Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 587: The Storm Is Upon Us With Mike Rothschild

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Thank you to Mike Rothschild for joining. Get his book at fine book sellers everywhere .  Follow him on twitter     Show Notes    

Today's show is brought to you by AdamandEve.com. Go to AdamandEve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y, at checkout. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from GlorHole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way.

We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. This is episode 588. Actually, it's episode 587. You called me incompetent. Oh, you haven't gotten there yet. You'll see. Of cognitive dissonance. Cecil, this is a first. I don't know if you know this. Okay. This is a first. We are joined today by guest Michael Rothschild and this is the first weatherman we have had on this show. So Michael wrote,

the storm is upon us. So obviously, very excited for this weather-related episode. Meteorological, for sure. We've never done this before. We've never done it.

We've never had it, honest to God. So I guess the question is, how do you know what you're pointing at on the green screen, Michael? That's the first. Michael's like,

I thought this was a very serious interview. I'm a little disappointed that my guy booked this for me already. Well, there's a way to talk about QAnon that's a little too serious. So I'm glad we started this way. You know, mostly, you know, I live in Los Angeles.

So mostly I just sort of point and it's sunny or on fire. Smoggy or sunny. Do you prefer your sun in space or on the ground? We have both options here in LA. We're getting both right now. It's lovely. Right now. Yeah, yeah, it's great.

So Mike, you got a book that's coming out, The Storm is Upon Us, and you write about QAnon. We know our audience as knows a lot about QAnon. We talked about QAnon for years, and we have certainly inundated them with QAnon stories. But, you know, if somebody's just walking in and they've never heard of QAnon or they know the tiniest little bits, can you just give us the basics, just what QAnon is, where it started, that sort of thing? Sure. So QAnon, as it began from about October of 2017 until Joe Biden's inauguration, was a conspiracy theory that held a military intelligence team that called itself Q was using the image board 4chan and then later the image board 8chan to leak cryptic clues to Donald Trump's upcoming purge of the deep state. And that only the people who could decipher these clues would know what was about to happen and could prepare. So that's really the very, very basics of it. And you can go down any number of tangents. You can go down any number of weird rabbit holes, very disturbing and lurid stuff.

But that's the basics of what it was up until Joe Biden's inauguration. Did you just say that it started in 2017? Yes, it did. Yes, it did. Oh my God, this is the three longest years of my life, Mike. My God. Three long, I mean, seriously, 2017.

I was 11 years old. I feel like I've been talking about QAnon for like the second half of my life. Yeah. When QAnon came to Cecil and I's attention, it came to our attention and we relegated it to the joke part of the show,

like the non-serious, like, well, a lot of the, that's a lot of the show, but we really thought of it like in the David Icke space aliens, you know, so outlandish as to be laughable by any, but the most fringe people in America, right?

And we really were like, holy shit, this stuff were like, holy shit. This stuff is so far out there, there's going to be a tiny infinitesimal fraction of just yokels that are interested in this. Let's joke about it a little bit. But it's really like space aliens are under my skin kind of stuff. What happened?

Because I liked that better, Mike. I really liked that too. I feel hearty, broken, and it's not good. So what happened? Well, I thought of it that way as well. At the very beginning, and I write about this in the book, kind of how this all came to my attention. I've been following conspiracy theories and scams and stuff like that for a long time. And then in about January of 2018, so it feels like a million years ago and also last week, I started seeing tweets about John McCain and Hillary Clinton wearing orthopedic walking boots, not because they'd injured their ankle like the rest of us wear orthopedic walking boots for, but because they

were wearing secret ankle bracelets because they've been arrested in a purge called the storm. Now, I thought that this was great. I needed to run this down. Every part of this, I needed to run down. This was so outlandish, so bizarre. This was just like right in my wheelhouse. outlandish, so bizarre. I just, this was just like right in my wheelhouse. But within a month or two, I realized that it had, it had a lot of similarities to these, these scams called affinity frauds that I'd been writing about well before Q ever existed. Can you tell us what that is? Sure. An affinity fraud is basically a fraud where a member of a community defrauds the other people in that community. Oh, so like a church. You get them quite a bit in immigrant communities where there's a trusted member of a sort of

insular immigrant community who will be scamming the other people in that community. But where this is a little bit different is that these are driven primarily by a guru who is dispensing secret intel about a great world-changing event. So a community grows around the guru rather than a sort of member of the community taking control of it. This community grows around the intel. And now we got a Q-ru. Basically, yeah. I was kidding, but that's Jim Baker too. I mean, I was kidding about church,

but that's Jim Baker. That's 100% Jim Baker. That's a lot of these profiteering- Prophets. Prophets, yeah. Oh, totally. And that's the way that these people come off. They come off as disciples. They come off as kind of plugged in secret oracles

of knowledge that only they have access to. And where a lot of these things started was as financial instruments. And I trace it from a scam that was running in the early 90s in downstate Illinois, actually, in Mattoon. This scam called the Omega Trust and Trade Organization. I think that's what it was called. And it was this guy named Clyde Hood, this part-time electrician. He was a bar bouncer, just a guy. And he reinvented himself as a Fortune 500 banker who had access to a secret financial instrument called Prime European Bank Notes. And you could buy these Prime European Bankes for $100 from Clyde Hood, and he would roll them into what he called omega units. And the omega units...

