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Gang Stalking 2 - Targeted Individuals
39 Plays5 years ago
This week Josh and M revisit the world of (purported) gang stalking by taking a look at the 'Targeted Individual' community. Along the way Josh gets distracted by M's knees...
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
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Transcript
Introduction and Technical Difficulties
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi there, it's Dr. MRXdenteth and I'm here to warn you about the following episode, not because of its content, not because of its lewd nature, but rather because at some point during the recording my microphone falls within the fold of my clothes and thus there is a strange kind of
00:00:23
Speaker
rustling sound you will hear from time to time. That is not due to the tendrils of eldritch wisdom growing out of the back of my body causing interference with the recording. It is indeed cotton rubbing up against a microphone as I move. Listener beware.
Episode Gift and Introduction
00:00:53
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr Imdenty.
00:01:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison, sitting next to me, as always, is Dr. M. Denteth. We've been told we're a bit flabby in our introduction, so we're just going to cut to the chase this week and get straight into content after one brief detour, because last week we had a little intro sketch about my new book.
00:01:24
Speaker
Now, I actually forgot to do this in the show, and I thought it should be better to do it on screen rather than off screen. So, Josh, here is your complimentary copy of Taking Conspiracy Theory Seriously, which even has a handwritten note by one of the authors and the editor on the inside. Why, thank you very much, Dr Denta. I like the staginess of what you just did there.
00:02:06
Speaker
Previously on the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy
Reflecting on Past Episodes
00:02:15
Speaker
Well, look, I think I'm just going to sit here and riffle through my brand new book, quite frankly, because it's such a pleasurable sensation. And also, because it's summery, it's quite nice, a bit of a breeze. Well, it does remind me of what you do with air conditioning in this room. So do you want to do the previous thing, or are you just getting tanked in advance of... Can't I do both? Can't I do both? Possibly. So what were we doing four years ago today?
00:02:39
Speaker
In episode 39 we were talking about reasonable disagreements, i.e. why is it there are disagreements between conspiracy theorists and non-conspiracy theorists, but also between conspiracy theorists and other conspiracy theorists. Which if you want to hear that, go back to episode 39 back in 25 days. I have literally no memory of that episode.
00:02:59
Speaker
I wrote a paper on it. Well there we go. Probably more to you than me then. Indeed. It was. It was one of our fantasy episodes. Ah right. Yeah. So 2016? Well we're actually now between two episodes.
Conspiracies and Public Figures
00:03:12
Speaker
So between episodes 84 and strangely enough 85. Where one week we talked about David Robert Grimes and his mathematical model of the viability of conspiracies. And then the next week we talked about the death of Antonin Scalia.
00:03:27
Speaker
which was back in a time when American politics wasn't as toxic as it appears today, which is saying something because those conspiracy theories were pretty toxic at the time. Oh, but the death squads killing Supreme Court justices, it was grand.
00:03:43
Speaker
And then in 2017, this date, we were talking about President Bloody Trump, who we've tried to decide we're not going to talk about this. Unless we really absolutely have to. Unless he actually triggers a world war or gets impeached or, you know, assassinated while giving the next state of the union. I don't know. But so that's what we were doing last year because we did it so much last year. Not going to do it this year.
00:04:06
Speaker
I see that was 2017. We actually did nothing last year. Sorry, you're two years ago. Didn't we? This is one of the weeks we head off. How about that? Good source. That was previously on the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. Short, succinct and to the point. Let's move on. Let's do that. Updates. And retractions.
00:04:27
Speaker
So, one update this week, and no retractions.
Controversies and Public Reactions
00:04:30
Speaker
This time we're talking about one-time guest on the show, David Icke. The Australian government apparently is being pressured to revoke his visa ahead of a speaking tour there in March. Now I should like to point out that Mr Icke is not coming here this time that he's visiting Down Under.
00:04:44
Speaker
maybe our interview with him has put him off. You can listen to us talk with David Icke all the way back in episode 111 back in August of 2016. The time when the lumbering system all went horribly wrong. Thanks David. Thanks David. Anyway, members of the Australian Labor Party have written to the current Immigration Minister, David Coleman, calling on him to ban Icke on the basis of his anti-Semitic views and apparently having campaigned for Holocaust denial to be taught in schools.
00:05:12
Speaker
Is he actually done that, or is it one of those, eh, dog whistling? Yeah, we'll talk about that in just a sec. What makes this particularly awkward is Australia's somewhat mercurial approach to issuing, or not issuing visas. They did let Lauren Southern and Stephen Molyneux in, but have banned Gavin Innes and Chelsea Manning. They let a French au pair stay, despite breaking the terms of her visa, but refused asylum for a woman fleeing religious persecution. Basically, Australia's visa system is a bit like a magic eight ball at the moment.
00:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, so that Holocaust denial thing. So I too was a little bit curious about this. It does turn out that David Eich in more recent publications has been quite challenging of the official story about what happened during the Holocaust and has on occasion kind of said they need to teach the controversy in schools. So arguably, you could say that David Eich is advocating teaching Holocaust denial in schools.
