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I Want To Believe 101 (part 2)
69 Plays4 years ago
We continue our conversation with Laura Kruse on conspiracy theories and Alberta. We dive into Laura's story for the Progress Report blog, McKinsey, 🍞📈, the UCP’s incoming evisceration of Alberta’s post-secondary system, and our favourite conspiracy theories.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:15
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host Duncan Kinney, and we're recording today here again in a beautiful under-squitchy West Guy again, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Rejoining me is Laura Cruz from the Kino Lefter podcast to continue our conversation on conspiracy theories. And for this podcast, I swear we're gonna get into the story, Laura, for us, and the particular conspiracy theory that she wrote about for The Progress Report. Laura, welcome back to The Progress Report. Back by popular demand, hi, thanks.
00:00:45
Speaker
Well, we just got talking about conspiracy theories and we couldn't shut the fuck up. The last podcast is really good. If you were listening to this and you haven't listened to it, it is a really pretty sweet history of conspiracy theories in North America, all the way up from the Masons in the 1830s to QAnon today.
McKinsey & Conspiracy Theories
00:01:06
Speaker
You know, that's where we've done that we've kind of gone through the history we've done the reading now is on to the story that you wrote and it's time to bring it all back to Alberta. So the story you wrote for us and the link will be in the show notes, of course, but you've connected the UCP hiring McKinsey and company these management consultant psychos.
00:01:25
Speaker
They've been hired to examine, produce a report on our post-secondary education system. Yeah, that's correct. And you've linked this, the UCB hiring McKinsey to do this to a very popular conspiracy theory with the online left in Canada. What is that conspiracy theory and kind of what's the connection? Remember how there's a election happening in the States in November, allegedly? Maybe, possibly. Who knows if it'll actually happen or if Donald Trump will, you know, leave if he loses, but yes.
00:01:54
Speaker
Um, so during the democratic primary race.
00:02:00
Speaker
there was a candidate called Pete Buttigieg who basically kind of came out of nowhere. So he's a small time Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And he became one of the front runners in the race, kind of out of nowhere, not really a person with a huge name recognition prior to his race.
00:02:25
Speaker
He won Iowa. I mean, it seems like eight years ago, but he won the Iowa Democratic primary, right? Allegedly, yes. Barely, barely. I mean, depending on how you do the math.
00:02:35
Speaker
But yeah, that was very shocking to people because going into that race, Bernie was looking so strong. And then also, people thought that there would be a large surge for Biden. That was the front runner through all the speculation up to that point. So then Pete Buttigieg, who also came out early before the results were announced and made this speech that very heavily implied that he had won.
00:03:06
Speaker
It kind of was a shock to everybody who was watching that. So he comes out of nowhere. He takes the front-runner spot in the Iowa caucus, and it's like a big shock. But prior to this, when he had been doing his promotion of his campaign, a lot of attention was paid to his military service.
00:03:31
Speaker
And he is very kind of moderate position. So that's kind of how he was setting himself apart. He became kind of the poster boy for the moderate center of the party.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yes, the extremely exciting candidate. What was the tagline on the Vogue photoshoot? Pete Buttigieg makes bland sizzle or something fucking stupid like that? A policy wonk with sex appeal, which kind of reminds me of another horny tweet about another kind of centrist Democrat. Oh, God. Yeah, I do remember that. But he's like this utterly unremarkable, like,
00:04:07
Speaker
former mayor of a town of 100,000 people. He's gay, he's a former intelligence, or not necessarily intelligence, but a military guy. He's naval intelligence. Naval intelligence. And like military guy, there's pictures of him in- In Afghanistan, yeah. Yeah, in armor and with a gun and shit. But the other thing that caught your eye was it wasn't necessarily his military service. It was something else he did during his private sector career.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yep, so right when he graduated from Oxford and Harvard, he took a three-year stint with McKinsey & Company, which is this global management consulting firm, has offices in 65 countries, and he worked for them as one of their quote-unquote whiz kids. They love to scoop kids right out of these elite universities and give them
00:05:00
Speaker
I mean, McKinsey is this extremely evil corporation that we'll get into, but one of their favorite ticks is describing anyone who has ever worked there for any amount of time as an absolute fucking genius. Yeah, exactly. I am expecting my invite to interview soon, but nothing yet.
00:05:18
Speaker
Just the cream of the crop. I think I'm a little old to be a whiz kid now too. So he took a job there. It was about three years that he was working and he talked about how the world was his classroom, whether it be a seat of an airplane, anywhere you could bring a laptop.
00:05:42
Speaker
offices all over the world, secure sites in Afghanistan, anywhere in the world.
Bread Price-Fixing Scandal
00:05:54
Speaker
He wrote about it in this memoir, Shortest Way Home, where he talked about how in 2008 he was working in Toronto with an unnamed Canadian grocery store chain and that they were looking at how to combine prices.
00:06:13
Speaker
across a lot of different products. And basically this timeline very neatly coincides with a massive price fixing scandal that basically all the Canadian retailers, the large Canadian retailers, were all kind of banding together to artificially inflate the price of bread about double the amount of what other grocery commodities were costing over the same time period.
00:06:42
Speaker
and basically like so Loblaws got got out ahead. I'm just gonna stop you right there because it is we have totally memory hold this fucking thing like the idea that our our grocery store billionaires because like the people who own our grocery stores the Loblaws
00:06:59
Speaker
the Galen Weston or the Weston family, the Sobies family, these fucking psychos are incredibly wealthy. And, you know, essentially they're like lords and they fixed the price of bread for years. Like this is the stuff like the French Revolution and like shit has like he's happened over less and like Canadians are just like, yeah, whatever.