I know. He rolled them first into alpha units, but then he had to change it. It was a whole thing. How many choice units make a prime unit? It was a very evangelical community. So even that term like the Omega is, you know, with the Alpha and the Omega. It's a very evangelical thing. Clyde Hood got insanely rich and he made a group of about a dozen and a half acolytes around him. Extremely, extremely rich. There were people driving 100-year-old cars around Mattoon, people building mega mansions who had like fast food

jobs. There are stories. Okay. Did they have to build the mega mansions in Mattoon though? Like it sounded impressive. And then you're like, I'm still in Mattoon. Right. Right. And there are, there are stories about people going to the post office and picking up sacks of cash that were so heavy that the bottles fall out when you pick them up. I know. Wait a minute. Did they have dollar signs on them? I can only hope. Oh my God. I am in the wrong business.

Gosh. Man, we hear about this all the time. Why are we grifters? Mike, we'll edit this out. You want to be grifters? I would do so well because I know all the tricks now. You know just what to say, just how to play. You could be our grifter consultant. I mean, I would do so well because I know all the tricks now. You know, you know just what to say, just how to play. You could be our drifter consultant.

Just how to play people like a fiddle. I mean, I would never do it because I'd have to be a little bit. Right, right, right. I mean, yeah. He wouldn't either, Mike. Yeah. Wink. If I did it.

Wink. So eventually Omega gets busted because it's a giant fraud. Sure. And everybody involved in it gets arrested, goes to prison. Clyde Hood actually died in prison. And you'd think that that's the end of it. But the thing about these kinds of frauds is that they never end. They just change form a little bit.

So one of the acolytes of Omega, one of its investors, was this woman who lived in Yelm, Washington. And I don't know if you guys have talked about this, but Yelm, Washington is a hotbed of new age crankery. This is where the Ramtha school is. There's the Ramtha school. There's all kinds of culty stuff going on there. And so this woman who lived in Yelm, Washington, her name was Shani Goodwin. She rebranded herself as Dove of Oneness. Dove of Oneness? She chose that on purpose. She chose it on purpose.

Dove of Oneness. No sacks with dollar signs on them came her way. She had to work a little harder. She rebranded Omega as part of this even bigger scheme called Nasara. Now, Nasara is probably something that some of your listeners have heard floating around in the sort of culty, new agey conspiracy sphere. There is an actual economic proposal called Nasara. It was written by this guy, this engineer named Harvey Bernard, who laid it out in a book. And I love this detail. The book this guy wrote is called Draining the Swamp.

It's just a book. What? Are you serious? Yep. Yep. What? Did he make this book great again? I feel like.

No, no, not for him. I feel like the guy from Always Sunny right now with all the string and some text and I am spinning. Yep. Oh my gosh. Everything old is new again. There's more. Because there's always more. So Harvey Bernard prints

a thousand copies of this book, Draining the Swamp. He sends it to the leaders of American business and to every member of Congress thinking that this pie-in-the-sky economic proposal based on the sort of libertarian ideals

of abolishing taxes, going back to the gold standard, abolishing consumer debt, all this, you know, very utopian stuff. He thinks, oh, this is a no brainer. They'll pass this and everything's going to be great. It goes, no, no one wants anything to do with it somehow. And nobody quite knows how this happened and nobody ever will because Dove of Oneness is dead. But Dove of Oneness found the Nassar proposal sometime in the late 90s. That sentence might be one of the most aggravating just sentences.

Dove of Oneness found the Nasara proposal. And that's, I just, okay. All right. It's just, you're telling an amazing story and I don't mean to interrupt it, but I just heard that phrase and wanted to kill myself on air. That's all. Yes. That's fine. So it keeps getting weirder.

Dove rebrands Omega and links it with Nasara. She adds these secret law components of Nasara to the Omega prosperity scam thing. So she builds up a following of mostly of kind of burned Omega investors promising that Omega was just one part of this great delivery of prosperity packets that will be released at some point by the world government that will make everybody rich who is a believer in it. So she creates a mailing list. She creates a mailing list. She actually has, she takes advantage of the beginnings of the internet, of Yahoo groups, email lists. She's sending out email blasts, fax blasts. And it's this same kind of thing. There's this great world-changing financial event.

She's got the intel for it, but it's much more up to date and sort of minute by minute than Omega ever could have been. So you're getting emails constantly about the Nassar prosperity packets are about to be released, but the dark forces intervened because they don't want you to have Nassar. They've already gotten a Nassar for themselves. At some point, part of this became that Nassar had already been signed into law by Bill Clinton and Congress and the Supreme Court knew it, but even admitting it publicly would result in the death penalty.

So nobody was allowed to talk about it. Secret laws. Yeah, that's exactly- Secret laws. Those are the most effective laws. That's how you know that they've happened. How the fuck do you compete? How does anybody compete with prosperity pack?

You can't. You can't. You really pack you can't you can't you really you can't like here like social justice warriors have just been trying to hand out equal packets and it's not even working you know nobody wants them so this keeps going shanie shanie goodwin double oneness builds up her following to the point where uh in the hours after the 9-11 attacks, she sends out an email blast saying that the 9-11 attacks were perpetrated by the dark forces attempting to stop Nassara from being released and that the records for Nassara were being held in the World Trade Center. And that's why the cabal had to destroy it. This is probably the first real 9-11 conspiracy theory. And this takes off

in her following like crazy. She's able to grift off of this for years. She raises enough money by scamming an elderly woman in San Francisco to rent rolling billboards that would drive around Washington, D.C., proclaiming Nasassara now. That'd be so confusing to regular people. I don't know what that is. The regular people are in the out group. They're not supposed to know what's going on. Only the people who know what's going on have the secrets.

