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Conspiranews for October 2019
27 Plays5 years ago
This month's news update covers the following topics:
- the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
- the many travails of Facebook
- a cui bono theory about anti-vaccine exemptions
- Hillary Clinton's opinions on third party candidates, and
- shady dealings at InfoWars.
We also update you on all the Trump news, say a little about that Sandy Hook lawsuit, and wonder why two medical examiners have contrasting views about the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
—
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:
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Transcript
October Reflections and Time Travel
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the end of October, which means it's time for the news. But first, the old... Yes, let's have a quick look at what we were talking about at this time in previous years. Now, our time travel remote viewing device is unfortunately in the shop, so I suppose we'll just have to look at old episode notes on our internet-connected handheld touchscreen computers like a pair of Amish cavemen. Cave people. Well, well, yes. Anyway.
00:00:24
Speaker
Indeed.
Project Montarc and Media Appearances
00:00:25
Speaker
In October of 2014, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Catherine Ryan of Radio New Zealand, and we took a look at Project Montarc. Yes, one of our earliest viewer requests, that one. We then took a judgmental squint at the pejorative use of the term conspiracy theory, and we also discussed Gamergate and Ebola, and struggled to see the difference between the two.
00:00:48
Speaker
Indeed, now by 2015 the shoe was on the other foot and this time M was in the interviewer's chair, subjecting Joe Juskinski, Charles Pigton and Cathy Olmsted to a thorough grilling slash amiable chat. In between interviews we took our first look at the VW emissions scandal and then we got classy with a bit of Shakespearean authorship conspiracies.
Scandals and Conspiracies Over the Years
00:01:06
Speaker
Now come 2016, my shoes were on the correct feet again, just in time to take another look at the downing of Flight MH-17. Better known as that tragic Malaysian Airlines flight, no not that one, the other one. We then went on to look at conspiracy theories and feminism, and the whole WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Hillary Clinton, Shemozzle, in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Whatever happened with that?
00:01:32
Speaker
Ah, no idea, can't be that important. Certainly no more important than the release of a new Dan Brown thriller, which him read in October of 2017 and then told us about. The things I do for you people, I lost ten IQ points. Yes, we also came over all false flaggy as we looked at Operation Embarrass and the LaVonna fear. Finally, 2018 saw us gearing up for Halloween with some spooky tales of Phantom Cosmonauts, mysterious number stations and...
00:02:02
Speaker
the Catholic Church. We also looked into a rash of recent disappearances of notable figures, including Fan Bingbing, who eventually showed up alive and well, and Jamal Khashoggi, who... didn't. But that was then, this is now, and now is time for the Conspira News. Mate, that sounded like a
Podcast Evolution and Technical Challenges
00:02:27
Speaker
cow.
00:02:27
Speaker
News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News. News.
00:02:55
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. N. Denton.
00:03:11
Speaker
We should have been recording this on the usual Thursday, which was Halloween. We could have done a spooky episode with costumes and five voices. Joshua, it's Halloween in America, even as we record. It is Halloween in America, even as we record. But by the time, actually, if I get this edited tonight, it'll be going out Halloween America time. If I don't edit it until tomorrow morning, then everything is a lie. Yep. But let's pretend it's the end of October and not the start of November, and that way we're justified in having a news roundup.
00:03:41
Speaker
for The Conspiracy News of October. I don't think we have anything to announce. Well, people who are watching the podcast will see that things look different. We're broadcasting from the news station part of the set of the podcast is going to The Conspiracy.
00:03:57
Speaker
We're trying a few things out. You'll note that the microphone setup is completely different this week. We are continuing to have sound related issues. Yes, you even got a little bit electrocuted. I did. There's a bit of a spark in my life just for a few seconds there. And frankly, I've never felt so alive.
00:04:16
Speaker
Good. So yes, we'll see how this goes. We might stick with it. If it goes horribly, we'll just say it's our news set up. And we'll just pretend this episode never happened. But I think that's all. So I think we should just blast straight into the news. And there's a new sting coming up. Oh, is there? Oh, later. Not right now. The next sting you've heard before, but later on in the set up.
Conspiracy Theories: ISIS and Bin Laden
00:05:03
Speaker
breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news
00:05:11
Speaker
So we actually, we have a whole bunch of news here. A lot of it is stuff that we've already mentioned in our bonus patron episodes. The first three items are making new. We have new stuff. The Trump stuff is for patron listeners. Part of it will sound repetitive, although there are new bits sprinkled in. But no, we have new news. We have new news. We have old news and news that's just right. We call it the Goldilocks news.
00:05:39
Speaker
Do we? No, we don't. I just made that up. What we're talking about first is the death, of course, of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, otherwise known as that ISIS guy that Donald Trump killed, personally, I understand. Was it the Washington Post? Talked about the austere religious scholar who died? I only saw people on Twitter taking the piss out of that obituary, but I didn't know what they were talking about at the time.
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, anyway. So this guy is dead. He is. Donald Trump is lording it up like nothing on Earth. And yet, to my mind, this is a Osama bin Laden 2.0. In what way? In that, A, people are claiming that Bharati is not dead. People are claiming that his disposal at C is suspicious, proving that he's not dead, or he never existed in the first place, thus proving he can't be dead.