00:06:12
Speaker
Or at least, yes, is trying to do the devil's advocacy stuff just a little bit too hard. Well, he's still kind of stuck on there, there are alien shape-shifting lizard Jews out there who are giving a bad name to the rest of the Jewish population. Yeah, strange fellow, strange fellow, nice to talk to. Yes, very personal, but his views are interesting to say the least, and that at the least we're going to say at this particular point in time.
00:06:39
Speaker
It is. So we're going to shuffle things around a little bit or shuffle them back, I think, because we used to do things this way. We did. But we are mercurial ourselves. We are. We are the David Icke. The Australian immigration system of our Tehran podcast. Yes. That is an accurate analogy.
00:06:59
Speaker
So the point is we're gonna do the news now and then get that out of the way and then that way we will have the entire body of the podcast to talk about this week's main topic. Which is an interesting topic but before we can talk about that let's move straight on to the news. Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
Russian Navy and Secret Weapons
00:07:24
Speaker
So, at the top of our news segment, we have a piece of news that isn't so much conspiratorial as it feeds certain conspiracy theories, including those that we're going to be talking about this week. It's been reported that the Russian Navy has a new weapon that can disrupt the eyesight of targets and make them hallucinate and vomit. Isn't that vodka?
00:07:44
Speaker
Yes, but it's also... But it's from a distance. Yeah, it's vodka. Telepathically. That is, we have a new form of energy weapon and the purported Russian weapon is already being used by proponents of secret energy weapon conspiracy theories to go see, see, told ya.
00:08:00
Speaker
Now, if this weapon exists, it's proof positive that such weapons are being worked on right now, but the fact that they might exist now does actually tell us that the conspiracy theories about them in the past were the kind of thing we ought to have believed back then. You'd have to show that the particular weapons talked about in these conspiracy theories existed in the past, which almost always turns out to be the problem.
00:08:22
Speaker
Indeed. Now, we mentioned this on the bonus content of the podcast last week, but it's worth bringing up again for a larger audience.
YouTube's Algorithm Changes
00:08:31
Speaker
YouTube is changing its algorithms to reduce the spread of potentially harmful content.
00:08:37
Speaker
Now, what gets defined as harmful is a big deal here. As Friend of the Show, Professor Joe Yusinski, pointed out when interviewed on this particular topic, it all depends on a megacorporation deciding what they take to be true or false, plausible or implausible, warranted or unwarranted.
00:08:57
Speaker
Now it is true that YouTube is not taking videos about miracle cures, claims the earth is flat, or 911 truth videos down. They are simply making them harder to discover. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a known problem that for a while Google's algorithms have tended to create an echo chamber very, very quickly.
00:09:21
Speaker
But whether we should be leaving these kinds of decisions to big business, well, we here at the People's Bureau for the Conspiracy think it should be left to organisations that are a little more open and not so proprietary in their algorithms. And now a reminder that bad stuff happens.
UK Inquiry and Cover-up Suspicions
00:09:40
Speaker
Sometimes we hear at the podcast as a guide to the conspiracy might look like we're making fun of conspiracy theories, but as well, you know,
00:09:47
Speaker
We do take these things very seriously, except for when we don't, don't judge us. Anyway, in a matter which looks very much like a cover-up, a public inquiry in the UK which is examining undercover policing is refusing to publish a list of more than a thousand political groups that have been spied on since 1968. Sir John Mitting, a retired judge, is chairing an inquiry that has yet to hear any evidence in public.
00:10:09
Speaker
Not only that, but it's not due to conclude before 2023. Why? Because the police have filed a large number of applications to conceal the identities of undercover officers. Given it seems that police in the UK have overwhelmingly monitored groups which have been labelled left-wing or progressive, with only three far-right groups which are infiltrated having been identified thus far, it's all looking a little bit suspicious.
00:10:31
Speaker
This is especially the case as the victims of the surveillance have a history of criticising Mitting himself for making decisions conducive to the police. It's oh so British. And if it's not a cover up, it certainly looks like one. It sure does. And that is all we have for the news this week. So now let us target some individuals and talk about them behind their backs using our advanced video tech technology.
Introduction to Targeted Individuals
00:11:06
Speaker
By advanced video tech technology, do you mean your exposed knees? Yes, my exposed knees are in fact the way that they will get you. If you're listening to this in podcast format and you want to get a good eye full of Dr Dennett's knees, give him a good ogle and switch on over to the YouTube channel for all your patella requirements. That's the podcaster's guide to the knee conspiracy. Anyway, we're not here to talk about knees, although we could.
00:11:34
Speaker
We're here to talk about a subject that we've talked about before, and that subject is targeted individuals. Well, when we talked about before, we talked about gangstalking. This is the techno-thriller version of gangstalking. I think, yeah, it's...
00:11:50
Speaker
I think gangstalking is sort of a subset from what I could gather. It's one of the ways in which targeted individuals could be targeted, but targeted individuals is the wider thing, which we talked about back in Episode 103 in the middle of 2016. So at the time, it was a little bit, we were kind of reacting to a person's reaction to another thing. There was an article in the New York Times talking about targeted individuals, exactly what a targeted individual is, we'll get to in just a second.
