:08
Speaker
We know. Of course, now that we know about you and your pants-based role in the conspiracy, Gillies Pecan. And we still harbour doubts that is your name. You are now inextricably linked to us for all time. Or at least until the mystery of what really happened to M8370 has solved. Which comes with costs and with benefits.
00:01:32
Speaker
One benefit, apparently a best of 2019 episode, an episode which cannot consider itself as the best of 2019, which might be awkward if it turns out to be our best output this year. These are the contradictions we have to confront. Yes, so why not join Josh and myself as we take a look back on 2019 and ask, did we enjoy it? The answer will surprise you. But first, to celebrate the end of the year, it's time for a special party-based theme
Podcast Introduction and Patron Acknowledgments
00:01:58
Speaker
tune. Hit those decks, Joshier Addison.
00:02:07
Speaker
Hey! It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy!
00:02:36
Speaker
Hello, Merry Christmas and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. It's our last episode for the year. It is our last episode for this year. Yes, but not for last year, for instance. That was one about 50 odd episodes ago. Certainly not the last episode for next year.
00:02:55
Speaker
No. No, I mean, it'd be weird to have the final episode of next year, this year. Although, I mean, like TV shows, you kind of film your finale at some point in the middle of your season, the year before it actually plays. It gets very confusing. It's a bit timey-wimey. No, none of that here. So, we, we, of course, being I, Josh Addison, they, Dr. M. Dentiff,
00:03:17
Speaker
uh we the podcast we the podcast is going to conspiracy um have a couple we have two new patrons now one we will not mention in part because i haven't pledged the level that we do mention them also in part because their name appears to be unpronounceable
00:03:34
Speaker
which might be part of their cunning ploy and of course someone who we're calling Gillies P. Cam although their actual username is actually just one word so we're kind of making breaks to make a joke of a name out of there who has joined our wonderful pantheon of patrons and now gets to get the bonus content that patrons get access to every week
00:03:57
Speaker
And there will be bonus content for this week. Oh, there will be. We'll be talking about Super Centenarian Centenarians?
Reflecting on Christchurch Mosque Shootings
00:04:04
Speaker
Centenarians, I think. That sounds like a Marvel villain that the X-Men used to fight. The Super Centenarian, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's not. It's just a very old person.
00:04:15
Speaker
Which is the biggest threat to the Marvel Universe yet. Possibly. But anyway, that's for later. Now is now. And now, we're going to have a look back at 2019. I guess we should play some sort of a sting. Should we do that now? Yeah, I think we'll put the sting right about here.
00:04:39
Speaker
Yep, that's some good sting placement I think. So in previous years we've sort of rattled off everything we did in the year and it doesn't really give you time to have much of a look at anything. So we thought this time we'd each pick our three favourite episodes and just have a bit of a talk about them. Although favourite is possibly not the most accurate word to use if we were to start with your first pick.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yes, so my favourite episode of the last year has to be episode 211, which wears, which wears, which wears. I have no idea what's going on with my mouth today. And you'd either more or less alcohol. Yes.
00:05:17
Speaker
Broadcast March 21st it is of course the Christchurch mosque shooting episode. Yes, I mean certainly the biggest thing to have happened in New Zealand for a very very long time and the sort of thing that immediately started inspiring conspiracy theories so we kind of couldn't not
00:05:34
Speaker
devote an entire episode to it. That's what we do. No, so for those of you who aren't aware of local history or indeed major political events that occurred in our region of the world back in March of this year, there was a series of mass shootings in Christchurch at two Islamic centers leading to the death of at least 50 people.
00:05:56
Speaker
and all inspired by a terrorist alt-right white supremacist manifesto that the shooter had authored themselves, which is then led to a whole tranche of say gun regulation, gun control movement in the country and a forthcoming trial about a terrorist which will be occurring next year.
00:06:21
Speaker
So the media here decided not to name this particular tourist, which we never saw not done either. I think it sort of kind of kicked off by the Prime Minister. She made a point of saying, I'll never mention his name. Now, overseas news agencies have no such compunction. So if you look at any overseas news source, you can find the guy's name out fairly quickly, but that's neither here nor there. So yeah, there's been, what has there been so far? There've been sort of hearing sort of pre-trial
00:06:50
Speaker
Yes, so he got the usual arraignment where the suspect gets to plead guilty or not guilty. He has plead not guilty. He wants to give a spirited defence as to why shooting more than 50 people, killing 50 people was something that was not a crime in this country, which is going to be a fairly interesting argument.