She, of course, is begging for money. She needs a new computer. She needs a new modem. She needs to go on the run because the dark forces are going after her. Finally, around 2010, she died. And she, at this point, is living in her mother's trailer somewhere in Washington. The IRS is coming after her. She's screwed.

So she dies. Of course, the scam continues on, perpetrated by the people who were working with her. perpetrated by the people who were working with her. And at that point, a lot of the people who'd been burned by Nassara thought that Nassara was just something that was part of another scam that was starting up called the Iraqi Dinar scam. And I write about this in the book too.

This is the idea that the worthless currency of Iraq would revalue to its pre-Gulf War value. So if you bought a million dinars for $900, they would revalue to be worth millions of dollars. And then there's the same kind of the intel, the gurus. Now, it's a little different because the gurus couldn't sell the money and the people selling the money couldn't give you the intel updates because it was considered investment advice. So you have like an ecosystem that grows up overnight out of selling Iraqi currency. This is still going.

There are still- People are still buying Iraqi dinars? People are still buying them. They actually, they got popular again during the Trump era. A lot of the big firms have been busted. One got taken down for like $100 million worth of fraud. Oh, my God. So there's a direct line, basically, between the Omega Trust scam of Mattoon, Illinois, in the early 90s, to Nasara, to the Iraqi Dinar, and then to QAnon.

To GameStop. Yeah. And now it's at GameStop? I really thought that was going to be what this was. That moved a little bit too quickly. That was that didn't quite have the secret knowledge component to it. Right. Right. Right. Much like trolling element to it. You know, one thing you find with these kinds of scams that they're incredibly earnest. They really they really believe that they are making the world a better place through delivering prosperity to everybody

and uniting everyone under this banner of light. Never mind that nothing ever happens. But this is really what powers QAnon, is this need for hope, this utopianism, this idea that our enemies will be punished and everything will be better. It's not nihilistic. It's not like watching the world burn. It's not, it's not nihilistic. It's not like watching the world burn. It's watching the bad people burn. So that's when I really started to get concerned about QAnon. That was a really long answer to your question. Um, no, it was great. I,

I started to get concerned about QAnon when I realized that it had very similar mythology to Nasara and the Dinar scam, except this wasn't selling an investment. This was selling the punishment of your enemies. And then I got really, really concerned and I started to sound the alarm about it. Yeah. There's another link there too. And one of the links about with QAnon is the moving of the goalposts, right? Yes. There's always this, don't worry down the road, this Nassar is going to be the thing that gets you rich. Don't worry. Don't worry. It's going to, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And we're noticing this with QAnon is that there's all these dates. This date came, this date came and went. Okay. But don't worry. Now we're talking

about this new date. And it reminds me of like Harold Camping who predicted that the world was going to end. And, and when he predicted that the world was going to end, he was just like, whoopsie, I made a mistake. I added wrong. It's not going to end today. It'll end in six months. And then he's like, whoopsie, it didn't end. And so there's always this moving the goalposts too. And we see this with QAnon. Is there a place with QAnon where the goalposts go where these people will not follow? You would have thought so with Joe Biden taking office. You know, and that's what I talk about with QAnon, what it was.

For its first three plus years, it really was this idea that Donald Trump was going to sweep away the deep state and purge freedom's enemies and everything would be better. But, you know, Joe Biden is now in office. And presumably, Joe Biden is as deep state as they get and will presumably not arrest and purge himself. So presumably, you never know. These guys are pretty creative. They're very clever. And Democrats are very good at hamstringing themselves. So maybe, maybe.

stringing themselves. So maybe, maybe. Yeah. But, you know, what you had then was not the idea that the, you know, we've all failed. None of this was ever going to happen. The prophecy just changes. So the prophecy switches from Trump is going to sweep away the bad people to Trump is going to be rightfully restored to office. The election was stolen. There was massive systemic fraud at every level. Trump actually won a landslide. And everything that's going on now with Joe Biden supposedly being the president is just a giant show, a giant piece of kabuki theater to draw out all of the corruption and expose it to all the sleeping normies. And then Trump will be reinstated once all of the fraudulent states have their votes, uh, discertified or whatever it is. And then Trump will be back in office and everything will be great. That's really where these people are now. And that's why

this Maricopa County forensic audit, which is a disaster and a joke is the thing that they are obsessing over more than anything else. If you go into QAnon social media, and they're all on Telegram, the secure messaging app, and I don't recommend people actually go to these places. There are enough people who work in this field who are monitoring these channels who will kind of share the most important stuff. But right now, they are obsessing over the most minute possible details of ballot counting, of vote counting machines, of ballot software, of like thumb drives and cloning ballots and software, just stuff that 99% of people do not care about at all. They are convinced that this is all part of some plan that

will see Arizona's votes decertified and remove it from the electoral college. And then that will spawn a recount in Pennsylvania, that will spawn a recount in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and all these states are going to have their electoral votes thrown out. And then somehow by like magic, Trump is going to be president again. And that's what these people really think is going to happen. Do they, I have a couple of questions. So do they think that we will need to go 88 miles an hour in order for us to go back in time? Or is that, I just don't remember if that's still part of it.