00:06:34
Speaker
Right, so what you're saying is there are conspiracy theories around the death of this person, much as there were around the death of Osama bin Laden, which is good for us because we're a podcast about conspiracy theories. So the first major conspiracy theory that comes to mind is the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, which is people who are saying, hasn't he died before? Haven't we had reports about him dying in the past?
00:06:54
Speaker
Now people are claiming I'm sure I heard he died X year or five years ago or three months ago etc etc which you had the same stories with the death of Osama bin Laden the death of Colonel Qaddafi
00:07:09
Speaker
apparently the death and then death again of Nelson Mandela. This does not appear to be a legitimate multiverse theory here, where people are getting information bleeding in from other dimensions. It just appears to be a case of, that name sounds familiar. Why would I have heard? Oh, he must have heard about a death notice. Well, he can't be dead now.
00:07:35
Speaker
Is it simply because we're talking about Western viewers to whom all sort of Middle Eastern type names kind of sound the same? And also those people say they all look the same as well. So there's a little bit of racism going on there, but also just selective attention. So people hear the name.
00:07:51
Speaker
They think they've heard it before and go, well, I must have heard it before because he was dead, as opposed to they've just had a passing reference. Well, so there was there was almost a running gag in the fight against Al-Qaeda with how many times did the number two person in Al-Qaeda get killed? By which I mean it wasn't the same person getting killed all the time. But any time someone would get killed, the next person would be number two, they'd get killed.
00:08:12
Speaker
And then people say, but didn't they kill the number two three months ago? In case of the way hierarchies and ranks work, you will eventually run out of number twos.
00:08:23
Speaker
But whilst there are number twos there, there are a lot of them. I'd just like to point out we've both said the phrase number twos a lot. I know. I know. I was kind of leveraging that. So we've got conspiracy theories saying that he's not dead and that there's wacky stuff in the US is up to its usual bizarre tricks. But there are more like prosaic. I don't know if that's the right word ones around exactly how it happened.
00:08:49
Speaker
Well, I think we're going to talk about the disposal of the body first. So there are the conspiracy theories that go, well, where's the body? If he's actually dead, where's the body? And these were the same conspiracy theories that came out when Osama bin Laden died, was killed, in that they disposed of the remains at sea.
00:09:09
Speaker
And they've done the same thing here. And people are going, well, that's a bit suspicious. How can you prove he was dead? Now, Trump has said they performed a test instantaneously at the site, which confirmed it was him. But without a body to show, it's a little bit hard to judge. And some people are going, that's a bit suspicious. Maybe there's more to the story. And that's where they, how did they find him?
00:09:37
Speaker
How did they get him? What really went on? Conspiracy theories come out. And it's probably worth pointing out that this is again the same as what happened with Bin Laden. There are all the stories about how they kind of identified his body by his height. And since they didn't have a ruler, they got a soldier who was supposedly the same height as him to lie down next to the body. See, I just like the idea that the Navy SEALs go right. So we need somebody who's the same height as Osama Bin Laden in our group.
00:10:06
Speaker
I mean, your shooting record is terrible, but you are the right height. So you'll come and make sure you don't get shot because we need your body. I mean, if you die, we're going to drag you with us. We need to compare your body to his. But anyway, returning to ISIS now, Al Qaeda 2.0. So what?
00:10:26
Speaker
What exactly are people saying? Because this came about just after Trump pulled America out of in the way of Turkey and the Kurdish people, which has not worked out well for them. Are people saying that
00:10:42
Speaker
He did that so that they'd have an excuse to go against ISIS? Or are they saying that he went after this ISIS dude to take the heat off his stupid decision to pull troops out of Syria? See, there's a third option here, which seems to be the one which people in the military in the US are saying, which was there was a long term plan to get this guy.
00:11:04
Speaker
And Trump's actions with regard to the Kurds, Syria, and Turkey basically meant they had to escalate the plan dramatically because they were relying on Kurdish intelligence, with America basically abandoning the Kurds,
00:11:21
Speaker
They were going to run out of that intelligence or find that the intelligence would suddenly go against them. So they had to move very quickly and perform the operation as soon as possible. So this wasn't Trump trying to deflect from a disastrous decision. This was a case of military chiefs going, if we don't do this now, we're not going to be able to do it at all because the president has imperiled this particular operation.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so I think that's kind of where it stands at the moment, isn't it? We possibly haven't had time for the really juicy conspiracy theories to develop around this one, but there's enough similarities, I suppose, with the Osama bin Laden case that people can trot out the old favourites with a different name on them.
00:12:05
Speaker
Well yes and who knows in a few weeks time this may be big news or in a few weeks time we may be talking about an impeachment jury but we'll get on to that later. First let's talk about Facebook.
Facebook and Political Misinformation
00:12:19
Speaker
Do we have to? Well it's in the notes which you wrote so I assume we do. Fine. So Facebook is
00:12:28
Speaker
in a bit of a spot of bother at the moment when it comes to political ads which has actually been exacerbated by Twitter now saying they're just not going to run political ads at all which may or may not be a good thing as people have pointed out
00:12:43
Speaker
Twitter banning political ads actually does aid in a bit the powerful because you can't run ads against establishment figures. And also you get a kind of hard line to draw as to what is a political ad versus what is simply telling people about achievements you've done and what counts as criticizing those achievements without being a political ad. It's going to get very messy very quickly.