00:07:15
Speaker
There were issues with finding him representation with actual legal firms in the country. He's been through several sets of lawyers by this particular point in time. So yes, it's going to be a very interesting trial. It's going to be able to see how the media covers it both locally and also internationally.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yes, because it's certainly just from what we've seen so far looks like the guy is going to want to use his trial as a platform to start rattling off all his bullshit white supremacy beliefs. And the media has sort of, what was it? Was it a compact or an agreement or something? The media had sort of imposed upon themselves a bunch of conditions to not spread this guy's views as much as possible. So they have said in the past that they will refrain when reporting on the trial.
00:08:03
Speaker
they won't be repeating any of the white supremacy stuff he says.
Discussion on Targeted Individuals
00:08:08
Speaker
Although that gets quite difficult, given the coded nature of the kind of rhetoric he and his ilk engage in, that you need to be fairly confident in being able to decode white supremacist symbols and language to then make sure you're not reporting them in the media. Yeah, I mean, this little example, of course, of the OK gesture,
00:08:32
Speaker
Which is so many layers of sort of irony and trolling. And is it a white supremacist thing or isn't it? It wasn't a now it is, yes. But he was flashing it in his arraignment.
00:08:48
Speaker
An obvious white supremacist and murderer of 50 people thinks it's a fun sign to flash, so that should tell you something. And as someone who has the legal permission to have a copy of the terrorist manifesto, and thus one of the people who can admit to having read it and can talk about it, and I'm not going to talk about it in any depth like I did at the time, it is filled with hyperbolic language that on the face of it can't be taken seriously.
00:09:17
Speaker
which is, of course, precisely what these people do. But if you know how the language works, it's all coded references that other like-minded individuals are going to understand. Now, you mentioned the gun law changes, so they've come into effect, but now... Well, the first trial... So it turned out after the shootings down in Christchurch that we actually have incredibly lax gun laws in this country.
00:09:42
Speaker
to the point where most people were horrified locally when they discovered just how lax our gun laws are. So we had a first tranche of gun laws which restricted particular semi-automatic weapons from being available to ordinary citizens with some exemptions for farmers or farming users. You can sort of apply for a license to get rid of it. Yeah, and there are also bush rangers and the like have access to these weapons when it comes to removing
00:10:11
Speaker
pest and other related mammals in our native bush, but there's a whole bunch of restrictions placed upon particular armaments, and that was the first tranche.
Exploration of Uluf Palme's Murder and Conspiracies
00:10:23
Speaker
The second tranche of gun laws is to bring about an actual gun registry, because it turns out we don't know how many guns there are in this country, let alone who owns them, and that's now become a bit of a political football.
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. The talking points you hear seem to have been copied and pasted from the NRA, and it's hard to get a feeling for exactly how big the opposition to these laws are. There's one guy in particular who's a seller of guns, who seems to have become the figurehead for the sort of gun rights movement here. A seller of guns with convictions for gun smuggling in the US. So I don't like, there doesn't seem to be a massive sort of groundswell of
00:11:06
Speaker
opposition to these gun laws, just a bit of a vocal minority. But it does turn out that two of our political parties, ACT and National, are listening to that particular rhetoric and going, well, if we come back into government, we might rescind some of this stuff. So you might want to think twice about handing in your guns because we might change those rules.
00:11:30
Speaker
As has sort of developed throughout the year, we've had a bit of an issue with white supremacist rhetoric at the University of Auckland as well. Yes, it's also been a quite confounding thing. So it turns out there have been white supremacists operating on the University of Auckland campus for quite some time, but they seem to be emboldened after the attacks down in Christchurch in March of this year.
00:11:55
Speaker
And it turns out that the administration, not the academic staff at the University of Auckland, has been rather loath to do anything about it, to the point where they don't even want to tear down white supremacist symbols that have been posted all around the campus. Yeah, they seem to be sort of running a freedom of speech, sort of not wanting to take a stand on any, not wanting to adopt anything that could be
00:12:22
Speaker
accused of taking a side or any sort of a real stance on it but that just kind of makes them look dumb. And also it actually does contravene the constitution of the university which is designed to make sure that all students feel safe on campus all the time and it turns out that when you have one of the most cosmopolitan universities in the world white supremacism makes a significant part of the population feel very very uncomfortable.
00:12:52
Speaker
So, shall I do my first one? I think so, because yours is much less depressing than mine. Well, it's less depressing. Less depressing. It's not entirely. Not depressing. Yeah, precisely. No, my first pick for a favourite episode is episode 205, that went out early this year, February the 8th, which was our second look at gang stalking, and we started looking into targeted individuals. Oh, TIs. TIs, yes, these are... Magnum TI.