Where are we going to get the nuclear? The Libyans aren't in the game anymore, Tom. That's true. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The amount of like any moment now is like your fucking early high school girlfriend who's going to sleep with you just after. Right.

This is the most blue balls in this conspiracy theory. Yeah. It is this thing needs to happen. Then this thing needs to happen. Then this thing needs to happen. Then these people need to do these things. Then this court case has to come out and then this order needs to be signed, but then it's going to happen. And so there's always, it's not even so much that the goalposts get moved. It's that there's another thing that has to be in place. And you saw that constantly with Nasara, constantly with the Dinar scam.

There was like 99% of it was there, but it has to be perfect. We have to get this one, you know, rural agricultural commissioner in to Crete on board with the Dinar revalue. We have to get this one, you know, this one guy somewhere to sign off on this one part of Nasara. There's always something else that needs to happen. And that's why they're always saying it's going to be next week. It's going to be two weeks. It's not going to be today, but it might be tomorrow. Sometimes with the dinar, you'd get, you know, the revalue has already been announced in the mosques in Baghdad. And it's just the news

is making its way here. But then something intervenes and there's always some reason that keeps people on the hook. It's that perpetual, like almost about to happen, but never actually happens. So it occurs to me that, a couple of things. One thing that occurs to me is

in order for these conspiracy theories to move past the fringe, right? Like, I never heard an Asara and, or, cause all that stuff lived on the fringe, but Q is now congressional, right? Q is now, Q has moved into out of the fringe and into the mainstream. So I'm curious if you have a sense of what it is about this moment culturally, which has allowed something which existed since 2017 and was connected to all these other really fairly prosaic and normal fringe conspiracy theories. So what is it?

Do you have a sense of what allowed that to move into the mainstream and what people sort of latched onto in these numbers that we've never seen before? Yeah, it was the pandemic. It was the sudden tilting on its access of the entire world. And anytime you have an event like that, whether it's 9-11, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, it doesn't have to be a negative event. Just something happens that changes everything. That becomes a petri dish for conspiracy theories. Because we look at that event and we think to ourselves, that's not real. That can't be happening. I don't have a frame of reference for that. That's never happened before.

There must be something else going on. And especially when you had the very early days of the pandemic, when nobody really knew what was going on. The advice we were getting was contradictory. Our understanding of the virus was really changing day by day. You know, it can be transmitted on surfaces. Well, no, it can't be transmitted on surfaces. You don't need to wear a mask. Well, you do need to wear a mask. And anytime you get that, people immediately start looking for the real answer. They assume we're being lied to. They assume that there is a nebulous, dark force that is doing all of this to hurt us for some reason.

And we all want to feel like we are a step ahead of our enemies and we know the real story and they can't fool us. So what you saw during the early months of the pandemic was, you know, the sudden lockdown, everybody's at home. A lot of people have lost their jobs or are working part time. They've lost their friend groups, their social circles. Their lives have been completely upended. And when that happens, you go looking for not just answers, but people who are going through the same thing that you do. And people found that in social media. They found it on Facebook. They found it on Facebook groups of people who were asking the same questions, questions about vaccines, questions about 5G internet, questions about whether the

virus was a bioweapon, about Bill Gates, about George Soros. You would join one of those groups, you'd meet a bunch of people, and the algorithm would read what you were doing and do its job of suggesting something else to you that was kind of like that. So if you joined an anti-5G Facebook group, you would get recommended an anti-Bill Gates Facebook group. Then you would join that and you'd get recommended a New World Order or Illuminati Facebook group. Then you join that and you get QAnon because that's just the next step there. So you had people radicalizing themselves while they were really just looking for information and looking for like-minded people who were having the

same difficulties that they were having. Kind of a summary, people got scared and uprooted their sense of normal. Then they got sent home. Then they got put in front of the computer in front of their phone. And then they got algorithmed to a certain degree. Yeah, that's what it was. So historically, this moved faster because of the technology. This, as a conspiracy theory, seems to have moved at just light speed in terms of its hold on people. And that seems to be just directly related to the technology of the times.

Yes. The conspiracy theories are as old as the hills. I mean, we've been in conspiratorial forever. And we're wired that way. Evolution has put the idea that a rustling tree could have an eagle in it that's going to peck our eyes out so we make a run for it. Most of the time, there's no eagle. But, you know, maybe one time there is an eagle and you get your eyes ripped out. So our brains tell us that things we don't know or things we don't understand are dangerous. That's always been that way. And conspiracy theories have always existed.

But now, because of social media, we can find these things much faster and with much less work than it ever took to be a conspiracy theorist, even in the early 90s. You know, even in the dawn of the internet, you still kind of had to know where the Usenet groups were, you know, where people were talking about this. You had to know even before that, what bookstore to go to, you know, who was handing out the pamphlets, where the gathering was. People had to do the work.

Now the machines do the work. Yeah. Now the machines do the work. Yeah. Now the machines do the work. Yeah. Yeah. And they're just good at it. Has any of this calmed down? Because as I understand it,

the QRU queue has not posted since January 6th. Is that right? The person purporting to be. December 8th, I think, was the last queue drop. And the last queue drop is great because Q put up a link to a YouTube video, which was a Trump rally with, we're not going to take it by twisted sister playing in the background. And then, uh, it got taken down for a copyright strike. So

the last ever Q drop is a dead link. I mean, if there is a more apropos metaphor, I don't know what it is. That's so great. But it hasn't stopped the cue. No. That's the thing. Like here we are eight months later and it has not stopped the cueing.