00:07:21
Speaker
They gave us a $25 gift card. It's such a banality of evil kind of thing because, you know, when you hear about how much of the price of a loaf of bread is, you know, a few dollars, but just that the fact that that's 50% more than it should be this very, very basic thing that
00:07:43
Speaker
I think is used to also calculate the cost of living like if the cost of bread rises that is also tied to the cost of living rise I believe so it's definitely in the like bread basket for like this the inflation calculation exactly exactly so
00:08:01
Speaker
they're just making money already hand over fist you know Galen Weston is I think the richest man in Canada also a Bilderberg conference attendee putting putting together everything there and but yeah it's just such a it's such a perfect
00:08:19
Speaker
um scheme because it's also so like unsexy and it really shows you how the ruling class functions to just very like uh boiling boiling frogs you know like very slowly turning up the heat on everyone else so that you're just gonna make the price of bread 100 more than it otherwise would have been over the 10 years and we're just gonna skim those billions off of the top of everyone who needs to buy fucking bread which is you know which is everyone
00:08:45
Speaker
And, and, and, okay, so, so Buttigieg is in his memoir, talks explicitly about his, I mean, he doesn't name LaBlas, but it's, I mean, the kind of conspiracy theory heavily intimates this. But, you know, the, okay, what's the line from the book? Here it is. The effects of price cuts on various combinations of items across their hundreds of stores. Okay, so yeah, very sus, right?
00:09:08
Speaker
And so he sends this in his book, but it doesn't really kind of become this whole like Pete Buttigieg connection to the bread kind of price fixing scheme doesn't really become popular until what point?
McKinsey's Controversial Influence
00:09:23
Speaker
One of, a Twitter user, a friend of mine, Chalko X, or Chalko Rex, sorry if I'm butchering that, it's in the piece. But basically, he extracted this one section from Shortest Way Home, and was talking about the maybe connection between Pete Buttigieg and this like,
00:09:48
Speaker
scandal between all these Canadian grocers. And this was picked up on by the New York Times. So what's his name, Byron?
00:10:00
Speaker
Binyamin Applebaum. Yeah, yeah. He basically does this really amazing interview with Pete Buttigieg where he talks like the Hal 9000 robot from 2001 Space Odyssey and is like, you've been fixing the price of bread, haven't you, Pete? Pete gets really sweaty and stuttering and is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there, Buster. I've not been doing any such thing.
00:10:29
Speaker
also even cursed even cursed like little little bright eyed bushes like whoa i'm gonna drop an f-bomb or a shit or something i forget what he said but you know what's interesting is that he doesn't you know he mckinsey is very explicitly tied to like the privatization of like war-torn countries and all this other stuff right and doesn't deny any of those other things but just gets very upset when he's talking about i didn't personally do anything um with uh
00:10:59
Speaker
price fixing that we maybe had was maybe involved. Right. So I worked for a consulting firm that had a client that fixed bread prices. All right. I'll have you know, I didn't fix the price of bread. Yeah, exactly. And it kind of got tied in with Loblaws specifically, but it could be any of them. Yeah, it could be Safeway or Sobey's or God knows. But it's, it's Loblaws because they've worked with, uh,
00:11:24
Speaker
In the bread truther movement, yes. But this moment with Applebaum, this New York Times editor, and Buttigieg goes viral, and the bread truther movement essentially is kind of... Goes mainstream. Goes mainstream, yeah. It goes from just some randos on left Canadian Twitter talking about it to everyone talking about it. It's pretty funny.
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And it's very convenient because he doesn't like talk about anything else, right? Because he doesn't he doesn't deny any other thing, I don't think. And it's been a while since I've seen the the full interview.
00:12:02
Speaker
But this really drags McKinsey and company into the public eye, a company that is, again, evil as fuck and terrible. And I think McKinsey is worth a closer examination. So what is McKinsey and company?
00:12:19
Speaker
So McKinsey & Company was founded in 1926 by the guy who basically invented management consulting who was a professor at the University of Chicago named James O. McKinsey.
00:12:35
Speaker
And I think why this is significant is because it also comes from the same intellectual birthplace of the entire neoliberal economic system. So Milton Friedman, also a very famous economist out of the Chicago School of Economics,
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah, like in the 50s or whatever though, like later on. Yeah, exactly, later on. But that kind of intellectual conservative elite oftentimes has their roots in Chicago.
00:13:06
Speaker
Yeah, the intellectual kind of like, you know, work that was done to justify all of the terrible things that neoliberalism has done to us over the past 50 years. Exactly. And so, you know, James O. McKinsey came kind of out of that milieu as well, not at the same time, but kind of same vibes, I would say same vibes.
00:13:27
Speaker
And they're huge. Now, you know, they operate in I think 130 cities in like over 60 countries all over the world, including one in Calgary, an office in Calgary.
00:13:40
Speaker
So they basically are a management consultant firm and what a management consultant firm will tell you what they do is that they work with a client, they try to identify a problem the client is having and they try to find the most efficient way to solve your problem. So whatever your problem is, they'll come in and they will
00:13:59
Speaker
you know, work their magic with their genius absolute genius whiz kids and they will figure out the best course of action. But in truth, what they do is they just basically are mercenaries available to say or do whatever you want. So if you read, you know, the UCP has hired McKinsey for over three and a half million dollars, I think three point seven million dollars to write this report on the Alberta post-secondary system.