00:13:20
Speaker
People who believe that kind of works as a concept because the whole point of Magnum PI is he comes back from, is it Korea or Vietnam that he was a Marine in? Not sure. Never watched a lot of Magnum PI. So you can imagine a situation where he's got PTSD after his time in the war and he thinks he's a targeted individual. Magnum TI, CBS if you're listening, come to us. We've got all the really bad ideas.
00:13:49
Speaker
But until then, we can talk about that episode a bit more. So targeted individuals, of course, are people who believe they are being targeted by some mysterious them, the government or some authority or other, for sort of targeted harassment that takes many forms. They believe it can be people harassing them on the streets. It can be electronic interference. It can be messages being beamed into their heads.
00:14:16
Speaker
and a whole lot of things that basically sound like symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Yes, which led us to a very interesting discussion. Are these the conspiracists that so many people use the pejorative form of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorists? Are these the conspiracists they're actually worried about? People whose beliefs appear to be entirely subject to paranoia
00:14:44
Speaker
and not any kind of evidence-based rationality. And I mean they do refer to things like good old MKUltra, which was a real thing that really happened and didn't involve experimentation on people without their consent or knowledge. But when you actually talk to the people, and indeed one of the things that we used as reference for this episode was a video that Vice put out a couple of years ago,
00:15:05
Speaker
where they followed a couple of these targeted individuals and yeah, I mean a lot of their stuff kind of didn't stack up. One guy who reckoned, you know, talked about how magnets would stick to him because of whatever electrical implants and stuff had been put into him and when it came down to it, it was this dude putting tiny little sort of magnets like you get off the back of a fridge magnet onto his skin where they stuck because they're tiny and he was a little bit sweaty really. Yes.
00:15:30
Speaker
if there wasn't much of a mystery to that one at all. And, you know, Britt brought out some sort of a vault meter and was sort of holding it onto the back of his neck and saying, look, see, you know, the needle twitches when you put it on my skin, and then the documentarian said, oh, can you put it on my skin? And the exact same thing happened to him, which of course ... It turns out the brain is really quite filled with electrical current. But I just found this episode really interesting just because of some of the, I don't know, the contradictions involved. These are people
00:15:58
Speaker
who appear to be suffering from some sort of paranoid delusions, and yet the nature of their delusions fight against it. They had one of the guys who quite casually talked about how he had these voices telling him to kill his family.
00:16:15
Speaker
Even when he's talking to the documentarian, he's like, oh, there they are now. They're telling me to tell you to bugger off and not talk to you. But because these people believe that this is the voice of the enemy, that these are people who are trying to trick them and, you know, the enemies who are subjecting to the stuff that motivates them to not do the horrible things they're being told to do and to actually resist it.
00:16:36
Speaker
And then furthermore, they sort of, especially in the internet age, they sort of group together and have these sort of support networks, which psychologists will say is kind of not a good thing because they all get together and reinforce their own delusions. And yet, they're also reinforcing their desire to fight against the delusions. They sort of, you know, at the same time as their
00:16:57
Speaker
receiving these paranoid messages, they're also resisting them by kind of the exact same delusion. Yeah, so I suppose the worry there is given... Now, we're assuming that targeted individuals are not being predated upon by state apparatus.
00:17:13
Speaker
So if they are suffering from a delusion, there are other factors which are going to potentially exacerbate delusional states, which means that those groups can very easily fall apart. And so the reinforcing mechanism that allows them to survive can then collapse into something which is an even worse state.
00:17:33
Speaker
And then you've got the person who has the voice in their head saying, kill my family, who no longer has any kind of support structure that tells him that killing his family would be a bad idea. I looked I tried to find a bit of an update.
00:17:48
Speaker
to this story, Justin, and coming up with the notes for this episode. I couldn't really find any follow-ups on Vice, which was unfortunate because I would. The episode, it ended, two of the guys talked about how they'd got in touch with some clinic in Spain, I think it was, that was willing to give them a full-body MRI or something so they could finally hunt down whatever implants had been put in them.
00:18:10
Speaker
And they were supposedly going off to do that, and then at the end of the documentary it sort of said, no, they never made it to Spain. So they don't really sort of find out what happened there. And then they also, one person they spoke to a lot was a woman whose circumstances were always just a little bit strange.