00:13:10
Speaker
but Facebook is kind of in trouble because Facebook has said that they won't fact check political ads, except it turns out they will. They will? Yes, so this is a, it's kind of a weird story here, so
00:13:27
Speaker
Elizabeth Warren last week ran an ad on Facebook saying that Lindsey Graham supports the Green New Deal. And she ran this ad on Facebook not to mislead voters that Lindsey Graham, a Republican who opposes the Green New Deal, actually supports it. She ran this ad to point out that Facebook has said they will not do any fact checking of political ads.
00:13:54
Speaker
Yes, she did make a point of saying, I put this ad out here. It is false. You know, she never claimed that what she was that she was trying to mislead, but said, look, I put up this blatantly false ad. What are you going to do about it? And people are asking, what is Facebook going to do about this? Because this does allow for, as we're seeing at the moment, the Republicans and Trump in particular running attack ads against, say,
00:14:17
Speaker
presidential candidate Joe Biden, claiming that Hunter Biden, his son, is being investigated for fraud in the Ukraine when he's not. And people are concerned that this kind of skews the balance of power, especially given the way that Facebook ads are algorithmic. They're not just an open slayer that advertising to everyone, they are carefully targeted, which means that they are the kind of ads that can be weaponized.
00:14:46
Speaker
Now, Facebook has said we will not engage in any fact checking. So a candidate in California who's running for governor went, fine, I'm going to announce my candidacy for governor and I'm going to run false ads about my candidates and we'll see what Facebook will actually do. Now, Facebook have now said, oh, but we are going to check ads if someone admits they are lying up front.
00:15:14
Speaker
So we're only going to check ads where people say they are lying. We're not going to check ads to see whether someone is lying, which now means the problem is not whether you run fake ads, it's whether you're honest enough to admit that what you're saying is a lie. As long as you're willing to hide your intent,
00:15:32
Speaker
conspire against Facebook, then you can run false ads to your heart's content. It's starting to sound a little bit like a logic puzzle if you have one ad that always tells the truth and one ad which always lies.
00:15:46
Speaker
How do you know which door to go through? The left one. It's right there. Quite simple. Yes, because it does kind of say, OK, so you can't have an ad that contains lies if you tell the truth about the fact that it's lies. But if you lie about the fact that you're lying, then you're lying lies. And this is getting even worse to a large extent because Facebook is talking about having trusted sources.
00:16:14
Speaker
So, and this is disturbing, turns out that in the States almost 80% of people get their news from Facebook.
00:16:25
Speaker
That's quite a lot. I mean, I don't use Facebook a lot. No. But I don't get many news stories in my Facebook feed. No. Which means if I were relying on Facebook for news, I'd be really impoverished. Really, really impoverished. Anyway, Facebook has a policy of working with trusted sites. One of the sites they are now claiming is trusted is Breitbart.com.
00:16:53
Speaker
who we certainly don't trust. No, they are the kind of people who put theory before evidence. Now, people at Facebook were questioned about this. They said, oh, no, we're not going to succumb to ideology here. They're a trusted site. And people have pointed out that the problem is you're kind of making the claim that they're a trusted site.
00:17:16
Speaker
which is putting their ideology on par with, say, new sites that work with evidence-first politics later, that's an ideological decision. And wasn't it Breitbart, or am I thinking of a different site that people have seen as users' networks of Facebook pages to vastly inflate their reach in contravention of Facebook-supposed policies? Well, they were saying so, but apparently that's going to be offered as well.
00:17:46
Speaker
Yeah, so there's all that dodginess. I assume we've all seen the clips of him being grilled in Congress and coming across not well.
00:17:56
Speaker
Although I'm told apparently the constant congressperson, congresswoman, and congressman that he does before the start of every thing was to try and run out the clock a bit because they had a limited amount of time. That seems to be the one interviewing technique that he had been taught, but the rest of it didn't fit well enough. I did like the post that was online pointing out that here's a still of Zuckerberg at Congress.
00:18:18
Speaker
And here's the matter. And the wax dummy looks a lot more human. It's very, very weird. That man has seen a lot. Like vaccines, Joshua. Tell me about Facebook and vaccines. OK, so we've had a bit more anti-vaxxer stuff. So it was Idaho's Department of Health and Welfare. I've been to Idaho. I'm just saying. I have not. Doctor Who fan fiction now. Did you get vaccinated while you were there?
00:18:47
Speaker
Yes, but I'm not allowed to talk about it because it's a disease that you're not allowed to know about. OK. Idaho's Department of Health and Welfare bought 14 ads to promote a statewide program providing free vaccinations for children, which Facebook removed. Meanwhile, at the same time, they didn't remove anti-vax ads, which they've said that they will remove because they won't tolerate anti-vaccine material on their social media platform.