00:14:28
Speaker
And they basically put out a bunch of proposals where they said, these are the parameters that we want you to examine our post-secondary system under, and then you're going to write a report about the best way that we get there. So any client is setting the parameters of what they're asking for, but they'll basically
00:14:50
Speaker
give you the um they'll give you the bad news so that you kind of have a arms length person to kind of say well look you know uh we didn't want to fire all of you and put you out on the street but mackenzie and co said we had to if we wanted to chop 30 from our budget which we asked them to do so you're fucked get get fucked bye sorry my hands are tied this report that i paid for um we we have to uh we have to follow it sorry
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah. McKinsey, they're the high priests of neoliberal ideology, right? If you need to offshore something, if you need to do a whole bunch of layoffs and move all of that work to some of their location with lower labor standards and less environmental regulations, McKinsey or the folks you hire, they were the best at it. They were the premier fucking people to purveying both as ideology as well as getting paid by corporations to do it.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But McKinsey is, and this, I mean, I guess this also follows the pattern that Jason Kenney has set up, right? Like he loves these arms length, you know, third parties, third parties in quotation marks to give these types of reports, right? We've had Janice McKinnon and her kind of blue ribbon panel. You know, we had a similar, some accounting firm with, what was it?
00:16:14
Speaker
Ernst & Young for our health system, you know, right before a pandemic, they were like, actually, you know, you should get rid of all these rural hospitals. Yep. And I mean, the pandemic has largely interrupted the austerity that was about to be inflicted on on the health care system. But it's like the reports right there, like if and when this thing ever gets licked, like the health care system is about to get cut to the bone, right? Yep, exactly. And and McKinsey is just kind of the latest and greatest example of this for the post-secondary system.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And basically they're being asked to, in their request for proposal for these things, they're being asked explicitly to implement the specific recommendations that the McKinnon report had for the post-secondary sector.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, so again, like you're talking about, set the parameters. Here's the deal. We need to fuck the post-secondary system. We want to gut it. We want it to do the things that we want it to do. We want to fire a whole bunch of people, maybe shut down a handful of them, the ones that we don't like, or restrict the parts that we don't like. Please make this happen, McKinsey. Yeah, exactly.
00:17:19
Speaker
And so what are the honest, or what are the reasonable expectations from this?
Impact on Alberta's Education System
00:17:27
Speaker
What are the solutions, quote unquote, that you think are gonna come out of this report?
00:17:34
Speaker
So these are all based on it's directly out of the request for proposal that the UCP government put out. So it's all right there for you. But they basically have a mandate to look at quote unquote more entrepreneurial ways of funding the academy so that it's less reliant on government grants.
00:17:58
Speaker
and to increase their revenue mix to include more tuition. So this just basically means more private sector donations and more tuition straight from individual students, less government funding, less public funding. They're going to be looking at the governance structure. So how are the universities run?
00:18:24
Speaker
Um, they're going to be looking at, I mean, just to jump in there too. That's hilarious, right? Because the UCP wasted no time and immediately stacking every single fucking board of every single university with their cronies and donors and volunteers. So I don't know. Janice McKinnon is on now the board of governors for the university of Alberta, like directly off the heels of this report was placed on there. So you knew what was coming. Mm-hmm.
00:18:52
Speaker
It's not even a little bit covert. They just did it straight up. Yeah, there's one thing I can appreciate about the UCP, actually, is that they know what political project they're a part of, they know who their masters are, and they just go out and fucking do the work. Whereas the NDP got to bring all the people who fucking hate them into a room
00:19:12
Speaker
spend two years asking them what they want kind of half do it and then and then that never actually do like don't actually like end up doing anything that that sticks and waste so much time in the process right yeah exactly like something like if you consider the 25 a day um
00:19:29
Speaker
daycare program that they put in you know that's a great program but in the amount of centers it was if it was a universal program that a lot more people had access to it would be way harder for the UCP to just like eviscerate that as well because it would be like suddenly everybody is in the same kind of boat and they could really know what they're missing right and and kind of push back those universal programs are very sticky for people and they really matter to people
00:19:59
Speaker
But back to McKinsey. So McKinsey is doing, what are they supposed to be doing to our system, to our universities and colleges? Yeah. So they're also going to look at the viability, quote unquote, of several institutions. That means consolidate them, shut them down, reduce duplication. So a lot of places, speculation is that they're going to be taking it so that only specific programs are running at specific universities and that kind of stuff.
00:20:26
Speaker
And then also removing the ability for the faculty to be able to kind of have input on program design. So Ricardo Cunha, who's the president of the Faculty Association at the University of Alberta was pointing this out, you know, saying that
00:20:43
Speaker
You know, rather than doing programs that are for the public good, you might be doing programs, designing programs and research that will suit the interests of the Board of Directors exclusive, or the Board of Governors, pardon me, exclusively. So the Board of Governors is largely dominated by private oil and gas interests.
UCP's Economic Strategy
00:21:05
Speaker
And then the last thing that they really want McKinsey to work on is how further to kind of roll out the welcome mat for businesses to take root in Alberta. So this is the Alberta advantage, the fabled low taxes land of the free that we've got going on here. The lowest tax. Put out the welcome mat for businesses in Alberta. Like, bitch, Alberta universities in Alberta are already like hand in glove with fucking the corporations.