00:18:25
Speaker
It seemed to be like she lived in people's flats and shipping containers and so on, because she thought wherever she stayed, you know, she'd get these headaches or whatever, which were a result of her electromagnetic beams or something being shot at her by her harrasses. And no matter where she moved to after a little while, they'd start up again and she'd move again and so on. But she also was jetted off overseas for retreats in other places, quite happily appeared to be sort of independently wealthy.
00:18:54
Speaker
But they never really got into her circumstances. No, no, that was a bit weird. She was also the one who managed to get a doctor to cut open her hand, essentially looking for an implant, which when nothing turned up, just would just prove that it was. So that proves it was nanotechnology. The fact that we couldn't see any implants. So small it can't be found. When he cut open the part of my hand where I was sure there was an implant.
00:19:19
Speaker
Which just goes to show that in certain situations doctors will do anything for a good payment of cash. I'm not saying all doctors, there are going to be some doctors out there that I mean we knew back in our university days when people wanted to say
00:19:39
Speaker
Ritalin or speed, there were certain doctors out there who would prescribe it to you for dietary reasons. And it was quite known that that was a boondoggle. An actual boondoggle. Yes. Nice word. Yes, I just picked that one because I found it a fascinating topic, basically. Yeah, yeah. So what's your and which I'm assuming is your motivation for your second pick?
00:20:02
Speaker
Yes, the murder of Uluf Palmer, the Swedish Prime Minister, who in February of 1986 was murdered on a walk home with his wife from the cinema. Yes, so an actual head of state being shot dead in the street, it was kind of the Swedish JFK
00:20:21
Speaker
And it's an unsolved murder to this day. And because of the status of the victim and the fact that the crime has never been solved, it's all an active investigation in Sweden. It actually might be the most expensive investigative crime in human history, given the number of Swedish krona that's been poured into the investigation. And when you think about it, when your prime minister is shot on the streets of Stockholm,
00:20:49
Speaker
and no one knows who did it, you kind of want that solved because it's a pretty major issue. But due to the fact that it hasn't been solved and the variety of different theories and suspects, there are a number of conspiracy theories about not just the death of Parma.
Humorous Dive into Various Conspiracy Theories
00:21:06
Speaker
but also why it was never solved in the first place. Yes, so there are conspiracy theories around either the police cocking up the investigation and then covering their own arses to save face, or deliberately cocking up the investigation. And thus covering up the fact that they didn't want to solve it in the first place.
00:21:28
Speaker
But I mean, there does seem to have been a bit of a bit of incompetence, really. There was the first officer detective, I assume, who was put in charge of the case, was obsessed with the Kurdistan Workers Party and was sure they were behind it for reasons that pretty much just appeared to boil down to racism. Yeah, basically, they were foreigners. He was a xenophobe. They were the convenient suspects.
00:21:54
Speaker
And so I put a lot of time and effort into investigating that angle and refusing to investigate anything else. So by the time someone finally basically rested off him. Yeah, the case was rested off him and he was retired. It was a year or two cold by that point.
00:22:10
Speaker
As I recall, the reason why we were talking about it back in May of this year was because there had been an article in someone, there was a little development where this old walkie talkie had shown up. Yes. So it was a case of it turned out that someone, the day after the crime was committed, was in the area and found a walkie talkie.
00:22:36
Speaker
which was never revealed to the police. And then when they found out about it, they're going, it's actually a fairly rare technology for the time.
00:22:45
Speaker
And it's a rare item for Swedes to have at that particular point in time. Maybe it's connected with the criminal activity. Now, as far as I'm aware, no one knows anything more other than it was found proximate to the crime. They think it may have been used by either the assailant or people working with the assailant. The theory is the walkie talkies were used to plan the crime in situ.
00:23:12
Speaker
But at this stage, they know no more than we knew back at the beginning of the year. But the presence of a walkie talkie itself would have been significant because that would suggest multiple conspirators here, whereas some of the possibilities have been that it was just some guy. In fact, was it the Christa Peterson fellow? Yes. Was he convicted for the murder in 1989, but then eventually pardoned because of a
00:23:38
Speaker
lack of motive, the lack of a murder weapon and the fact that the identification of him by the witness, Lisbeth Palmer, Olof Palmer's wife, was taken to be unreliable due to the police cocking up the lineup.