00:12:19
Speaker
But due to there was that article, then there was an article on the website, the psychology of conspiracy theories reacting to that article and trying to draw sort of a psychological distinction between conspiracy theory and delusion, which we didn't really agree with. No, no, we did not. No. So while we did go over the whole idea of targeted individuals and gangs talking and so on, a lot of it was our sort of reaction to this particular
00:12:42
Speaker
a particular article about it. Now, in general, just to recap, targeted individuals are people who believe that they are being targeted by some sort of grand conspiracy and harassed, basically, in one of a number of different ways. One of those ways is gang stalking, which is where literally you're being followed and stalked by a large group of people.
00:13:06
Speaker
And they'll talk about things like people whispering words to them as they pass them in the street. They'll talk about cars beeping their horns at odd times or noises happening at the same time as certain scraps of speech come across the radio to highlight them and stuff like that.
00:13:24
Speaker
But then there's also the more techno-oriented one where people will claim that implants have been put inside their bodies somewhere and through those people are directing voices into their heads using V2K or voice to skull. I don't know why it's V2, not V2S, but V2K apparently is the term. So that these people basically hear voices telling them to do things and claims that their minds are being controlled.
00:13:53
Speaker
You hear stuff like this, I'm no psychologist, but it basically just sounds like the symptoms of some sort of schizophrenia, which is why it gets a little trickier to talk about. Is this just good old-fashioned mental illness, or is there reason to think it might be something else?
00:14:09
Speaker
Well, yes, and therein lies the $30 question, because there is this interesting aspect here that, to an outside observer, the description of targeted individual gives of their lives and the kind of interference coming from a third party in their lives does actually seem to map on very, very closely to some commonly described mental illnesses.
00:14:37
Speaker
Of course, the targeted individuals will then say, well, yes, we know it looks like that. It's deliberately made to look like a mental illness so that when we complain about it, doctors and other medical professionals who are either in on it give us a false diagnosis or are easily confused by the fact there are people with a mental illness with the same symptoms. But targeted
Exploring the World of Targeted Individuals
00:15:02
Speaker
individuals are adamant
00:15:04
Speaker
they do not belong in that group of people who are mentally ill. I almost wonder a little bit if it's just sort of the harmful nature of the social stigma we have on mental illness because the thing they'll always say is I'm not crazy because to them mental illness means you're some sort of you know stereotype of a drooling incompetent
00:15:25
Speaker
locked up in a straitjacket in a funny farm somewhere. Whereas if perhaps there was less of a stigma about there being some, you know, that it being somehow shameful or some sort of weakness to have a mental illness, maybe they would be much less hesitant to accept that that could be the case. But when we talked about it last time,
00:15:45
Speaker
We found it a little bit hard to discuss in terms of conspiracy theory, partly because, I mean, it isn't obvious if there is even evidence to say that there's a conspiracy theory, as we say, and also the targeted individuals themselves.
00:16:01
Speaker
tend to be very hazy on the exact nature of the conspiracy which we'll get into very shortly. I suppose we should say that this is a viewer request or listener request. I actually don't know whether Jim watches or listens to the podcast or vodcast but our friend Jim
00:16:18
Speaker
late last year said, hey, this is documentary by Vice on targeted individuals, which covers a lot of the things that you said would be great to get an update. And Jim, this update is for you. And everyone else is watching.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean since then there's a 2017 video from Vice. We also found a 2018 article from Wired. So it's sort of a topic that pops up from time to time basically. It looks like any time a reporter happens to stumble upon the TI community and think well that's that there's an interesting story there and there is.
00:16:55
Speaker
Apparently, the earliest Google searches for the term targeted individuals started showing up around 2004. So that's when this iteration of this kind of conspiracy theory first started to crop up. Although, as we see, it may have been around for quite a long time. It's quite a long time, actually.
00:17:15
Speaker
So, when we talked about it before, we sort of said, well, it looks hard to distinguish from a mental illness. On the other hand, we do know, especially when it comes to the gangstalking style of things, there have been coordinated stalking efforts in the past. Oh, yes. I mean, it's a common trope for people who are running a conspiracy or trying to get someone to not say things they're not meant to, is to harass them in a variety of different ways.
00:17:40
Speaker
including getting random strangers to harass them on the street and the like. Indeed, there's even some evidence that some people have been led to believe they're mentally ill, that the phenomena has a technical term, gaslighting, where you make someone think that they are ill, in part to control them. So this has been done by government agencies in the past, it's been done, the stories of Scientology, what was it?
00:18:08
Speaker
I've forgotten the term. They had a specific term for going after people. Yeah, I can't remember. Even when you look at more recent phenomena like Gamergate, which sort of, you know, organised harassment of individuals. Well, I mean, they had swatting. Yeah, well, exactly, yes. That has resulted in a death, hasn't it? More than one at this stage, yes.