00:21:35
Speaker
and like business interests, right? And we just became the lowest jurisdiction in all of North America for corporations. They don't pay them anyway. TD Bank is going to relocate here next year. You heard it here first. TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, all these big Toronto-based giant banks. They're definitely coming to Calgary.
00:22:02
Speaker
jobs and growth, baby. That's job creating. Okay, so you've kind of laid out how, you know, what, what McKinsey has essentially been hired to do by the UCP, and it's very much their kind of modus operandi, they are, they are these
00:22:15
Speaker
you know, slash and burners, you know, they work with anyone who will pay them to do all sorts of evil shit. They also work like behind the scenes, right? So you don't really like, they don't publicly take credit for things. Their client list is protected by very robust agreements.
McKinsey's Scandals and Ethics
00:22:30
Speaker
They didn't even release Pete from his during the course of the presidential run. So it's quite, they're quite like behind the scenes. You only hear about them when something goes horrifically wrong, which it often does.
00:22:42
Speaker
which you detail in our story. So what are some of the greatest hits of McKinsey and some of the shady, illegal, conspiracy theory shit that is actually real that they've gotten up to? So when I was researching this article, I knew McKinsey was evil, but I was just like, wow, this is...
00:23:02
Speaker
This is a lot. This is a lot of evil here. This is a lot of evil. In the article, I really go into a detail with two of them, which I think are the most fucked and that upset me personally the most. The first is that they worked with this company, this drug manufacturer called Purdue, who was a large part of pushing the drug OxyContin.
00:23:26
Speaker
throughout the 90s and the early 2000s, culminating in this massive crisis that we're faced in as people, as the conditions around us are worsening and deaths of despair going up, a lot of them are comorbid with this rise in OxyContin use.
00:23:44
Speaker
especially in kind of economically depressed areas of the states and in Canada. So they basically worked with Purdue to quote-unquote turbocharge the sale of OxyContin and they wanted to double the amount of OxyContin that was being sold in a year. They did all kinds of stuff like
00:24:10
Speaker
They worked with them on how to counteract these very emotional messages that mothers who had lost children to overdoses were putting out. They knew full well that people were addicted to this drug and were dying in record numbers.
00:24:27
Speaker
And they were like, okay, here's what we do. We counteract all this negative messaging by, you know, stressing that OxyContin, you know, lowers pain. It helps you feel less isolated and depressed. Like it definitely does do that, but not in the way that's actually- A real, real thank you for smoking shit. Exactly. The most evil PR stuff you can imagine.
00:24:49
Speaker
Exactly. There was an attempt at a crackdown when there were being billions of pills sold. Over 10 billion pills were sold in 2012. And there was this crackdown on the distributors.
00:25:05
Speaker
Walgreens and these large chains were being asked to put additional measures in place to kind of flag where these quote unquote pill mills were, these doctors that will just kind of like churn out these prescriptions for folks.
00:25:22
Speaker
McKinsey helped, McKinsey helped Purdue to lobby Walgreens and make sure that their product was still being sold. And, you know, you can just look at the astronomical amount of deaths of despair and especially places like Appalachia, where it's called like kind of hillbilly heroin. And in recent tragic news, Jonathan Sackler, the co-owner of Purdue Pharma, Purdue Pharma died at the age of 65 of cancer. See you in hell.
00:25:52
Speaker
Yeah, RIP to a real one, not really. Yeah, so yeah, McKinsey, bad. What's your other, what was the other McKinsey one you had that really fucking rattled you?
00:26:04
Speaker
So they also worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, otherwise known as ICE. So they basically started a relationship with ICE. It's been over $20 million over the entire run of their relationship. Under the Obama administration and then just concluded, I think in 2018, with massive public outcry about the practices that ICE were engaging in.
00:26:31
Speaker
And so basically, you know, officials from ICE, and you can do with that information what you will, officials from ICE claim that McKinsey's kind of prescriptions and solutions and efficiency findings were too much even for them. So they were saying, you know, you know how you can save some money will reduce food that people are eating their medical care,
00:26:59
Speaker
Do they really need food and blankets and medicine? Really? I think they could do with a little less. So people that were also in congregate jailing facilities were being transferred out into these underserved rural jails that are a lot more dangerous for people to be held in.
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah, they just basically wanted to make life even worse for people who are detained under this already very awful and evil program. And they're so embedded in ICE's workings that they ghost wrote their own contracts to justify their own retention.
00:27:43
Speaker
But but you're saying you're saying that ice was like slow down McKinsey like that's what they okay. That's what they say I have that's what they say I mean, but even Even if it's someone trying to cover their ass, it's still fucking hilarious and likes. Yeah, so evil
00:27:58
Speaker
Exactly. Like literally this agency whose whole function is to exist to be like a terrifying boot of the state, like stepping on people who are just trying to like escape, you know, massive economic hardship usually imposed by the United States on especially, you know, Latin and South America, like tear families apart. We've all seen those like horrific images of like the detained children and those
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, the modern day Gestapo, they're the ones who put kids in cages. Exactly. They're like, they're like, McKinsey, slow down. You're too evil for us. Allegedly, yeah. Allegedly, perhaps. You have some other kind of a McKinsey greatest hits. You don't have to kind of go into as much detail, but I know that there's a few other things that you, you listen to the story and that have come up in your research that are probably worth mentioning.
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah, there's so many. They worked with the Saudi Arabian government to identify key dissidents who were bringing up criticisms of them. And then very soon after Jamal Khashoggi was, you know, allegedly murdered in the Turkish embassy and the Saudi journalist, so possible connection there. They were involved in a scandal in South Africa.