00:23:56
Speaker
Now, was he the guy who supposedly shot the Prime Minister, mistaking him for someone else? I know there was one scenario where the claim was that the guy had mistaken the Prime Minister for someone else who looked a bit like him, who was like a... No, I think that's another suspect again. There were a few different suspects and they were all really fishing. Yeah. The citizen one is interesting because after being pardoned,
00:24:19
Speaker
He kept on going on TV and suggesting that maybe he had done it after all, suggesting it was just attention seeking. And so there was a theory that he was mentally ill and thus was using this as some way of acting out. And then there, because it's been such a significant event, then there were the sort of repercussions in the works of fiction as well, weren't there?
00:24:38
Speaker
Well yes, so Stig Larsen, the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who I believe the Swedish title of the first book is actually The Men Who Hate Woman. It was only the girl who kicked the hornet's nest that then meant that they renamed the first book with an English name similar to the second book.
00:25:00
Speaker
and he was obsessed with the assassination of Uluf Parma. His theory was it was a state-led execution because back in the mid-80s in Sweden nationalists and white supremacists were very much embedded in the police force and security apparatus of Sweden at the time. Parma was a left-wing firebrand. The
00:25:28
Speaker
Apparatus didn't like that particular fact, they had a good reason to get rid of him, and thus Lassen thought it was a quite deliberate state-led conspiracy to kill off a Prime Minister that they didn't like. And what actually drew me to this originally was that many years ago when I was in Norway,
00:25:48
Speaker
I watched a TV series called Death of a Pilgrim, which is a fictionalised account of the investigation into the death of Ullof Palmer in the modern day, where they solved the crime. Which just seems really odd. Yes, taking an unsolved crime and then just writing a solution to it.
00:26:09
Speaker
based on imagination, I assume. Yeah, basically. Who did it in the show? Oh, it was a police-led conspiracy by right-wing members of the Conservillary, but they make up the person responsible, I suppose, because they're a bit worried about libel law. Well, yes, yes, you would be.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yes, so again, just a fascinating case. So something that here on the other side of the world, and in the English-speaking world, I guess not a lot of people know about, but in Sweden, the Prime Minister who got bloody shot in the street. Now, of course, this does make me think we've never talked about the Australian Prime Minister who went for a swim and never came back. We've mentioned him. Yes, we've never discussed... There are conspiracy theories galore about him being abducted by the Russians.
00:26:57
Speaker
So there's probably something in that. Might add that to our list. Whilst you talk about your second pick. My second pick is genuinely I think the best episode
Explaining QAnon to Kids
00:27:09
Speaker
possibly that we've ever done. I don't know. But unfortunately it's controversial.
00:27:13
Speaker
in circumstances that unfortunately were unlikely to repeat. My second pick... It's going to happen again. It probably will. It almost did a few weeks ago. It's true actually. Episode 215, April 18th of this year. Now the actual topic of the episode was the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral and the conspiracy theories around it. And you may recall earlier this year, big fire in Notre Dame Cathedral did a hell of a lot of damage.
00:27:37
Speaker
And immediately there were conspiracy theories around whether it had been set deliberately and by whom and who was covering stuff up and so on and so forth. But that's not why the episode was great. Why the episode was great was because I showed up at Em's house to record that episode. Em opened the door and said, I'm very, very drunk. And he was.
00:27:58
Speaker
Yes, I'd been out drinking with friends of the show, Jamie and Nick, and I'd only planned to go for a few drinks, because I'm a responsible person, had a podcast to record, and Jamie kept on saying, have another drink, have another drink, and I did, and I arrived back home, actually forgot we're going to record a podcast, only remembered about 15 minutes before Josh turned up, very hurriedly set up things, and then we spent 25 minutes recording the intro.
00:28:26
Speaker
We did, yes. It turned out reading from a script while drunk, not so easy. Very difficult. Very, very difficult. The rest of the episode went fairly swimmingly, I thought. You acquitted yourself quite well. I was passionate. I was really invested. You were animated. That's true. It was very good. In fact, that's the one episode where I know we know from the stats that most people consume this podcast in audio form. It goes up on YouTube every week.
00:28:52
Speaker
The viewership stats indicate that most of you probably don't have time to sit down and watch a video, which is fair. You can do other things while listening to a podcast, but watching kind of takes your full attention. But that one episode is the one I think everyone needs to watch, because while the audio version just sort of had the final product,
00:29:07
Speaker
I did edit a lot of the problems out of the audio because as audio didn't quite work. No, but the video contains the supercut of, I can't remember, all 11 or was it 15 attempts? I can't remember. There were a lot of stopping and starting. And it is quite frankly brilliant viewing.