Right. Cue, the cue rue is gone. Right. And like, just like you described with the other, it follows the same pattern, right? There's nothing new about this pattern, which is interesting. Yeah. And what you've had is the person who is most likely responsible for the bulk of Q's drops on 8kun is Ron Watkins.

The administrator, I guess the former administrator of the site, the son of the owner of the site. He's one of the major characters in the HBO documentary Q into the Storm. It's not 100 percent that he was making the posts. I don't know if we'll ever know 100 percent who is making the posts, but he is the best guest that most disinformation researchers and journalists have. So he resigns from Aitken on Election Day. Q makes a couple more drops. One, I think, went up as Ron was giving an interview, which I think was him trying to prove that he wasn't making the Q drops. Apparently, like, his fans don't realize that you can just set up something to post automatically or just, you know,

get one of your flunkies to do it. Ron leaves Aitken behind, presumably leaves QAnon behind, and starts tweeting relentlessly about Dominion voting machines. Now, this stuff is all gone because he was banned after January 6th, but a lot of it is on the Internet Wayback Machine. And if you go to his Twitter account on the Internet Wayback Machine, you will find that he goes from tweeting very rarely to dozens of tweets a day about the minutiae of the technical manual of the Dominion voting systems set up, sending people to go watch these ballot counts. He's doxing people. He's putting up videos of people. It is relentless tweeting. And he's getting the attention of really important people. He gets the attention of far right journalists. He gets retweeted by Donald Trump.

He carves out a niche for himself as an expert on large systems analysis, which he is not at all. on large systems analysis, which he is not at all. He's the admin of a message board that barely works and that was going down constantly. But it was like he willed himself to be this new career and then everybody just kind of went along with it. So Q disappears as a poster and is replaced by Ron. And Ron's tweets read exactly like Q drops. And Ron's posts on Telegram, because he was banned from Twitter, his posts on Telegram read exactly

like Q drops. It is, I mean, it's circumstantial evidence that he was Q, but it's so compelling to me that it really solves the question of who was actually doing this. And Ron basically made himself a celebrity in that right wing stolen election world. Well, yeah, I mean, it's pretty easy. I want to ask, do you know how big the Q movement is? Because I remember we've had some conversations with people who really kind of hand waved it away to think that it really wasn't that big of a deal. How big do you think the movement is itself, if you could guess? It's very difficult to tell.

You know, the polling with this is all over the place. And there have been some numbers that say something like, you know, five to seven percent of registered Republicans or Trump voters believe in the actual tenets of a movement called QAnon. Now, that's a lot of people still. That's like millions of people. But the number of people who believe some aspect of the story that Q spun without identifying as Q believers, or maybe even without knowing what it is, is almost certainly much, much higher, probably into the tens of millions. I don't know that it's been purged completely, but it has been sort of taken down. Like there's been plenty of stuff that's been taken down off of Twitter. Things have been stifled on Facebook and other places.

In fact, one of the reasons, you know, we have this very incompetent assistant who works for us. His name's Ian. He's the worst. And he's terrible. And so here's the thing. Ian was supposed to reach out to you and he actually sent me a message today.

And he said, the reason why I couldn't find the, I didn't even notice that this happened was not his own incompetence, which is normally what it is. It turns out that Google hid your email and thought it was spam

because the storm is upon us was the title of the email. So it specifically found that and said, no, that's spam. That's clearly, we're going to hide that

from stuff because they figured that it was a Q thing. That is so interesting. So I wonder, do you think that any of this has simmered down? Now that they're sort of having to go on these back channels, that people have to download a new app and it's not in your newsfeed, is it simmering down a little at least? It's changing form. And one of the things that I've been writing about lately is QAnon believers have dropped the branding of QAnon. There was a drop made, I think in October, where Q just basically rewrote their entire history and said, there is Q, there are Anons, Anons meaning the followers of Q. There is no QAnon.

Basically saying that this term, which by the way, they had been using liberally for years. The most popular pro-Q book is literally called QAnon, an invitation to the great awakening. Did they have to just rebrand it to just the invitation to the great awakening? I don't know because they don't answer questions like that they don't they don't think about those things when when q says there is no q anon they say well there's no q anon that never existed that's not real the media made that up to make us look crazy it's not our crazy i i do want to ask you there are elements of the Q conspiracy story which read just, I mean, almost word for word identical to the satanic panic.

Yeah. And so there seems to be a moral panic element to QAnon. So do you have any sense of of that like there's obviously there's a political angle to it but there seems to be also a a moral panic element to the q anon and the one you the one you're talking about is the frazzle drip portion where they're carving the faces off of babies adrenochrome out and stuff right okay yeah yeah one of the things that makes q anon so adaptable is that it's a lot of different things it It is a very political conspiracy. It deals with a lot of the sort of minutia of the U.S. government. But it's also very sort of techno thriller, Tom Clancy ish.