00:29:14
Speaker
where the nationalized power company was completely corrupt and embedded with this very evil billionaire individual, and they were completely illegally working in there as well. Is that the Gupta family, or was that some other South African corruption family? Yes, the Gupta family. The Gupta shit is incredible out of South Africa, but yeah, okay, keep going, keep going.
00:29:38
Speaker
They were involved in top level executives at McKinsey were involved in insider trading. So they went to jail for that. And they have worked with Kremlin linked businesses. They've worked with like Ukrainian fascists. They've done, you know, there's so many things that it's the the mind just boggles that these are just the unsavory details that we know about.
00:30:05
Speaker
So there are definitely tons more things out there that have McKinley's fingerprints all over them that we'll probably never know. So just yeah, total mercenaries for capital, essentially, right? Exactly.
00:30:20
Speaker
Well, I mean, thank you for the story. It's really good. And if you haven't read the story and you're listening to this podcast, you should definitely
Journey into Conspiracy Theories
00:30:27
Speaker
read it. You should share it. This piece that you wrote is part of a column, like an ongoing monthly column that we've started collaborating on called, you know, the red string. You know, this is a reference to, you know, your cork board with your pictures and your pins and your red string connecting it all together. The classic look.
00:30:49
Speaker
The classic, yeah, like the gift from, you know, it's always sunny in Philadelphia or whatever, right? That's so popular. So I guess the question, and we kind of covered the history of, you know, conspiracy theories, but I think the kind of modern conspiracy, and also why it's important for you to kind of understand why these things are so popular and how they work and the kind of theory behind conspiracy theories. But I'm kind of interested in getting into
00:31:18
Speaker
your own personal, like how did you as a person get into conspiracy theories? What was your kind of entryway into the world of learning how it all works and how it's all connected? I would say that I've always been a person who's like interested in the truth.
00:31:40
Speaker
I've always been very... Not me, fuck that shit. Yeah, you're fake news. But I've always been interested in alternative histories and digging into things and things not being what they seem. So I've always been interested in that, always been a bit of a contrarian as well.
00:32:01
Speaker
And I'd say that my first entry into the loony side of conspiracy theories was 9-11 trutherism. And I've emerged from that older and wiser. I never was deeply embedded in the truther community. But I dabbled with a little loose change, a little zeitgeist in my high school days.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, my brother who's more your age, he definitely remembers the kind of zeitgeist and I was a little too old. I mean, I just wasn't in high school when it happened or whatever, but it was like, it was a weird mishmash of everything, zeitgeist, wasn't it? It was 9-11 conspiracy trutherism, but it was also like a whole like worldview, wasn't it? Yeah, it was, what I remember about it really clearly, because I was like, whoa, man, this is blowing my mind, was about how like the myth of
00:32:53
Speaker
Jesus repeats through all kinds of different world religions. And this like idea of a son being, you know, reborn, like murdered and reborn for the sake of healing humanity is like comes from ancient Egypt and stuff. It's like, and I remember it being like kind of this larger like unified
00:33:17
Speaker
View of how the new world order works I think I don't remember too much about it's been a while since I've revisited as I guys I don't think I will It's been a while So yeah, that was kind of my entryway into that but I did think those people were like cookie I think I have a bit more of a nuanced
00:33:35
Speaker
a view of the Bush did 9-11 kind of meme now. I think what really kind of set me on to the path that I'm on now was the financial crisis in 2008 and starting to learn about that and learning that everything was, everything that I thought I took for a given at that time, it was right when I turned 18, the financial crisis happened. So it was my first year of school and it just all kind of
00:34:03
Speaker
made me think that I was living in the system, a system that can fail. And I had never been alive for a recession. I didn't know. And this was the greatest one, the biggest one since the Great Depression. So that made me start to learn about how capitalism functions. And that really opened my eyes to the ways that the way that the ruling class acts, even though they propagate. Mark Fisher has a point about this in exiting the vampire castle. But even though the ruling class
00:34:32
Speaker
They promote this ideology of individualism. They tend to act as a class. They act in solidarity with one another to promote their own interests, right? The rich have incredible class solidarity and you see it constantly.
00:34:48
Speaker
So this was kind of my first time and seeing this ruling class solidarity that existed kind of this, this waver in the, in the matrix for me as like a suburban middle class white girl, right? That basically was on the path to becoming just the same, right? And now we've seen that the millennial generation is so downwardly mobile and I'm amongst those people, right? So that was kind of the first thing that brought me on to viewing the world in that kind of way.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, like I was a teen in the heyday of conspiracy theories, the 90s, right? Like I'm an 83 birthday and I grew up watching X-Files and definitely liking X-Files and definitely going on to proto message boards and posting about X-Files. And that was kind of my introduction to the idea that there were shadowy forces beyond our control that were controlling society and that were collaborating with aliens.
00:35:44
Speaker
All that shit. Also, aliens are real now. It's like on page 17 of the New York Times. It's just like, yeah, we just declassified some shit. And by the way, aliens are real. And also, aliens are so passé that they've privatized the collection of alien artifacts. Yeah, all four vehicles are now in the hands of the private sector. I love that detail when you pointed that out to me.
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, like Harry Reid, so like former Senator, former House Majority Leader in the Senate, like big fucking deal, was obsessed with these, was obsessed with UFOs and aliens. He was from Nevada, hilariously, you know. And, and yeah, he's just like talking to the media about like recently declassified stuff. And it's just like, oh, yeah, we think we think some alien artifacts are in private hands.