00:29:28
Speaker
And your star turn, I think. I have to say, your finest talent. I mean, it weren't for the fact that I would probably kill myself doing it every week. We should do more drunk podcasting. At the time, I think we mentioned that whole Drunk Histories show and the fun they have with that. It was pretty much on a par, I think. We could do a recounting of the history of North Head with me being drunk.
00:29:52
Speaker
9-11. Drunk. Drunk 9-11. So that brings us to your third and final pick which I think once again you picked for similar reasons to my...
00:30:03
Speaker
Yes, so I'm thinking, once again, this is a one you really need to watch the video for. This is episode 238 broadcast on October 10th. Cue a non for kids or how we scarred Josh's children. I think the scarring went in the opposite direction, I have to say. My theory is, what happens when they turn 21? Are we going to be showing this video their 21st? No, it's possible.
00:30:30
Speaker
No, so this was the episode that was filmed during the school holidays. It was. As I recall. And my wife was away at a teacher conference. My wife is a teacher, and so here's the school holidays. His wife's also a common law partner. You keep up. Well, yes. The head of civil union, celebrate the civil union. Close enough. There isn't a proper term for it.
00:30:47
Speaker
But at any rate, she was away. She was off on some teacher conference during the holidays, and so I was looking after the boys myself. And we thought, well, I could try and farm them out or something while we do our recording, or I could just bring them along. And so we decided, why don't we base an episode around that? And so we did.
00:31:04
Speaker
And yeah, so we tried to explain QAnon to a six and nine year old. Yes. And fairly quickly, I think it would be fair to say we lost control of the episode. Yes. And we never really got it back. I mean, Lucas, bless his cotton socks, did try to engage. He was enthusiastic on camera. But Jack,
00:31:27
Speaker
No, I think, yeah, I don't know. Lucas was most comfortable in front of a camera, I think. I don't know. We eventually, once we put the episode together and put it up on YouTube and our wife was back home, we played it for her. She got about halfway through the episode before tapping out because Lucas was just so goddamn loud all the time. Yes. It was probably our most scatological episode, which is
00:31:54
Speaker
actually quite interesting. Indeed, you'd be unsurprised to learn that to the minds of young boys, farts are the funniest thing they are, possibly to the minds of grown adults as well, but we wouldn't be good at that. Well, yes, yes. I mean, we both failed at wrangling children completely, and yet I still feel that it was a very interesting experiment. And at least as informative as any other QAnon
00:32:18
Speaker
In fact, possibly even more so, given the role of children in the narrative. So yes, again, another one to hunt down on the YouTube channel if you feel like it. QAnon for kids.
Shakespeare Authorship Theories
00:32:29
Speaker
Now we're going to go in a completely different direction and go Shakespeare for women. Shakespeare for women. Women? Yeah, so my final pick is episode 225. I noticed I just happened to pick episodes 205, 215 and 225.
00:32:43
Speaker
Number one. Exactly. So this one was now July the 5th. And we had the episode called Was Shakespeare a Woman? And someone has remarked that any time a headline ends with a question mark, the answer is almost always no. No. And we thought that was probably the case, but it's still nevertheless just a really interesting thing to talk about. In this case, Emilia Bassano, later Emilia Lanier, once she was married off to her cousin, I think. It was the style of the time.
00:33:10
Speaker
I was a contemporary of William Shakespeare. She is the first woman to publish a collection of poetry under her own name. Which was fairly remarkable at the time, because there were a lot of restrictions in Elizabethan England as to who could publish and how they could publish. So if you were aristocratic,
00:33:32
Speaker
It was expected you published under another name, although there are so many exceptions to that rule that now people are going, maybe we're just wrong about that. But women in particular just weren't meant to have literary lives at all, which is why there's a whole history of women writing under the non-deplume of men around about that time.
00:33:54
Speaker
But Amelia Lania did not do that. I believe some women had sort of published like pamphlets of poetry or something, but hers was a complete works that she published. Selve Deos Rex Judaeorum, Hail God, King of the Jews. It was sort of a religious, lots of religious imagery about women's
00:34:13
Speaker
sort of woman, a woman's role I guess in how to be a good Christian, but it has been interpreted as being sort of proto-feminist in a way. So she's a very interesting person in her own right, but she's also a person who people have suggested might, is one of the contenders for the person who really wrote The Mix of Shakespeare. And in part that's due to the long-standing conspiracy that people have that
00:34:36
Speaker
William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon is not William Shakespeare the Bard on the notion that William Shakespeare is Stratford-on-Avon doesn't have the right kind of fancy background or pedigree to have written the plays and thus he was the stage manager and one of the actors in the trope but not the writer of the plays his name is associated with
00:35:01
Speaker
Which has then led to a whole bunch of theories like the Earl of Oxford and the like being put forward to explain... Although interesting theory that Kit Harington is actually Shakespeare because when you think about him as John Snow with that kind of almost Elizabethan bed
00:35:22
Speaker
What you do is put a ruff around his neck, and my God, it's the picture on the folio of the first Shakespearean publication. You've hit on to an absolute winner there, Joshua. Yes, no, sorry. Kit Harington is John Snow. Kit Marlow, of course, is the full name of the car from Knight Rider.