00:19:17
Speaker
And this has made people go, hmm, this sexy is bad. So it's more of those algorithms apparently that supposedly because the pro-vaccine ads were referencing, were trying to sort of refute anti-vax conspiracy theories and therefore got flagged as anti-vax conspiracy theories, which is a problem that's been in YouTube as well, hasn't it? Yes, and in part the problem is
00:19:43
Speaker
If you're running an anti-vax ad, what you try to do is not make your ad look like an anti-vax ad. So you count your language, you talk about things very carefully. When you're running a pro-vaccine ad, which is countering anti-vax information,
00:20:02
Speaker
then you often engage in the recitation of anti-vax claims to debate them, which means that the AI which is looking at your ad then claims your ad is an anti-vax ad and then it cancels it. Yeah, so it all seems to come down to the fact that
00:20:24
Speaker
significant stuff is happening under the control of algorithms. I was reading a thing today about sort of Mark Zuckerberg and basically, I mean, there was a little bit of the whole sort of, I don't know, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, why the hell do we listen to this guy? All he is is a dude who figured out a way to make a lot of money off of a website. What does he know about how democracy should function? But it was basically sort of saying, you know,
00:20:50
Speaker
Forget his input, you just need to make laws. The business that we talked about the other week about the act in America, which means that sites like Facebook are immune to libel laws, they're saying, well, just get rid of that and make them take responsibility. Because the thing is, they can take down copyrighted stuff. When there's copyright claims, which they could possibly be liable for, those go down. In Germany, where you're not allowed to have anything to do with Nazism, that gets taken down. They remove that. Yeah. So they could do it if they wanted to. We need to make them want to.
00:21:20
Speaker
And of course what makes this particularly galling is that Facebook have promised to up their game in this regard and are not following through.
00:21:30
Speaker
No. So, I mean, in terms of the political ads stuff, I think, yeah, it seems like they talk in terms of politics and then that gets tricky because one side, you know, but wants to say, well, our ads should be fine, but their ads are horribly dishonest and the other side says exactly the same thing. And what people really seem to want is whether it's about truth. Is it true or not? And the only way it seems to
00:21:52
Speaker
to screen these things, whether or not they're true, is to hire human beings and pay them human money to actually fact check them. Which Google nor Facebook seem to want to do. No. Anyway, so enough of Facebook and their anti-vax stuff. Let's talk about some anti-vax stuff. Excellent. All right. This is a lovely Qui Bono story. Now, where is Bono at this particular point in time? I don't know.
00:22:21
Speaker
No, it could be anywhere, quite frankly. Check him on your GPS device. No, he's cut the ankle bracelet off again. We implanted his neck. And his ankle bracelet's neck. I don't think you know how Bono's Anatomy works, anyway.
Vaccine Exemptions and Medical Ethics
00:22:38
Speaker
So it turns out that some doctors might be giving vaccine exceptions because it pays rather well. Yes, funny that. I didn't know this was a thing.
00:22:51
Speaker
but that you can get an exemption for it. I suppose it does make sense because some people genuinely cannot have vaccines. There are some people who have allergic reactions to vaccines or have suppressed immune systems, which means that giving them a vaccine which can cause a low level fever is actually quite bad. And these people are the people who get legal exemptions in the US from vaccines in states which allow legal exemptions.
00:23:21
Speaker
And for good reason, these are the people who need to be protected by herd immunity because they're the ones who cannot get vaccinated. But it turns out that some doctors have spotted this, particularly in San Diego, a zanvelet, a San Diego based doctor who single-handedly wrote at least a third of the area's vaccine exemptions and charged $180 for the evaluation.
00:23:50
Speaker
And in some cases, never even examine the patients to see if they actually qualified for the exemption. They seem to go, you don't want to have an immunisation? Give me some money and I'll make sure you don't. So yes, as you say in terms of conspiracy theories, there's a benefit there.
00:24:08
Speaker
money talks. Yeah, sometimes the Qui Bono analysis actually does pay out, which is kind of how it's meant to work. So now, another bit of
00:24:23
Speaker
a viewer slash listener feedback. It was good old Captain Hapster, wasn't it? It was indeed. Thank you, sir, slash Madam slash other. I don't actually know what gender the identify is, but look, they're a captain. I have to say is we salute you, Captain. That was a really dodgy salute. Isn't the Navy one?
00:24:43
Speaker
There's a thing about the Navy one. They go like that because they all had dirty palms or something. Some weird naval thing. You've got dirty palms. Yeah, it's a completely different reason. So yes, on Twitter, we were alluded to some wacky happenings in Australia. Yeah. There's a delightful twist in this tale, which comes right at the end.
00:25:06
Speaker
A person in Australia by the name of Angus Taylor accused Sydney's Lord Mayor, because Sydney is one of those big cities, so they get a Megamere or Lord Mayor in the British system, his name is Clovermore, of driving up carbon emissions by spending 15 million Australian dollars on travel
00:25:28
Speaker
in the financial year 2017 to 2018 and this was backed up by a council document that was then sent to of all places the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
00:25:42
Speaker
Now, this was taken to be a problem for multiple reasons. A, that's a lot of money to be spending on travel. And B, the Lord Mayor had earlier declared a climate emergency and the need for Sydney to act upon that. So this travel cost looked ever so slightly
00:26:01
Speaker
Hypocrisical. Yes, not a good look for the Lord Mayor, or at least it wouldn't have been a good look for the Lord Mayor if it had turned out to be true. It turns out that this damning document that showed this $15 million figure for travel had been faked.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yes, so the actual annual report for the 2017 to 2018 year indicates that councillors spent $229,000 on travel, which was actually under the budgeted allocation of $300,000 Australian dollars. Now, Josh, I'm not a number weighing expert.