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah. And, and that was, that was mine. I mean, I then yeah then and then yeah gradually as you, you know, as you go down the kind of left wing conspiracy theory rabbit hole right you definitely I definitely learned about, you know, the Bilderberg group.
00:36:43
Speaker
and the Alex Jones stuff, which is still Alex Jones's greatest single piece of journalism that he's ever done is that he infiltrated the Bohemian Grove and brought a camera crew and described their ceremonies in front of Moloch and all that stuff.
00:37:02
Speaker
evil as shit. So for those that don't know, for a weekend, every year, a bunch of very powerful people get together and they go to this place called Bohemian Grove, this is 100% true. And they all kind of they love to larp and do like,
00:37:19
Speaker
little like fancy lad productions of this, they love to do it. So they all go away on this weekend. The all the staff that work there, the catering staff are like held to very, very, very strict, not non disclosure agreements, they put on robes and they burn a giant owl in in like effigy. It looks so scary. Watch the Alex Jones coverage of it. It's amazing.
00:37:44
Speaker
And this is kind of solidified Alex Jones as a major figure in this kind of like libertarian and like hyper dissident right, right?
00:37:52
Speaker
And they all piss in the woods. I remember that a lot too, is that they're peeing everywhere is freely encouraged. It's just one of the details of the Bohemian Grove. I didn't know that. But they've got to relax, man. They're all having hard days being CEOs, AKA sitting around and doing jack shit and collecting money. When you're hanging with the bros and you're planting evil shit, you just got to have your wang out and pee sometimes. It makes a lot of sense.
Cultural and Political Conspiracies
00:38:21
Speaker
Okay, okay, so that's how you got into it. What's your favorite current conspiracy theory? What's the one that you're currently down the rabbit hole on?
00:38:29
Speaker
I mean, the last year has been really consumed by Epstein. I'm trying to kind of pull out back from that because I'm also finding the meme-ification of that whole thing quite disturbing. And I also think it's a way that people can talk about these like salacious details very openly, which I'm trying to kind of pull back because it's making me black-pilled. But one conspiracy that I'm super into right now is it's called the Laurel Canyon conspiracy.
00:38:57
Speaker
And so there was this Air Force base called Lookout Mountain that was like a bunch of films were created in there and it was in Los Angeles. And it was just this big military compound where they mostly put together
00:39:14
Speaker
like atomic bomb footage during the Cold War. But also they produce like a ton of Hollywood movies. And we all know that, you know, the CIA, the military industrial complex in Hollywood are like very, very tight, right? They if you want to have a military
00:39:31
Speaker
badge in a fucking movie. The US, the Pentagon, a bunch of people from the Pentagon show up and essentially clear your movie. Exactly. Yeah. They like basically censor it at that point rather than after it's released. They kind of, if you want the cool stuff, you got to play game with them. So there's basically this conspiracy that comes out where
00:39:53
Speaker
A lot of the counter-cultural figures of the 60s were the children of high-level military people. A lot of them would say that their families were dead or whatever and they were orphans, but they actually were the children of high-level military people. One of the ideas that comes out of that is that the hippie generation
00:40:21
Speaker
um kind of existed to disrupt this like radical emergence of this new kind of left consciousness right so this new um anti-war black panthers all national civil rights all this kind of thing and this like widespread unrest against the um the war in Vietnam um the the organizing that was happening uh
00:40:43
Speaker
to disrupt it, this conspiracy theory goes, the CIA kind of created this whole scene, right, this whole hippie scene that were headed by these different musicians and these different kind of cultural figures that was not focused on making change, but rather disconnecting. So it's like the system man, you don't want to like work for the man, you don't want to change politics, you want to withdraw from them and like start your own private commune.
00:41:12
Speaker
outside of the purview of the rest of society where you're kind of off-grid and not affecting things. So that's kind of what the Laurel Canyon conspiracy is overall. The very interesting kind of contemporary thing that I just learned about was that Jared Leto now owns the compound at Lookout Mountain.
00:41:32
Speaker
And Jared Leto has always been very secretive about his past. You can find out that the studio companies poured so much money into his and his brother's band, Thirty Seconds to Mars. They never really made any money, but they put all this kind of resources into this band and
00:41:59
Speaker
when that didn't take off, he kind of like became an actor and that's where he found most of his success. But also now he has like a cult that people follow, but those kind of culty vibes are infused throughout the 30 seconds to Mars thing. So it's a very, it's a very like interesting parallel of this guy who's being so heavily promoted to be a dominant like cultural figure in Hollywood. So I'm very like into that one right now. Sick.
00:42:29
Speaker
I mean, I'm just reading his Wikipedia page now. His mom was a hippie, his dad. My mom's father was in the Air Force. It doesn't say who his dad was. Just his mom was a hippie.
00:42:41
Speaker
uh yeah i will definitely i mean i mean you kind of run the the risk of just like everything being an op when you kind of i mean maybe it was just convenient that a bunch of fucking but yeah it's it's hard to say right you don't do run the risk but at the same time like the the the connections become kind of undeniable in in a way and like look i'm like way way far gone
00:43:07
Speaker
So I don't necessarily recommend people start thinking like this, but thinking like, okay, so Winona Ryder, famous actress, her godfather was like, Timothy Leary, who's like, if you don't think he's a CIA asset, I don't know, I don't know what I can tell you, right?
Notorious Figures and Elite Circles
00:43:22
Speaker
So it's just like, oh, the veiled profits in that who's the secret society that operates in, in kind of the Midwest.