And it's also very like evangelical Satan's going to throw you in the lake of fire kind of stuff. So that idea of children being trafficked, being tortured for their adrenochrome, Q doesn't talk a lot about that. In fact, the actual term adrenochrome is never used in the Q drop. That comes entirely from the base of people who believe that Q is real. So one of the things about Q is that it's not just top down. It's not like there's a guru who's giving you everything you need to know, everything you need to think about, nothing else is allowable. Q believers are encouraged to bring their own fears and their own conspiracies to QAnon to add that to the mixture, to the big secret war between good and evil. So you can add in Hillary Clinton is a blood-drinking,

occultic demonist. And you can also bring in Hillary Clinton had John F. Kennedy Jr. murdered in a plane crash so she could run for the Senate. Those two things are not in opposition. They're the same thing. They are the deep state is evil. And here are all of the ways that the deep state is evil. So this really lurid stuff, it doesn't repel these people. It brings them in because it confirms their own biases and it makes them feel like they're not in a cult. They're thinking for themselves. They're finding, they're finding things that the quote cult leader is not giving them. It's, it's a, it's a movement. It's a group of people who are fighting the same battle. Even as they redefine that battle moment by moment. There's like an American melting pot aspect to this. It's just like, bring me your tired,

your crazy, your huddled conspiracy theories. Mush them together in our weird melting pot of, except for that it's gone international now too, right? Right, it is now. That's encouraging. Yeah, it's popular in Germany. It's popular in the UK, in France, in Japan, the Philippines. I mean, this thing is everywhere. And what it does is they sand off the parts of it

that don't really fit with the local culture or local politics. So you don't get a lot of like hardcore Trump stuff, but then sometimes you actually do like there are, you know, pro-Q marches in Germany where guys are holding up signs to say, make Germany great again. There are Michael Flynn worshipers in Japan. This is such a big tent and it is such a conspiracy theory of everything that there is something in it for everybody because it's about everything whatever your experience is whatever wherever your personal demon is that fits in q anon it's it is it is everything it's happening everywhere everything

is part of it but it's deeply fascist though isn't it because the the very the very concept of it is there's going to be this thing that bypasses normal channels that is sort of almost the government being a vigilante against these people to just punish them. But it's bypassing all the normal ways in which someone would be punished in our system through sort of a, just a- Like secret trials and military tribunals. Yeah. It's like, they talk about military deaths and military assassinations, and it really feels very fascist. Am I wrong there?

Oh, no, not at all. There is definitely a fascist element to this. This is the leader decides who the enemies are, and the enemies are arrested. They're tried with extrajudicial trials. They're not given due process. There is no appeal, and then they're tried with extrajudicial trials they're not given due process there's no appeal and then they're executed you know this is this is like how the nazi people's court worked but i okay so but i i have heard that that some bernie supporters even like went into this too and they're like far

leftist i don't get how that how did how does that, how do they reach those people? A lot of it was the pandemic where you had this, these encroaching conspiracy theories that were traditionally very popular among, you know, not among Trump people, among left-wing people, you know, anti-vax stuff.

Sure, absolutely. Anti-5G, you know, wellness stuff, you know, health freedom communities, you know, stuff about big pharma killing holistic doctors. This is not traditionally right-wing stuff. This is much more left-wing stuff. And I really believe, and I don't know if there's a way to prove it, but it's just sort of how I perceive all of this, that this is about Hillary Clinton. And I think it's no accident that the first Q drop was that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested.

I think that there is a loathing of Hillary Clinton on both the far left and the far right that transcends any kind of ideological difference. I mean, there's stuff where these people vehemently disagree, but they kind of meet in the middle with Hillary Clinton is the worst. And it's not even Hillary Clinton. It's Hillary. Yeah, well, Bill Clinton has a penis.

I mean, it's misogyny. The opposition to Hillary Clinton has always been rooted almost exclusively in misogyny. So, man, this is all upsetting. So does this end? Is there an end to this?

You know, I don't know if it ends. I think it changes form. And I think that's what's happening right now. Certainly with the stolen election, Trump will be reinstated nonsense. But also QAnon is becoming much more like the Tea Party or the Christian right of the 80s. And that they are starting to get involved in local politics. or the Christian right of the 80s, and that they are starting to get involved in local politics. The QAnon movement more or less failed in the 2020 congressional elections. I mean,

yeah, you had Marjorie Taylor Greene, but any Republican was going to win that district. They did see some success in state legislatures, though, and we're starting to see more local offices getting taken over by QAnon believers. And we're starting to see it in school boards. You've got QAnon believers and people who don't even, who specifically don't use the branding of QAnon, but are spouting the same things, you know, critical race theory, cancel culture, the election was stolen, COVID is a hoax, all very cutting edge, right wing conspiracy stuff. That's all Q friendly. I mean, Q is pounding on the stolen election for a year. Q is pounding on COVID being a hoax the moment it started. All of that stuff is very Q friendly. But these people aren't using the term QAnon because it

never existed. Apparently, they're not using the hashtags. They're not talking about like satanic trafficking and adrenochrome because that really just repels people. They're talking about a very vanilla, very sort of casual version of this. And they're taking it to city councils and school boards. And these are elections that are not hard to win. These are elections where there's very little local coverage because local news has been completely gutted, where maybe you only need a few hundred votes to get into office. And it's not that hard to show up to a school board meeting screaming about how progressivism

is going to cancel your way of life and how they want our kids masked because masks are slave muzzles and vaccines are poison and Trump is the real president and you get enough people in your community who already agree with that stuff. And maybe those are people who are going to sit out the school board election because most people do and they vote. And we are starting to see these people get into office. And this is a terrifying and very sustainable path forward for this movement. That's terrifying. I wish I never asked that question. Yeah. Thanks Tom. Thanks for that buddy.