00:18:33
Speaker
And then also, because the targeted individuals will often say that this is, you know, when people ask, why have you been targeted? They'll usually claim it's some sort of a mind control sort of experiment or something. The governments or whatever powers that be trying out these technologies on me to
00:18:51
Speaker
trial them for military or whatever usage and then to which point we do know that there have been weird wacky trials like MKUltra in the past looking into things like mind control. And there's been medical experimentation on people in the past like the Tukaski syphilis experiments. So it's not out of the question
00:19:12
Speaker
that events like these, or, sorry, I should say, symptoms like these might be more than mental illness and actually might be, as a root cause, someone doing bad things. But, as we're going to see, the conspiracy described is amorphous and vague, and the evidence for the conspiracy is, I would say lacking, would you say lacking? Yes, yes.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, when we talk about Scientology or things the KGB got up to or in culture and so on, there's usually, you can usually point to a clear motive, for one thing, you know, Gamergate and Scientology and stuff. It's very clearly we don't like this person. We don't like their politics or what have you.
00:19:58
Speaker
And you can usually, if only after the fact, identify the people, if not the individuals, then the groups behind it. There's a set of individuals that are gone after. And with the TI stuff, not so clear. No. The actual conspiracy, when asked, they will say, look, I don't know. I don't know who's doing this to me. I don't know why they're doing it. I don't know why me. I just know that it's happening. So there must be something behind it.
00:20:29
Speaker
In the video by Vice, which you can find if you look up on YouTube, there's one point in the video where the interviewer is talking, he talks to three people, a few others, but the main people he focuses on are two men, one called Shane and Kieran and a woman called Fiona.
00:20:50
Speaker
At one point when he's talking to Shane and Karen, they very briefly just rattle off. You know, it's a sort of a transhumanist military globalist agenda 21. It's the Freemasons. And then the Freemasons get a mention afterwards, but it's just very, very sort of vague general conspiracy theory sort of talking. And it's interesting, the technological sort of
00:21:17
Speaker
the currency of the technology that's involved in two different ways. One, the internet has had a massive effect on this sort of community in the same way that the internet has allowed all sorts of subgroups of society to get together and find one another, essentially. Like Goths or Emos. Or even... Do Emos even exist anymore? Not to my knowledge. It's going to emote in quite some time. Ninety stuff is coming back, though.
00:21:45
Speaker
I don't want emotes coming back though. No, I was at... I saw Florence in the Machine in concert last week and there was some genuine 90s fashion on display for better and worse. There was a good bit of PVC around. The support act actually wore dungarees. I remember dungarees were a thing in the 90s. I never remember them being a good... They've been back a good five or eight years now. It's not good. Anyway.
00:22:09
Speaker
Distracted slightly there. But no, the internet is good at letting people find each other. And so that has allowed this TI community to find each other. They organise conferences now. It's estimated there's around 10,000 people identifying as targeted individuals across the world.
00:22:25
Speaker
And if you're of the belief that this is nothing but a delusion, it's a mere symptom of mental illness, then this is a little bit worrying because it does seem to allow these people to get together and reinforce their delusions. Although there can be actually quite a positive aspect to it as well. Yeah, well we will talk about that as well. Let's actually focus on the actual claim of conspiracy. Yeah, it's probably the best place to start.
00:22:48
Speaker
Any decent conspiracy theory has at its heart a claim of conspiracy. And the problem with the TI conspiracy is it's not very clear what the conspiracy is. The only thing they're definite of is that a conspiracy exists. Yes, and that they're not mentally ill. So they know in their heart of hearts that they are being followed and targeted. They don't know why them.
00:23:18
Speaker
And they're not entirely sure why the conspiracy exists. So as I said, we've got a mention of agenda 21, mentions of transhumanism, so some kind of conspiracy to change the very nature of humankind, where they are the ones who are being experimented upon. And at one stage, Shane in the video talks about Freemasons defecating in his bed.
00:23:46
Speaker
Yes, he's, at this point in the video, he's sort of cataloguing all the stuff that's happened to him, which he believes is evidence of his targeting, including break-ins to his house during which someone shit in his bed. And he sort of... He'd go, why would I do it? And then the interviewer goes, but...
00:24:03
Speaker
Why would Freemasons do it? No, the engineer goes, why would they do it? And you go, why would the son of a Freemason do it? In case of I think your implication of the Freemasons at this particular point in time. And obviously quite specifically, a very particular child of a Freemason. Yes, so it's a weird one there. It's a little bit, one thing I found a little bit frustrating
00:24:24
Speaker
to find out is there's not much talk of how these conspiracy theories originated in the individuals. In the video, briefly at the beginning, it starts with the reporter going to a TI conference, and so there are a few interviews or a few snatches of interviews with a bunch of people.
00:24:45
Speaker
And a couple of them will talk about they remember the first time they'd been walking down the street and suddenly became aware that a group of people were all following them. But that's really all it came from. I would like to hear why people first thought, first came to think that they were being targeted. Maybe for some of them was when they started hearing voices in their head.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, that side of thing I'd like people to go into more. And that kind of gets us back to the internet aspect because as most of us are aware, Dr. Google is a thing. So you find you've got a strange lump on the back of your leg and you don't want to go see a doctor because doctors are expensive or you don't have time to make an appointment. So you do a search on Google and by and large what you've discovered is a cancerous growth.
00:25:32
Speaker
No, by and large, if you've got something on your skin, Google will say it's likely to be cancer, at which point you start panicking, you make an appointment with the doctor, and they go, no, that's just a benign skin lesion or skin tag, you don't need to worry about that, they're common in everyone.