00:35:39
Speaker
Yes, that's true. That's very, it's not often referenced in writer, but yes, it is. Kit, Kit Mullo, can you drive to my location? Yay Prithi. I shall. Yes.
00:35:53
Speaker
But yes, no, so the theory is about how it could be that Emilio Bassano wrote the works of Shakespeare kind of go along the same lines as the existing ones. Shakespeare can't have written them because he's not the right kind of guy. And a lot of the ones it's, you know, he can't have written about court because he wasn't noble enough. He couldn't have written so well about things overseas because he wasn't well-travelled enough. And in this case, it's he couldn't have written female characters as well as he did because he wasn't woman enough.
00:36:21
Speaker
And when you really look into it, I mean, they spend a lot of time talking about how the reasons why they think Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare and then go on to why they think, in this case, Amelia Bassano did. And a lot of it is the fact that we kind of only have, like, there's no definitive, there are no diary entries of Shakespeare saying, today I wrote this bit of Macbeth, there are no
00:36:43
Speaker
records of anyone else saying, ah, today I popped in on Shakespeare and he was in the middle of writing Romeo and Juliet or something. There's no specific records of Shakespeare actually doing the writing. His name's on everything, but they'll sort of say there's a whole lot of
00:36:57
Speaker
all the evidence that Shakespeare did write Shakespeare is circumstantial, and yet when they talk about all the evidence for their pet theory, it's all just as circumstantial. Yes, you're replacing one circumstantial story with another, which is kind of lacking the history of attribution of the fact that nobody doubted the authorship of Shakespeare
00:37:17
Speaker
in Shakespeare's lifetime, just after Shakespeare died, or indeed up until the beginning of the 20th century, where a descendant of Francis Bacon thought, hmm, Francis Bacon isn't famous enough. I'm going to claim he also wrote the Shakespearean canon. I mean, the Shakespearean authorship controversy is a very new theory, which is kind of interesting in its own right.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yes, I mean that was my final pick. I mean they were just ordered chronologically really, I guess. Because again, I just found it a very interesting topic. So I think Amelia Bassano is a woman we should hear more about, a very interesting figure. And you don't need to make her Shakespeare to appreciate how great her work actually was.
00:38:02
Speaker
And certainly there were ties. I mean, there's the suggestion that she was the dark lady that Shakespeare wrote about in some of his sonnets. Another MCU villain. There was some suggestion, there was stuff in that, a lot of what we know about Amelia Bassano are from the diaries of another guy whose name I haven't got written down in front of me at the moment, who was sort of a bit of an occultist and a bit of an apothecary or whatever, you know, back then, sort of scientist occultist were kind of the same thing.
00:38:30
Speaker
And Amelia Bassano was a patient of his and he kept detailed diaries. And so he's a person, he has some of our best accounts of going to see a Shakespeare play. He wrote about attending Shakespeare's plays and so on. And he wrote about his dealings with Amelia Bassano, one of which was her sort of quizzing him on occult matters, which people have taken to be possibly, she was doing research for helping Shakespeare with the supernatural elements of Macbeth, because it was around that time.
00:38:56
Speaker
So it's possible, you know, she certainly seems to be known to Shakespeare. It's possible she was a bit of a collaborator, possibly an influence on some of his roles, but no real evidence that she actually wrote the whole lot. No. And it should be pointed out that the journalist who's putting forward this particular theory seems to be much more interested in it as a bit of speculation than buying into a massive conspiracy to hide the real identity of Shakespeare.
00:39:23
Speaker
But it's a really interesting avenue into talking about Shakespearean authorship controversies and conspiracy theories, a topic we have covered in the past as well. Yes, nice. And it was because you heard the interview with Elizabeth Winkler, I believe. On national radio. So I mean, the original theory has been around since about 2007, as I recall, but Elizabeth Winkler was here giving interviews earlier this year.