00:26:40
Speaker
But I do believe that 300,000 is smaller than 15 million. That is correct. The education system hasn't failed you in this case. Now, I don't know by what factor. I think it's a factor of pi. Several. A factor of several. Of several pi's. Several pi's, yep.
Forged Documents and Political Scandals
00:26:58
Speaker
Now, what made the story particularly interesting is that no one is accusing Taylor of doctoring the document. They don't know where the doctor document came from, but they're fairly sure that Angus Taylor was not the one who supplied the Daily Telegraph with a doctor document because Angus Taylor is not just some schmo. Angus Taylor is the energy and emissions reduction minister of the government of Australia.
00:27:27
Speaker
Right. I don't know how the politics of it works. Is he sort of a left-wing guy and the Lord Mayor is a right-wing sort of guy or vice versa? Joshua, Australia is ruled by right-wing reptiles of both sides. The government is... they're called the Liberals. Actually, they're called the Coalition. They are right-wing. Right.
00:27:49
Speaker
So what I'm asking is, is there a difference though? Is the mayor then, is he then a lefty mayor? Well, I mean, he's a Labour mayor, but Labour in Australia basically agrees with the government on all substantive issues anyway. So they're kind of right wing as well. This is right wing in an Australasian sense. Our right wing does not reflect the right wing in Europe or the US. Why does your computer keep making noise at us? Is it angry? Have you angered the computer?
00:28:17
Speaker
It's just got a mind of its own. Fair enough. Now, wasn't there... I don't think we've got it down here. Wasn't there something... The doctoring of the document was quite cartoonishly badly done as well, wasn't it? They'd misspelled something or there was something... Yeah, there were. I mean, this is the case of when you're inflating numbers by that degree, I think you basically just give up or hope.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yes, the doctoring itself was not particularly good, which is why Council went, no, that's quite clearly not what's meant to be in the document. I think they put things in the wrong columns, the formatting was wrong, the fonts were wrong. But no, it turns out the document is doctored. But in typical Australian fashion, the minister has not resigned from his criticism, even though it turns out that they spent only $229,000 rather than $15,000.
00:29:10
Speaker
million. The minister has still said they probably shouldn't have gone to that climate change expo over in Europe anyway. So the minister is not going to resign from his criticism, even though he's off by several factors of pi. He sure is.
00:29:28
Speaker
Now, now we get on to the stuff we've talked about before. Shall we just do just do it really quick? I time you or you can time me. So Hillary Clinton, we've talked about this in our bonus episodes. Hillary Clinton's got a little bit of trouble in suggesting that one of the Democratic candidates for president at the moment is actually working for the Russian government to try and split the vote and sabotage it. And it's been suggested that Tulsi Gabbard, who's a
00:29:58
Speaker
Congress person. I believe so. I had no idea.
Political Accusations and Speculation
00:30:02
Speaker
People have hinted that she could be the candidate that Clinton is talking about. And everybody said it's all just a bit of a bad look, especially about how she kind of said similar things about Jill Stein in the last election, which did just kind of come across a little bit as a little bit sort of born to rule-ish in the whole idea at the time that it was kind of Hillary's turn
00:30:23
Speaker
to get a shot at the presidency and anyone getting in Hawaii was obviously some sort of a plant or a double agent or who knows what. Indeed. Now, other news that we covered in the bonus episode is a little bit of the old Alex Jones. Now, Alex Jones, you might remember, is a really, really angry person who's always going on about vitamin deficiency and gay frogs.
00:30:46
Speaker
Turns out that doing that has made the back of my throat, if this is slightly constrict, but I'll be back in time for this. So Ron Jacobson, who worked at InfoWars between 2004 and 2017 in video production, has testified in a Sandy Hook trial that he warned staff that they shouldn't be telling open lies about what happened to the parents of Sandy Hook with respect to their children who died.
00:31:13
Speaker
only to be met with laughter and ridicule. So basically Jacobson pointed out that their reliance on a particular source, Wolfgang Helberg, was not a good idea given they had one source for the claim that Sandy Hook was fake and this particular source was taken to be unreliable in the first place. He pointed this out, was laughed at and eventually forced out of info wars as a result.
00:31:43
Speaker
So it's not entirely clear how much of this is sort of us covering the holes after the fact I was the only sane person in the room sort of thing that we do see people engage in, but I suppose it does speak to the mindset, I suppose. Yes, it speaks to the idea that maybe Infowars isn't about getting to the truth. Maybe Infowars is more about
00:32:05
Speaker
generating ad revenue from a particular part of the population wants to hear particular types of stories. Now, now we come to the Trump portion. So I think we can probably say that the Trumpatorium is is dead for the time being. For the time being, especially given the news today that there's actually going to be an impeachment trial. Yes, things are significant and significantly conspiratorial that we really don't have an excuse for not talking about it. So we have a new signal of understanding new sting.