Yeah, no, I, that, I was hoping is going to Peter out. And what's crazy to Mike is there's the, the difficulty here is that we've, we've, we've read some stories and we've,

we've sort of covered a little bit of this because what we've seen is these people, they get in deep, right? It's not just, it's, you know, frazzle drip sounds ridiculous to us, but, and, it's, you know, Frazzledrip sounds ridiculous

to us, but, and, and I don't know that people start on Frazzledrip. It feels like, it feels like the, you know, the gateway drug is, you know, something much lower on the scale of craziness, but they eventually graduate to Frazzledrip, right? There's, there's people out there who genuinely believe this. And so these people are deep in this. And there was a woman who we read an article about a woman who was trying to deconvert people through dialogue. And literally the only way she said that this could be done is one-on-one conversation, that this is not a thing that we can just, we can't, it's going to be very difficult to, you can't just mass unplug people. You have to do this work singularly.

Yeah. There is no large-scale de-radicalization. That does not work. What you have to do is you have to really fight these battles one-on-one because everybody's journey into conspiracy theories is a little bit different. And so therefore, everybody's journey out of conspiracy theories is going to be a little bit different. The problem is, most people who are enmeshed in the world of QAnon, they don't want to leave it. They like it. They want to be a part of that group. That's a community of people who believe the same things. out of that group are crazy and dangerous and hateful. And the people who are in it are loving and patriotic and they know what's going on. They're awake. Why would you want to leave a community of people who love you and listen to you and believe the same things you believe to a harsh and unforgiving world of people who you feel like are telling you what to do? People don't want to do that. Yeah. Somehow you made the last thing you said worse.

do. People don't want to do that. Yeah. Somehow you made the last thing you said worse. That's what just happened, Mike. And I just want to say it to you. Mike, people are going to be looking for your book. Can you tell us a little bit about your book? Sure. It's called The Storm is Upon Us, How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. It is available anywhere you get books. So be that Amazon, be it brick-and-mortar stores, bookshop.org. You can order it directly from the publisher. That's Melville House. It is everywhere.

It's hardcover. There's an e-book. There's an audio book. There's no shortage of how to get this book. And I think it's certainly a primer for people who maybe have only sort of heard of QAnon and really don't know anything about it and maybe feel like it's not that important. But it's also got a lot of information that's not about QAnon. It's about how these things start and why people believe them and what it is that draws people to movements like QAnon, historically what's done that, and some of the basics of how to help people, how to get

people out of it. And so I really hope that people find it to be readable and not overly complicated. It's not an academic book. It's very much a story. And it's very much a book that I really wanted to be a page turner. You know, there's thriller aspects to it. It's not just sort of a list of statistics and studies. It's very much a living story. So I really hope people find it accessible and that it kind of puts some things into perspective and helps people have a little bit of empathy for people who are dealing with this, whether it's the people who are sucked into it

or their friends and family members who are really looking for someone to help them figure all of this out. We'll put links on this week's show notes to the book and to your Twitter account. Mike Rothschild, thank you so much for joining us. This was, while it was a little distressing, it was very, very insightful.

Great interview. Well, thank you. And I really, I hope that people are not so much distressed as people feel like they know what this is. And once you kind of know

what the component parts are, then I think maybe you're not quite as afraid of it. It doesn't seem so intimidating and you can find ways to deal with it. It doesn't seem so intimidating and you can find ways to deal with it. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much, Mike. Thank you. Yo, it's Big V.

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I'm not going to get the vaccine. Then die. What do we do, argue with you? I'm not on the debate team. This isn't mock trial. Aren't you worried about the side effects i'm worried about the disease well they're tracking you through the microchip they're tracking you through the phone you're watching this on get the vaccine so see so we've got to talk a little bit about covid and we're not it would be impossible at this point not to discuss the incredible fucking surge that we are in the middle

of nationally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Delta variant is just chewing through shit. Yeah. So they've got a couple of COVID stories. So this story comes from CBS News. COVID patient in Louisiana says he'd opt for hospitalization again over vaccine. So this is part of a larger story.

That headline really comes as part of a larger story about the continued reluctance of people to accept reality. Yeah. Especially in rural areas. Right. Yeah. Mostly in rural areas to accept that COVID is going to tear through your, because they missed it all early. Yeah.

They missed it. Delta is fucking coming for you. Delta is at least, depending on what you read, it's something like twice to 325 or 225% more contagious. A lot of stuff that I was reading was saying that people who are sick with it have up to a thousand times more virus in their nose and throats than people, than the original strain. So it's massively fucking contagious. I was listening to something the other day where some infectious disease specialist, and it was a news thing. It wasn't some bullshit like, you know, I found this on social media thing. He was saying like with Delta, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. If you do not get vaccinated, you will get COVID. This thing is massively more contagious than the

original strain. And there are still people out there who think this thing is like not real or not a big deal. Or, and in this story in particular, there's a guy who gets it. And a hundred percent, when they say, would you take the vaccine? He said, no, I won't do that. And he got it so bad. He was seriously hospitalized. And he was like, yeah, I'm real lucky to be getting out of here today. You know, I got fucking sick as a dog in the hospital.