00:25:50
Speaker
In the same respect, you might start having certain symptoms, like you start to think you're hearing voices, you find unusual scratches or marks or lumps on your body, you do a Google search to try and find out what it is. Some of those people are going to find the TI literature, and then they're going to, oh, that matches my symptoms exactly. I must be a targeted individual. Yeah, so however they get there,
00:26:20
Speaker
Some people get there, and then once they do, they find like-minded people who will reinforce each other just through a sense of sort of camaraderie. Finally, I found someone who knows what I'm going through, someone who will believe me, of course, because that's the thing that they often find most torturous, is that they're so certain this stuff is happening, and yet no one around them will believe it and say, oh, you know, you just need to go see a psychiatrist.
00:26:45
Speaker
So there's that but then there's also the fact that some people have put a lot more effort into Finding what they believe is evidence for their targeting at which can then be spread amongst others and so on and then they can refer to that so evidence They claim to have some indeed The main kind of evidence tends to be implants or unusual lumps or cuts found on the human body now
00:27:13
Speaker
taught at a med school for a while and then one of the things that you learn quite quickly is that if you suit your body at any particular random point in time you will find lumps or scratches you've never seen before because it turns out we cause minor injury and abrasions to ourselves in our daily lives every single day and like paper cuts until such time you they're drawn to your attention
00:27:39
Speaker
you don't actually feel or experience that particular wound. But when you find it, suddenly it becomes an item of fixation because you go, oh, what's this weird scratch? How long has that been there? And it will start to itch and you'll start to worry it and the like. Because by and large, if you don't know you've wounded yourself, for a minor wound, your body goes, well, I can just ignore that and just let nature take its course. So finding unusual lumps or cuts
00:28:09
Speaker
is something where it looks like the TI community is taking a commonplace thing but going well I've never noticed this before and because of that suddenly making it into evidence for the conspiracy. The implant stuff is more interesting. So one of the subjects in the Vice video talks about having MRI scans.
00:28:30
Speaker
and finding what appear to be implants at the back of the skull, at the bottom of both lobes of the brain. And he's going, well, that shouldn't be there. And then you've got some doctors, he's claiming, who are going, oh, that is unusual. And then other doctors, he's also claiming going, no, no, that's just an error in the air.
00:28:52
Speaker
MRI you get interference of a particular kind that's mirrored so it's obviously an error in the machine or the way the process was undertaken and he takes that to be evidence that they're covering up the implant in his head. And in fact that was Karen, the man with the MRI images, who his story has did change a little bit because I remember the first time he mentioned the MRI he claimed that
Societal Technologies and Concerns
00:29:17
Speaker
the doctor who had given him the MRI had actually said, never come to me and never talk to me about this again and gave him a bunch of money to go away. But then that story never quite comes back and it sort of shifts around a little bit. The video ends where he and Shane are planning to go to Spain where they claim to have booked in with some clinic that was willing to give them an MRI again to hunt down these
00:29:46
Speaker
This is
00:30:04
Speaker
his body is strangely attractive to rare earth magnets and that if he takes a AC current detector and scans it across his body it goes off. He's saying well I should be flesh and bone so that shouldn't be happening. The interviewer
00:30:25
Speaker
Then he goes, let's try it out on me, and discovers that rare earth magnets also attached to him, and that the AC scanner also goes off on random parts of his body. And he's going, well I'm not a targeted individual, so why is this going on? And Shane's reaction is actually quite fascinating, he doesn't really take it in.
00:30:47
Speaker
No, he just sort of says, maybe you want to get yourself checked out, mate. And the thing is, this is a case of not having enough knowledge is a bad thing, because it is true we are flesh and bone. Well, I'm flesh and bone, I don't know about you. Mostly.
00:31:05
Speaker
But we're also very, very complex electrical apparatus given the way that our brains work. And so it does turn out that AC scanners will pick up electrical activity, particularly around the skull, because there's a lot of electrical activity going on in the brain at any particular point in time. And
00:31:27
Speaker
Blood contained a large amount of iron, and rare earth magnets loved themselves a bit of iron. And also the magnets that Shane was attaching to himself were very little ones that looked like the sort you'd get on the back of a fridge magnet, if that they were maybe a centimetre half an inch long. Which means you're going to get surface tension.
00:31:45
Speaker
And so yeah, just simply, you know, a tiny bit of sweat, a bit of... It's not like he was sort of dangling them off himself or anything. He was just sort of putting them on his upper chest and stuff like that. So you'd think they would stick to pretty much anyone. And of course, then we get into the actual...