00:32:35
Speaker
We do. So we're gonna play that sting right about now. And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news.
00:32:47
Speaker
I think that was quite a pleasant sting, wasn't it? I'm going to assume it was. Yes, yes. I mean, what was the best bit about the sting? Oh, it's audio qualities, I would have to say. That's true. It could be heard with the human ear, consisted of sound wave vibrations at a frequency and amplitude that the human brain was capable of processing, all that stuff, you know? Please, please continue. And I also liked the good bits. Good bits such as? Didn't like the bad bits. Did you like the bit with Ted Danson? Sure.
00:33:16
Speaker
And what about the unicorn? It brought a delightful flavour to the proceedings. You don't think that it was kind of overstated? Yes. Now, one final question. What is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything? We all know that's 42. Why? Why are you forcing me to make such a... Because I want you to talk about the insurance policy. Okay, right. So this actually
00:33:43
Speaker
for all the talk of impeachment and proceedings and all that. This is a little bit different, but it's worth mentioning because it's a conspiracy theory that Trump and his supporters have been promoting and one that Trump himself has tweeted out a little bit, which is the insurance policy conspiracy theory. And this is the theory which goes that
00:34:01
Speaker
The whole DNC email hack in the lead-up to the 2016 election, this theory says that the Democrats themselves were responsible for that. They called in people from Ukraine, I think it was, to hack themselves as an insurance policy, because obviously this was before the election and any election results, so the idea was the whole thing happened.
00:34:21
Speaker
So that in the case that Hillary Clinton didn't win the election, they could say, oh look, but we got hacked. There was collusion and therefore the election result is not legitimate and so on and so forth. Now there's no evidence for this in any way at all, but this appears to be how they're trying to write off the Holy Mail hack.
00:34:40
Speaker
And I kind of don't fit into Trump's claim that this is an illegitimate witch hunt and no president has ever been persecuted in the same way whatsoever apart from Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. Yes, okay, so impeachment, impeach away. Okay, so...
Election Interference Allegations
00:34:59
Speaker
Prior to today all of this was taught behind closed doors about corrupt practices about Trump and basically the Ukraine. Now amongst the things that Trump has claimed to world leaders he recently told Vladimir Putin he wasn't perturbed by Russian interference in the US elections as the US medals and other nation's elections as well which
00:35:23
Speaker
is kind of true, but it's also not the kind of thing you're either actually meant to say out loud, especially to a leader of a foreign power that engages in meddling itself. You're meant to keep the quiet part quiet, not the quiet part loud.
00:35:42
Speaker
He's also been claiming that Adam Schiff, head of the House Intelligence Committee, helped author the whistleblower's complaint that actually led to the initial inquiry and investigation into possible impeachment. And there is no evidence that Adam Schiff
00:35:59
Speaker
helped author the complaint. It is true that Adam Schiff met with the complainant before the complaint was made, but that is fairly standard because whistle blows often meet with members of Congress to work out how to deliver their whistle blowing in such a way that they cannot be targeted by the people they're whistle blowing against.
00:36:22
Speaker
And the investigation has gone on. So if you've been paying attention, you'll probably know that we've heard from the likes of Bill Taylor, acting US Ambassador to Kyiv, or to Ukraine, I suppose. He would have been in Kyiv. So he's talked about the wacky, the slightly dodgy dealings that the US had with Ukraine. We've heard from Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who is a top Ukrainian expert. Now, he's the one
00:36:45
Speaker
He's the one who Fox News and the like have been trying to sort of insinuate with some sort of a foreign agent, haven't they? He's a decorated US soldier. With a purple heart. With a purple heart who nevertheless has sort of Ukrainian heritage. So there's been a lot of eyebrow waggling and, oh, he loves Ukraine, does he? Very, very interested in them.
00:37:08
Speaker
So he has been saying equally damning things. He was supposedly in the room or at least listening in. He was one of the people listening in on the call because he's a Ukrainian expert. So he was basically listening in for the purposes of helping the government. And he has said that the transcript and the memos released by the White House about this call are incomplete.
00:37:31
Speaker
and miss out important phrases and terms used by Trump to the president of the Ukraine. So his claim is that it was quite obviously a quid quo pro phone call, and the White House has tried to downplay that by making the transcript and memo look more innocuous than it actually is. And even then it wasn't really that innocuous. No, that's the thing. If the transcript is not as bad as the original call, that's pretty disturbing.
00:38:02
Speaker
Meanwhile, the White House apparently said they're not going to comply with the impeachment inquiry, saying it's trying to overturn the election. The impeachment investigation. What's the difference? Well, now there's going to be a formal impeachment inquiry. So the inquiry is what happened beforehand. The White House will find it much harder to resist it because it has actually gone through a legal process in Congress. Although they are claiming it's illegal, but more about that in just a minute.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yes, so what have we got? They didn't allow the US's EU ambassador to testify of the contents of the Ukraine Corps. Rudy Giuliani and his buddies have said they'll ignore any subpoenas in the inquiry. I wonder how far that will get them. Well, given that three of them have been arrested, two forcibly so. One actually handed himself in in New York because he was aware there was a warrant out.