00:43:31
Speaker
One of their they have this weird ball where they Queen one of they'd crown one of the debutante daughters the Queen of love and peace Who was one of the Queen of love it love and peace the comedian from like Kimmy Schmidt and On What's it called fuck Doesn't matter but it sounds very office and Ellie Kemper is her name and
00:43:58
Speaker
And, uh, yeah, so obviously, it's really weird. You should look up photos, but, um, obviously like what that means is that, you know, rich kids get access to opportunities that, you know, poor kids don't get access to. I'm not saying that, you know, Kimmy Schmidt is an off, but I think that it's very, um, it's very fascinating, uh, to consider all those kinds of connections.
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so you brought up Epstein earlier, and not that I've necessarily gone down the Epstein hole as much as some people have, but I think the whole idea of Pizzagate and Epstein, right, that there is an ultra-powerful circle of kind of billionaire pedophiles is kind of one that is borne out by a lot of reporting. Yeah. And so, I mean, my interest in conspiracy theories tends to focus on kind of investigative journalism and what has kind of come out after the fact.
00:44:54
Speaker
And that's maybe much my bias as a someone who's currently fighting with the Edmonton Police Service to be considered a journalist. And one thing that came out relatively recently that really tickled my brain was a character who recently appeared on the popular Netflix drama, The Queen. I don't know if you've watched it. My partner really loves it. I know a lot of people love The Queen as a show. And one of the characters on the show is a character named Lord Louis Mountbatten.
00:45:24
Speaker
otherwise known as Dickie. And this fella is like a grandson of Queen Victoria. He's like Prince Charles's great uncle and really one of Prince Charles's primary father figures growing up. And Lord Louis Mountbatten is a real interesting, is maybe one way to put it. He's a pedophile. He has come out in recently declassified documents
00:45:54
Speaker
from the FBI that he was a pedophile. The FBI files describe him as a homosexual with a perversion for young boys. This is reported on Irish Central, a website that's based in Ireland, and the connection to Ireland will become clear later on when I tell his story. But yeah, Lord Louis Mountbatten, he liked to hang out at the King Cora School for Boys.
00:46:21
Speaker
with another person who you, I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy, but a guy named Jimmy Savile. And Lord Louis Mountbatten was responsible for introducing Jimmy Savile to the royal family, and Lord Jimmy Savile ended up becoming this very close confidant of both, well, not Mountbatten, because he died in the 70s, but of the royal family. And it didn't really, this didn't become known until after his death, though, lots of people must have known about it, but Jimmy Savile was an absolutely rapacious fucking child predator and rapist.
00:46:51
Speaker
And he used his popularity as he used his fame as he was one of the most popular people in England he had. He was a television presenter, which is always a kind of designation, which I kind of don't really know what that means. He's on television. He's very famous. Yeah. And he essentially had dressed kind of vibe.
00:47:10
Speaker
Yeah, he had access to vulnerable young children all the time through both his fame and the charity he worked, he did in hospitals. Just absolutely fucking evil shit. And people must have known about it, but whenever it came up while he was alive, it got fucking squashed. And one can speculate about why that was.
00:47:29
Speaker
Uh, but his close relationship with the Royal family probably had something to do with it because the one thing that the Royal family are actually good at is controlling the media. It is literally the only skill they have is manipulating and controlling the media. Which is so weird that Prince Andrew has fucked up so colossally. Yeah, just, I mean, every family has one, you know? And, uh, but yeah, so it, it comes out, these files are declassified in last year in 2019, uh, in August. Um,
00:48:00
Speaker
And it's like, you see these stories in The Independent, have fresh claims of abuse, colored our views of Mount Benton's murder. So Mount, Lord Louis Mount Benton, it'll be interesting to see if they actually deal with this in the crown, in the show at all, whether he is pedophilia and kind of relationship with Jimmy Savile. But Lord Louis Mount Benton was blown up by an IRA bomb in 1979.
00:48:23
Speaker
Yeah, which props to the IRA. There was some collateral damage. Some innocent folks were killed, but they did kill Lord Louis Mountbend in 1979 with a bomb, blew up his boat.
00:48:37
Speaker
And this Lord Louis Mountbatten thing is absolutely fucking wild. When you actually dive into him as a character, too, he's this colossal royal family fuckup, too. He was responsible for Dieppe, which is this episode in World War II history where a thousand or a few thousand Canadian soldiers were sacrificed in this kind of aborted aquatic invasion or amphibious invasion of Europe.
00:48:59
Speaker
Again, that shows, again, how the Royal Family is good at really only one thing because they were actually able to spin that post-World War II, that debacle into, oh, we learned a lot of useful things from killing several thousand Canadian soldiers. It was actually a useful exercise. In The Crown, too, he's also tapped to be the kind of figurehead leader of this banker's coup that never ended up going ahead.
00:49:27
Speaker
But there was some internal intelligence people, some newspaper shitheads, and a bunch of business people and bankers who almost cooed the labor prime minister at the time, some like hapless loser who wasn't even like, who was barely a social Democrat, but they thought he was a communist. And he was like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. And then in the show, I think in the show, in the Queen, on Netflix, he gets talked out of it by the
00:49:54
Speaker
the queen herself who's like absolutely not know this is silly but um but who knows what actually fucking happened right um he was also legendary protectors of democracy the monarchy exactly yeah yeah so i i went down the rabbit hole on this uh mount baton character kind of when the queen the latest season of the queen came out and i'll be following along when future seasons of the queen come out to see how they deal with his uh you know
00:50:19
Speaker
It's friendship and relationship with Jimmy Savile and his activities at the King chorus school for boys. Yeah. Did you see? I'm sure you've seen the Kevin Spacey videos. Let me be in that stuff and like the Royal commemorative cup and him talking about these kind of veiled threats and stuff like that I'm sure you've seen that right?