00:32:02
Speaker
technological question because the kind of technology that these TIs claim have been implanted in their bodies which are implanted GPS systems which keep track of them, radios in their head which broadcast messages either straight into the brain or through the air canal and the like are frankly technologies that currently we don't have
00:32:27
Speaker
No, no, we certainly don't. Not that we know of anyway. And so, I mean, they'll claim that these are secret technologies, but then they'll talk about directed energy type things such as what we mentioned in the news update that the Russians are supposedly coming up with. In fact, Fiona, the woman who he spends a lot of time talking to, she doesn't really talk about voices or mind control or anything. She just
00:32:55
Speaker
The targeting that she talks about is just about being made to feel very weird. She never really gives a good description of it, but she just gets a very uncomfortable, nasty, from the sounds of things, almost painful sensation, which she tries to block out with lead blankets and hoods and by sleeping in metal storage lockers and shipping containers and stuff like that, but claims that
00:33:19
Speaker
Wherever she goes, when she stays in a place for too long, the sensations get worse, and then she'll go somewhere else, and then it'll be OK, and then they'll build up again, which she claims is to do with implants. And it's interesting to watch her say she insists that she has implants around. She claims she has one in her hand, and says that now she's had her hand x-rayed, and nothing shows up in the x-ray, which proves that it must be nanotechnology.
00:33:45
Speaker
Now, which once again gets us back to as far as we're aware, this tech doesn't exist. And one of the reasons why we don't think this tech does exist is that the power requirements for say, running a radio or a GPS unit is one of the major reasons why phones don't really last very long. Notice the size of the battery in this device.
00:34:14
Speaker
Miniaturisation still requires power, and bio-electric power or something, they haven't quite got off the ground yet. At least not to the level which allows you to run devices continuously. How do pacemakers work? They have some sort of... I think they work with the electrical current that actually goes through the heart, and they basically hijack... They have some sort of particularly sturdy long-lasting battery.
00:34:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's so different there. Certainly not on the nano scale or even a particular micro scale. And of course the thing about pacemakers is that, do you have a pacemaker and there are certain things you can't do that go through x-ray machines and the like? Yep.
00:34:52
Speaker
And it's interesting to note that given that they're all about the idea that they've been body hacked, that they've had these implants stuck, and not them seem particularly worried about using computers or other sort of technology. No, I was taken by that because they organise online, they email each other, one of them does an internet broadcast.
00:35:13
Speaker
It does seem unusual to think my body's been hacked, which is hard. Why wouldn't they just hack my emails and my social media correspondence, which is relatively easy compared to body hacking? And then I went, well, if they think they're already in their brains,
00:35:33
Speaker
You probably don't really think you've got any kind of informational privacy anyway. So you might as well use a computer because they've got direct access to what you're going to say or write anyway. Yeah.
00:35:44
Speaker
And then the other one is just... Bad luck. Bad luck, essentially. Lots of bad luck. So as I mentioned before, the interviewer goes to talk to Shane, who pulls out this binder he has where he's compiled detailed information on all the things that have been done to him. But the things he points out are like some cracked tiles outside his house. Someone's broken the tiles somehow.
00:36:09
Speaker
his dog getting a bloodshot eye. Yeah, he claims there'd been a break-in and they'd done something to his dog and he showed that look, because when the dog looks this way, the whites of his eyes and one of his eyes are slightly bigger than the white of the eye and his other eyes, which I don't quite know what that's supposed to show. And yeah, it's just sort of unique. Every bad thing that happens around him is compiled as further evidence of this harassment against him.
00:36:37
Speaker
Now, there's a kind of historical precedent to these stories, isn't there, if we go all the way back to the 18th century? Late 18th century. Yes. In 1797, a man called James Tilly Matthews was committed to the Bethlehem, or otherwise known as Bedlam,
00:36:58
Speaker
psychiatric hospital. He's a very interesting case because his is thought to be the first ever documented case of paranoid schizophrenia and indeed a book was written about him. Now this is this is wonderful actually. The short name of the book is Illustrations of Madness but it's full title in that. Let me try this with my speech.
00:37:18
Speaker
illustrations of madness exhibiting a singular case of insanity and no less remarkable difference in medical opinions developing the nature of an assailant and the manner of working events with a description of tortures experienced by bomb bursting lobster cracking and lengthening the brain embellishing embellish with a curious plate hmm that's quite well done i thought
00:37:42
Speaker
apart from embellishing. Anyway, so this book, written in 1810 by a man called John Haslam, is another first, is considered to be the first ever full study of a single psychiatric patient. So he's a very well-documented case. And when you get into the details of it, it starts to sound very familiar. It's all about an heirloom, and it's not something that's passed down.
00:38:10
Speaker
a loom that works on air, that weaves air in the way. So he believed that a gang of criminals and spies who are skilled in pneumatic chemistry, which was a sort of science of the time, had taken up residence near him and were tormenting him remotely by using the rays emitted from this air loom. A gaseous charge generator.
00:38:40
Speaker
So the torments include what he called lobster cracking, which caused the circulation of his blood to be prevented by a magnetic field, what's something he called stomach skinning, and epiplexi working with the nutmeg grater, which involved introducing fluids into his skull. It's also something he can find on Pornhub.
00:39:03
Speaker
And he had code names for the people who were persecuting him. There was the middle man, who apparently was the person who operated the heirloom. There was the glove woman. There was Sir Archie. And their leader was a man called Bill, ultimately the king.
00:39:19
Speaker
And this starts to sound very familiar, this man who believed he was being interfered with remotely, he was being forced to suffer symptoms by a machine that operated on technology that was sort of at the fringes of society at the time and didn't really exist according to him. And didn't exist and never came into existence.