00:38:51
Speaker
So we're talking about people like Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman and David Koria, who have all been involved in various committees to help elect Donald Trump and have been channeling large amounts of money into pro-Trump action committees from someone known as Foreign National Number One. But it seems quite clear that Foreign National Number One is a Ukrainian government official.
00:39:20
Speaker
It also seems like John Bolton sounded the alarm on Giuliani, which I've heard some people saying, should have given him his war, dude. Dude wanted a war in Iraq, but instead you gave him the boot. So this is one of these tricky things where John Bolton's a bad person. He really wanted a war, didn't he? And it does seem that John Bolton's kind of the hero of our time. Because John Bolton looked at what Rudy Giuliani was doing in the Ukraine and went,
00:39:47
Speaker
Yeah, even I have standards. I'm not going to lie to get into this particular stuff. Now, this doesn't make John Bolton a friend, but when an enemy of your enemy harms your other enemy, you can't help but go keep going.
00:40:11
Speaker
The important part now is that the Department of Justice is now investigating the Mueller investigation. So, Tony Barr has bade the Department of Justice to investigate whether the Department of Justice actually committed a crime by investigating Donald Trump in the first place with regard to the Mueller investigation.
00:40:33
Speaker
So the DOJ is investigating itself, which is kind of hilarious, but that's also hilarious for the sheer fact that Donald Trump has persuaded Australian Prime Minister as far as we
Australia's Role in Mueller Probe
00:40:45
Speaker
know. At time of recording. Because they do change along. Scott Morrison to investigate itself as part of the investigation into the Mueller inquiry, because of course it turns out
00:40:56
Speaker
The person who started the investigation was Australia's foreign diplomat, Alexander Downer, who was in London at the time, met up with George Papadopoulos at a
00:41:11
Speaker
Some kind of formal do in London. Papadopoulos was the person who claimed we have the democratic emails. Down a whim. That seems like the kind of thing I should probably inform the FBI about. Down a going to the FBI was what revealed the DNC hack.
00:41:29
Speaker
The DNC hack of course then led to the claims about Russia and now the DOJ is investigating those claims and getting Australia to be complicit in those claims by getting Australia to investigate one of its senior diplomats. But there's still more, still more to go around because Italy, they've got Italy in on the act as well. Yes, although Italy has managed to sidestep the song.
00:41:54
Speaker
Attorney General William Barr visited Italy twice in the last year to meet with intelligence agencies to ask them to clarify their role in a 2016 meeting between Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor, and George Papadopoulos at the Link campus in Rome.
00:42:19
Speaker
Milfzud, I wish I knew how to pronounce it, told Papadopoulos that Russia had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton, that must be the...
00:42:30
Speaker
Oh, right. All right. No, actually, no, I am right. So, Mifsud was the person who told Papadopoulos that Russia had obtained damaging information about Clinton. Papadopoulos told Downer. Then told Downer, and the rest is history. Trump claims that Mifsud is not a professor with links to Russia, but rather a Western, intelligent
00:42:51
Speaker
asset working for Obama, as part of a plot to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.
00:43:03
Speaker
Are there any proof for that at all? No, and in fact, actually, the Italians have claimed that A, we're not involved in this and B, this is nonsense. But William Barr has gone to Italy twice to chase this up, almost as if he's doing the President's bidding and not being an independent member of the third branch of government. But that's another matter of time. Funny that, yeah. And finally, and I'm pretty sure we've talked about this in Patreon episodes as well, isn't the CrowdStrike thing?
00:43:33
Speaker
CrowdStrike, the private company that did the analysis of the DNC's servers after the email hike in 2016, and they were kind of the ones who reported back that it looks like Russia did it, which is now a consensus, as I understand it, among intelligence agencies. And so yeah, Trump and co have been going at CrowdStrike a bit and trying to link it to Ukraine as well, which of course then brings in the whole Biden, Hunter Biden,
00:44:00
Speaker
So Trump at one point said CrowdStrike was owned by a very rich Ukrainian, which apparently it is not at all, and trying to claim it was some sort of Ukrainian thing. And so then this kind of ties back in quite a nice way to what we talked about right at the beginning of the Trump section, this insurance theory policy that it was Ukraine and the Democrats cooking up a thing to hack their own email server to give themselves an excuse if they happen to lose.
00:44:29
Speaker
The wheel has come full circle. It really has. And that's basically all the Trump news we've got. And as you can see, there's quite a lot of it. It's kind of scattered because there are a lot of different avenues. We have to hope that the announcement today that there is actually going to be a formal impeachment against Donald Trump. Now, whether that's successful or another matter entirely.
00:44:51
Speaker
But Congress has started the process. There'll be public hearings now investigating exactly what Trump did with the Ukraine, etc, etc. And I'm sure the President of the United States of America will treat this as soberly and seriously as it deserves. I don't doubt it in the slightest. It's already crying treason.