00:50:42
Speaker
I'm vaguely familiar with it. Yeah, I mean the idea that there is this like deep, deep state war between like factions loyal to Kevin Spacey and factions loyal to the English monarchy is this hilarious, possibly real thing that is going on right now. It's very possibly real because they were all friends and like then you see photos of like Ghislaine Maxwell and Kevin Spacey within
Global Conspiracy Brainstorming
00:51:06
Speaker
like
00:51:06
Speaker
on the thrones in England, hanging out with Prince Andrew, who was really good friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Like, I don't know if they're, I don't think that it was a war thing. I think it was more of a like, I have information on you thing or, and it was just fucking weird. And I really wanted there to be another release this year, but there hasn't been yet.
00:51:27
Speaker
Dare to dream. Okay, so let's wrap this up with a kind of just a little round up of Canadian conspiracy theories, things that might come up in a future red string column. You know, the kind of conditions of this is that there has to be some kind of condition or some kind of connection to Alberta. But I mean, it can be pretty tenuous.
00:51:47
Speaker
You know, McKinsey being hired by the UCP was an excuse to kind of go off on McKinsey and the bread truth or conspiracy theory. But is there any kind of like Canadian or Canadian related conspiracy theory or Alberta related conspiracy theory that you have your eye on for the next column?
00:52:00
Speaker
I think we were talking quite a bit about looking at the idea of the quote-unquote like fourth Reich. So this idea of like the fact that Nazism is like alive and well across the world, like especially here in Western Canada. So this kind of harboring of fascists all over the world would be a really interesting place to kind of look at. We've also been talking about
00:52:28
Speaker
the Falun Gong and their shady dealings, the Epoch Times, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, their traveling Broadway show, which they poured tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars into promoting Shen Yun, I think it's called. I'm curious to dig. I was supposed to go to it this year, but I missed it. I was so upset.
00:52:53
Speaker
I think we might have to dig. I need to know. Plus, it's apparently a lovely and fun show, maybe a little boring. I love a boring show. Yeah, I mean, it looks really pretty, but there's not much story, kind of thing, is what I've heard. I heard that there's a rising tide of Karl Marx face that comes and crashes on the stage in this horrible display of anti-colonism, which I'm really excited to see with my own. You definitely need to go. I know.
00:53:21
Speaker
I don't know if an Alberta connection to this has been found yet. We might have to dig or push a little bit to find this or maybe just say fuck it and just write about it anyways.
Podcast Conclusion and Call to Action
00:53:31
Speaker
But like the Nova Scotia mass shooting where people are currently calling for a full-on inquiry was called Maple Gladio recently by the Chapo folks, the Chapo boys. Yeah, like I think all of those are kind of potential subjects to cover. And if you have
00:53:51
Speaker
Something that you really want covered by all means reach out to me on Twitter or in my email or Laura on Twitter which is what's your Twitter handle again? At underscore Saturn return the truth or tip line is open. Is there anything else you want to close this pod out with or did we kind of over the course of two hours finally have the discussion about conspiracy theories that we needed to have?
00:54:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think that pretty much covers it. I'm really excited to be doing this in an ongoing fashion. I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna make me even crazier than I already am. But should be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to what other people think would be interesting to cover in this kind of segment. Yeah, one last idea that here in my notes that maybe a subject for a future red string is
00:54:45
Speaker
the Trudeau Castro connection. Popular conspiracy theory on the right that Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's dad, which may explain his fondness for Fidel, which is probably the only cool thing about Justin Trudeau.
00:55:06
Speaker
Honestly, I wish, but I don't think so, but it would be cool. No, I don't think it's, I mean, obviously it's not real. I think it's been debunked to like the timelines don't work out or anything, but it is fun to write about. And like, there's all these like fun, like conspiracy theory memes you can bring up from the right and then like kind of proving it and stuff. But I think that's it. I think you can follow Canadian Q. That'd be an interesting one to take a look at. Maple Q, baby.
00:55:36
Speaker
All right, well I think that's it for this episode. Anything to plug? Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at underscore Saturn Return, as I mentioned before. I'm also one of the co-hosts on Kino Lefter, so you can follow that podcast where we talk about movies from a socialist perspective every week.
00:56:00
Speaker
Awesome. And if you like this podcast and want to keep hearing more podcasts like this, one of the things you can do to help is to share it. By all means, just, you know, hit that, smash that share button, like, subscribe, share, all of those things.
00:56:16
Speaker
You know, that's just a word of mouth is the most important way that the podcast like this actually get out into the world and more people listen to it. And, um, and one final thing you can do to help out if you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing it is to become a supporter. Uh, you can help keep this little independent media project going by going to the progress report.ca slash patrons, uh, putting your credit card there, you know, five, $15 a month, whatever you can afford really, really helps. And we are kind of pivoting to.
00:56:44
Speaker
a big hard launch, relaunch in September. So if you want to beat the rush when I will be asking you for money nonstop in September, just get in now and start giving us $5 a month and you can just ignore this part of the podcast. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, you can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme. Thanks so much again to Laura for coming on twice.
00:57:14
Speaker
And thank you for listening and goodbye.