00:39:39
Speaker
It mirrors a lot of what we hear T.I. saying just with a technological update, basically, where he talks about pneumatic chemistry and heirlooms. These days they talk about directed energy weapons and bio-implants and voice-to-skull communications and stuff like nanotechnology. By nefarious gangs or perpetrators.
00:40:05
Speaker
Now we mentioned earlier that despite the fact that the TI community in some respects does appear to be aiding and abetting people with mental illness, there is kind of a positive aspect to their community because despite the fact that if you believe this is a mental illness and not a conspiracy, then the TI community basically talking about
00:40:31
Speaker
gang stalking and being targeted is basically confirming their delusions. There's also the aspect that the TI community is very helpful to one another because one of the things which is quite common as a TI experience is the voices in your head trying to isolate you from your friends and family and so the TI community say look
00:40:56
Speaker
They're going to tell you, don't talk to your parents, don't talk to your siblings, don't talk to your friends. It's really important you maintain those relationships in the face of what the perpetrators are doing. So we're going to work together to make sure that when I'm in a bad space that way, you remind me it's just been done to you by an external force. Go talk with your mum,
00:41:21
Speaker
and I'll do the same thing for you when that happens to you. And the belief that what they're experiencing is something they're being subjected to by a nefarious group, who they are now quite strongly opposed to, also seems to
00:41:41
Speaker
do good and that it stops them from acting on these voices. At one point, Shane talks about how the voices at one point were telling him to kill his family. And he's like, you know, they wanted me to kill my family, so they have an excuse to lock me up on stuff like that. And he's like, you know, the reporter said, do you ever listen to the voice? Oh, hell no. And so sort of you have sort of the angle of spite almost that we're in another case, the person might eventually
00:42:06
Speaker
given to the voices, they have extra motivation not to do that because they're fighting, you know, they're actively fighting against the forces that are putting these voices in their head. Now, we should say there is an unfortunately high suicide rate among the TIS. Yes. And it's a little bit nebulous even then with a...
00:42:23
Speaker
When a person commits suicide, is it that they couldn't take the torment anymore and they looked for the release of death? Or is it further evidence that they were mind controlled and forced to commit suicide against their wills? So one thing which came up in the documentary was the discussion of Max Spears.
00:42:40
Speaker
Who we've mentioned in the past are very famous for claiming that he was a super soldier who had been engineered as a child to have super abilities. Lots of claims about UFOs apparently was a targeted individual and of course died mysteriously.
00:43:01
Speaker
And they were going, well look, they can put kill switches in you. They can use a heart attack like that. And that's how they got Max Spears. So they can also explain mysterious deaths by going, well, you know, it wasn't a drug overdose.
00:43:16
Speaker
they made him do it, or the drug overdose was a cover story for the fact they flipped a kill switch. Yeah, I was actually quite interested to hear that, because in the video when it starts, when there's a TI conference, you go to the guy who's leading the conference.
00:43:31
Speaker
basically stands up and says look here's Max Spears he was a TI and he was killed just a few weeks before this conference and I was like wait Max Spears was a TI because when we talk about it in the past it was more his sort of UFO conspiracy theories and that the either the extraterrestrials or the people trying to cover up the extraterrestrials had got to him I hadn't so I don't know if he identified as a TI but certainly the TI community thought he
00:43:52
Speaker
So what I do know is he did talk in the past about being tracked and people being out to get him. Now whether he ever claimed he was a TI is actually really hard to tell because there is both a lot and not a lot about Max Spears available online. It's very hard to sort out claims made about Max Spears from claims made by Max Spears about Max Spears.
00:44:18
Speaker
Yeah, so we mentioned, it was about two weeks ago, the update that there had been the increase in England, but he died back in 2016. We mentioned him all the way back in episode 122, which was actually 123, I guess. If you got that number from the spreadsheet, then it would be the number you've got. No, I think I got it from our original works. Well then it was 123.
00:44:42
Speaker
So even the first time when we tried to talk about it, we had trouble finding anything out because any sort of research you did, all the articles you found all just ended up kind of referring back to each other. It was hard to find any primary sources of information. It was all just the same stories going round and round in a circle.
00:44:59
Speaker
But yes, I was like, hang on a second, when I was watching this video Max Spears, I know that name, but I didn't realise in wanton, so it was interesting to see them claiming him as one of their own. Although what was particularly interesting, so there's a whole bunch of discussion in the documentary about the death of Max Spears, and there's a discussion about was he taken out by his perpetrators.
00:45:23
Speaker
And some of the participants at the conference talk about how Max Beers started talking with a really weird voice just before he died. And initially, the death was put down as natural causes. As we now know, due to an inquest, it wasn't natural causes. He had pneumonia and it was a drug overdose associated with trying to treat the pneumonia, along with his drug addiction issues that led to his death.
The Reality Behind Targeted Individual Claims
00:45:49
Speaker
They show Karen the video of Max Spears taking two days before he dies. And Karen goes, he just sounds like someone who's on Death's Door. So he's not convinced that Max Spears was taken out because Karen thinks there's too much focus on Max Spears.