00:45:13
Speaker
Now, I haven't actually been paying attention to how long we've been recording for, but I assume we've got time for just a couple more updates of older stories. A very quick update after the update, Sten. Update. And retractions.
00:45:30
Speaker
So it's time for an update on Sandy Hook and the Sandy Hook trial, which I believe has just come to a rather interesting conclusion. Yes, so Lenny Posner, who you may recall is the father of a child who was killed in the Sandy Hook shootings, he's been awarded $450,000.
00:45:50
Speaker
by a jury in Wisconsin after suing James Fetzer and Mike Palacek over their book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. A terrible, terrible volume, I have read that. Yes, apparently. It manages to work a bit of good old fashioned anti-Semitism in with the whole false flag as well from what I understand. It mixes a lot of things in. Now Palacek, the second co-author, actually settled out of court. But Fetzer decided to go all the way.
00:46:19
Speaker
and has kind of suffered because of it. Although, as is classic in all American litigation stories, Theta is going to appeal. Yes. I mean, it was all along the lines of that the books, the book's publication caused real world consequences for Mr. Posner harassment, gave him PTSD, he gave examples of these death threats and so on he received.
00:46:46
Speaker
And basically afterwards gave a fairly good account of it not being a free speech issue. He said, quoting, Mr. Fetzer has the right to believe that Sandy Hook never happened. He has the right to express his ignorance, but this award illustrates the difference between the right of people like Mr. Fetzer to be wrong and the right of victims like myself and my child to be free from defamation, free from harassment, and free from the intentional infliction of terror.
00:47:11
Speaker
Nice words. And finally, a good old Epstein update. Hadn't forgotten about him. So Josh, did Epstein commit suicide? Well, that's the thing. So according to New York City chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, she's only performed the autopsy on him and came back with the finding that he had indeed committed suicide.
Epstein Death Debate
00:47:32
Speaker
However,
00:47:33
Speaker
Former New York City medical examiner, Dr. Michael Baden, having looked at the autopsy results, reckons he sees indications in there that it's more likely to have been a homicidal strangulation. And it's that good old hyoid bone. I don't know what a hyoid bone is, but I've seen enough CSI to know that supposedly a fracture of the hyoid bone is what you see in strangulations more than.
00:47:59
Speaker
Yes, because I believe it's one of those things where it's possible for it to break from a hanging, but it requires a certain amount of force around the neck that it's more likely to break from strangulation. But that's the thing, more likely to break from strangulation does mean it sometimes does break from suicide, which means it's not a obvious deciding factor between suicide and murder.
00:48:29
Speaker
Yeah, so Dr. Baden basically said the various fractures around Epstein's larynx, as well as hemorrhages in his eyes, he thought were more consistent with a murder than a suicide. But Dr. Sampson has said she stands firmly behind her findings and basically sort of says this
00:48:46
Speaker
When you look at an autopsy, you have to look at the whole thing. This thing that you see in the CSI thing, the thing you see in television of finding the one little detail which shows, oh, I know it blows the whole case open. She's like, no, you can't just look at a little detail. You have to look at everything in the context of the whole thing. In the context of the whole thing, she still thinks it is much more likely that he committed suicide.
00:49:08
Speaker
Which, as we've said when we've talked about Epstein, doesn't mean there was no conspiracy to get him killed. It's entirely possible people could have put him in a situation where he was likely to kill himself. Or quite deliberately not checked up on him for quite some time, because if you're feeling a bit suicidal, I'll talk to you in three hours time rather than half an hour.
00:49:27
Speaker
So it's not like this puts paid to all conspiracy theories, just possibly some of them. Although, of course, if you accept that Michael Baden's testimony is greater than that of... Dr. Simpson? That's the one. I was reading through the notes there to get to that name. Unhelpfully, it's at the very end of the notes rather than at the very beginning. Then you might go, well, he's a man. We should listen to a man's voice on Epstein.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yes, we shouldn't. One thing which wasn't clear from the news story was whether he had just looked at the report
00:50:06
Speaker
Or whether he'd actually been there at the time, or how detailed were those he was looking at? Yeah, I wasn't quite sure. I had assumed he was looking at the published findings. I didn't think there was any implication that he had actually been involved in the autopsy himself. He was just reinterpreting the results as they had been presented.
00:50:27
Speaker
Anyway, I suspect there'll be more on this in time to come, but not tonight. Not tonight. Because if this Halloween episode over and on with, we'll be recording a patron special. Now, Joshua, we have an exciting topic for our patrons this week, don't we? What is it? It is the Securitate of Romania.
00:50:49
Speaker
It is indeed. We'll be talking about the Romanian secret police during the communist period. And what happened after the December 1989 revolution? Which could be a little bit Halloweeny. It's sort of sort of Transylvadian. It's just racist. Yeah, but it's Halloween racism, which is OK somehow. You're the kind of person who confuses Frankenstein with Frankenstein's monster. No, that's not true.
00:51:19
Speaker
As we all know, the real monster is the person making the pedantic distinction between Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster. I'll see you in hell, but I won't see you in hell. I'll see you next week. Yes, goodbye.
00:51:41
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:52:42
Speaker
And remember the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.