00:39:46
Speaker
She's written a book. She's written a book and I mean yeah so in the interview she did say look I can't prove conclusively that Amelia Bassano did write Shakespeare but it's an interesting thing and we should talk more about sort of Woman of the Period and so on and so forth and I agree.
Year Reflection and Future Plans
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah. So there we go. So those are our top
00:40:02
Speaker
The top six of 2019, which I think is a much better format for a year of year. I think it is. Yep, we should remember this next year, assuming we haven't all been teleported to Mars. Or turned into electric eels to go around JFK's neck. And that's the end of the episode and the end of the year for us.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yes, so we'll do our usual thing we do at the end of every year and ask for listener feedback, something which very really produces anything of note or indeed anything at all. But if there are things about this year you've really liked, or things about this year that you haven't liked about the podcast, why not write in to the contact details at the end of the show,
00:40:45
Speaker
and give us your feedback. What do you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of? If you want to see more of me being drunk, you will have to actually contribute to the Patreon so we can actually make that happen. Buy in the hooch. Without it affecting bank balances and my liver at the same time. Because you do have expensive tastes. I do. I do. I mean this is...
00:41:08
Speaker
for those of you watching video, these are single molds, these aren't blend. Yes, so if there is anything you'd like to tell us, please do. Yes, please do get in contact. We always like getting emails from our listeners. You can even go to conspiracism.popbean.com and leave comments on the individual episodes yourselves, which hasn't happened a lot. And there was that one guy who didn't like the fact that we talked about Trump a lot in the episode specifically about Trump.
00:41:38
Speaker
yes anyway yes that's fine i i believe he was a he was a patron and is no longer a patron really yeah didn't know that oh well um so
00:41:51
Speaker
This episode will probably be going out on the 20th of December. I personally am on holiday for about three or so weeks after that, so it'll probably be mid-January. Before we're back. And what a return we have planned. Do we? You've been invited to the notes for the stuff for the next episode. Oh, that's going to be the next episode, okay. Yeah. I thought that was just for some unspecified time in the future. No, I think we get on this quickly. Right, yep, no good. It makes perfect sense.
00:42:21
Speaker
and then it means we can do that and then by then will be the end of the month will be the catch up everything that's happened between now and the end of January. Indeed so I don't know I mean just as an aside as we're recording this the Congress has voted to impeach Trump. Yes so Donald Trump has now been impeached now whether he's going to
00:42:44
Speaker
Whether the trial is going to actually lead to him being ejected from the presidency is another matter entirely. But Donald Trump is the third US president to have a vote of impeachment? Fourth, I think, because didn't Nixon resign before he could actually be impeached?
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that makes him Trump, especially the third Nixon was going to be. Buchanan? No. Johnson. One of them. And another one. Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson. There we go. We're not American. We don't have to know American presidents.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, so possibly when we come back there will be a lot to say, although it's all going to adjourn over Christmas anyway. I mean, the actual trial won't occur until January anyway. Indeed, there have been theories that the Democrats should
00:43:35
Speaker
not actually start the trial and find some way to delay it all the way through until the election next year in the hope that they can then take control of the Senate so that if the impeachment goes through, there will be enough numbers in the Senate to actually boot Donald Trump out. But that does kind of sound like wishful thinking, I have to say. It does. I think require a lot of procedural work to stop a vote from going ahead very quickly in a Senate which is controlled by the Republicans. Yes, yes. Anyway,
00:44:02
Speaker
So, yeah, well, we may have interesting things to talk about when we come back next year. Maybe we won't. Now, after the break for our patrons, we will have an exciting episode about a very, very, very old French woman who may not have been as old as people claim she was when she died, and the Russian conspiracy that may explain it all.
00:44:25
Speaker
Yes, which old person might not have been that old doesn't sound particularly interesting, but actually I think this is quite an interesting little story. So for our patrons to whom we are not actually indebted, I suppose. But are eternally grateful. But certainly grateful. You can listen to that if you'd like to listen to that. If that sounds like something that would tickle your fancy. Or whet your whistle.
00:44:49
Speaker
You can become a patron by going to patreon.com and looking for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy or going to conspiracism.podbean.com where the podcast is hosted and signing up there. And I think we should probably let people go about their business. They've got lots of things to do, Christmas events to plan and hangovers to nurse and who knows what.
00:45:11
Speaker
Well, precisely. So, seasons greetings, merry festivus, and meri keremete to you all. Indeed. We'll see you next year. Goodbye.
00:45:28
Speaker
You've been listening to Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Ndenter. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbing. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:46:22
Speaker
And remember, silent green is meeples.