00:46:07
Speaker
and the fact that sometimes people just die. I thought that was quite fascinating that he did go... Yeah, sometimes people just die. It's not necessarily part of the conspiracy. And I think that was the only point I saw where there did seem to be some division within the TI community because he didn't seem to be a fan of the guy
00:46:28
Speaker
Whose name I didn't write down because he didn't he only featured at the start of the video But the man who lead the TI conference and he's also interviewed briefly Who has a YouTube channel and talks about other sort of stuff like here didn't seem to be I think it was a stream at the bases 2016 international conference which is a ufological Conference that's held every year not just in 20 2016. Yes so
00:47:00
Speaker
We did mention back then, in 2015, two doctors, Lorraine P Sheridan and David V James, examined 128 reports of gang stalking. Their study, they were quite definite that now these people are suffering from a psychological delusion and they were none too pleased about the whole internet community reinforcing each other's delusions thing. And it is interesting to point out that while
00:47:22
Speaker
I think we've got about to the end of it.
00:47:27
Speaker
the symptoms that the people in the interviews and in the videos and articles we talked about mentioned things that seem implausible given that they seem to involve technologies that we don't believe exist just yet. The full write-up of all these different cases talked about things going a lot more
00:47:51
Speaker
Im plausible to the point of flat-out impossible. People's family dogs being replaced with an exact double that happened to behave differently. Witchcraft focused through gold objects. Remote enlargement of bodily organs. Of organs, invasion of an individual's dreams at night and so on.
00:48:12
Speaker
Again, there's possibly a bit of cherry picking going on there to make the delusions sound more plausible in some cases. Well, yes. I imagine if you're being interviewed for a documentary, you may well put for the evidence you think is best and makes you look the least disturbed.
00:48:32
Speaker
But ultimately, we're a conspiracy theory podcast, not a psychology podcast, because neither of us has any psychological qualifications. Although I do read a lot of social psychology that suggests more lessons. So, I mean, as psychological lay people, we are in no position to say, yes, these people are definitely mentally ill.
00:48:54
Speaker
But as laypeople, it certainly looks like that. And certainly as conspiracy theorists, it's very hard to talk about the sorts of conspiracy theories that they're promoting, simply because they're so vague and so lacking any sort of detail. The actual claim of conspiracy is vague. Now, that's understandable to a certain extent. If you're being targeted by a conspiracy, it can be hard to detect the conspiracy in amongst the actual attack. But the evidence being used to show there is a conspiracy
00:49:20
Speaker
often looks a lot more like coincidences or simply noticing things and confirmation bias. It doesn't look like hard evidence of a conspiracy. It does look a lot like schizophrenia. It's unfortunate, yes. I mean, you can talk about sort of the falsification idea, which kind of works both ways. You can
00:49:46
Speaker
If you believe that you're a targeted individual, then any evidence to the contrary can be rolled into the conspiracy. Anyone who doubts you will be either in on it or, you know, the conspiracy is so good that normal people won't believe it. Like we saw with Fiona, the X-ray doesn't show anything. Well, that just proves it's nanotechnology. But then you could run the line the other way that if it really is a conspiracy, then
00:50:12
Speaker
any evidence of the conspiracy that this person finds could be written off as just further delusion on their part. So it's just generally hard to talk about all around.
00:50:24
Speaker
In terms of conspiracy theories and analyses thereof on the strength of their evidence and what have you, it's really hard to say that these particular conspiracy theories are warranted, I would say. No. And I think that basically... It does. Now, for patrons, we have exciting bonus content coming up.
00:50:44
Speaker
After the break, if indeed you take a break between listening to the podcast and the bonus content, you may do. I mean, I don't know. You live your lives. But we're going to be talking about the newest member of the EPA in the US.
00:50:59
Speaker
Turns out to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist. We'll be talking about potential dirty politicking by the National Party back here in Atarawa, New Zealand, and then a youth group in the UK with links to a youth group of the extreme right in the US, causing trouble for the Tories in good old Blighty.
00:51:23
Speaker
And if you want to hear about that, then you'll have to become a patron. And if you are a patron, thank you very much. We appreciate you greatly. And if you don't want to hear about that, then I guess everything works out nicely for you. And I have suddenly become aware that my audio is probably going to be awful because my microphone is lit. Oh, look, it has to. I wonder when that happened.
00:51:42
Speaker
I kind of felt it about half an hour ago, but I just assumed it was my clothing moving around. So if the sound this week is awful, I apologize. It'll be better for the patron episode. You pay the bucks, you get the better sound. Good sound quality, yes. So until then, I believe we're at the end of an episode. So it's hopefully been a quicker, more streamlined episode.
00:52:06
Speaker
I actually don't think it has been. It's a shame. I guess it's just a good thing that we're not so insecure that all it takes is a single negative comment on Reddit to make us rethink the entire structure of our show. Because that would be a bit inconvenient. It would be.
00:52:23
Speaker
I think we could actually think this by having a time that we simply erect there and stopping and starting it when we finish and start and conclude as Hegemon. But that's the kind of discussion we should be having after the show. It's goodbye from him. And it's also goodbye from me. That's how the catchphrase goes, isn't it? It is. To Ronny's. Goodbye. La levadare.
00:52:51
Speaker
you
00:52:57
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:53:58
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.