I've never been hospitalized. Have you been hospitalized sick? No, never. Even when I had meningitis, I had meningitis and they fucking sent me home. Yeah. You know, I've never been hospitalization sick. I've never been overnight one day in the hospital.

And when I think back to how sick I was, and the only thing I really have personally to compare it to is that meningitis. Meningitis, yeah. You were pretty fucking sick. I was pretty fucking sick. You were pretty fucking sick. I was very sick. And they sent me home compare it to is that meningitis. Meningitis. Yeah. You were pretty fucking sick. You were pretty fucking sick. I was very sick.

Yeah. And they sent me home and I dealt with that at home. And I wasn't okay. For two weeks, I wasn't okay. And I think like, this is worse, right?

Because you're in the hospital. You're in the hospital. Yeah. You know, and I have asthma and I did go to the emergency room one time because of my asthma, because I could not breathe. I couldn't catch my breath. And I went to the emergency room and I remember how scared I was

to like that feeling of not being able to catch a breath. Yeah, man. Is like that catch, that is a like, I need this to be over moment. That's a panic inducing moment.

There's very little I've ever felt that's like that. I can't imagine going through that and somebody's like, you know, you can never do that again if you'd like.

You could have never done that in the first place. All you have to do is get a shot. Yeah. Like, I'm not a fucking baby. Yeah.

Get a shot. Yeah. Well, and this guy is 100% thinks it's political. Yeah. Like, that's how he's treating it

is that it's 100% political. Even when he's, when he's confronted with a, with a GOP senator who I think is from his state or- From his own his state or his own state says you should get the, you should get vaccinated there. He's still kind of is,

is hemming and hawing and, and they seeded this. They did this. They were the ones who caused this. This could have been so easy, but they wanted political gain and they did not care how they grease the fucking wheels. They didn't give a fuck how many people had killed. They wanted political gain and they did not care how they greased the fucking wheels. They didn't give a fuck how many people it killed.

They wanted political gain. And the way to get political gain is to say that it's not a thing. And then, you know, you look at how many different fucking messages they've been sending out. It's mixed message city. I mean, it's not a thing. It's fake. It isn't fake because Trump's going to make a thing to fix it. But now that the Democrats are in, now it's fake.

And oh, you don't need these masks. And maybe it's just this outrageous group of lies that they've been telling people all for political. And now they're trying to blame. There is a serious effort on the right to try to blame the reluctance of people to vaccinate on the Biden administration for not sucking enough Trump dick. Have you read that story? Oh my God. They are, they are seriously, there are people like, well, you know,

maybe if Biden would reach out to Trump and ask him to cut a PSA or if he would reach out to Trump. Oh God. Get the fuck out of here. I actually want to read what this guy said when they, and they asked him about it because his words, like, it's kind of shocking.

It's kind of fucking shocking what this guy says. He says, before the interviewer asked him, before you you got sick if you had had a chance to get the vaccine and prevent this would you have taken the vaccine he said no i would have gone through this yes sir don't shove it down my throat that's what local state federal administration is trying to do shove it down your throat and the guy interviewing says what are they shoving the science and he says no they're shoving the fact that that's their agenda. Their agenda is to get you vaccinated. That doesn't even make sense. It doesn't even make sense.

Yes, public health officials' agenda is to get you vaccinated because that is what they are charged with. They are charged with safeguarding public health. It's like saying, the dog catcher is always trying to catch dogs. Yeah, it's so stupid. Oh, he wants to catch all these stray dogs. I got to let all the dogs. That's their agenda. Their agenda is to do their actual job to save my stupid fucking life. And that's the thing is he's taken up a hospital bed.

Yeah. Right. He's taken up a hospital bed in that place. He has an opportunity to get other people sick because of his own negligence, because of his own, because he thinks that it's connected politically. And there's another story, Tom, this one is from Alabama, al.com. And it's, it's this, it's this doctor who's talking about people that are dying. The headline is, I'm sorry, it's too late. Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated dying COVID patients. And Tom, I just want you to read, of this stuff here real quick. So this paragraph here, if you could just read this. Absolutely. I'm admitting young, healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections, wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham in an emotional Facebook post Sunday. One of the last things they do before they're

intubated is to beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I'm sorry, but it's too late. Back in 2020 and early 2021, when the vaccine wasn't available, it was just tragedy after tragedy, Kobe told AL this week. You know, so many people that did all the right things and still came in and were critically ill and died. A few days later, when I call the time of death, continued Kobe on Facebook, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same. They cry and they tell me they didn't know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color, they just wouldn't get as sick. They thought it was

just the flu, but they were wrong and they wish they could go back, but they can't. So they thank me and they go get their vaccine. And I go back to my office and I write their death note. And I say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives. Holy shit. Right, right. And this is, these aren't, these aren't old people. These are young people.

Delta is for fucking real, man. And I got, I don't want to be that guy, but I'm going to be that guy. We had this coming. We didn't have to have Delta in the States. We had plenty of time. There were plenty of vaccines. There's been plenty of vaccines for a long time. We have 48% of the entire population right now has two vaccines. So that's it. New York Times this morning, 48%. Tom, this is 100% the problem with privilege. We were so fucking privileged to have so much vaccine. There's people all over this world

that do not have access to a single dose. And we had enough doses in this country to vaccinate every single citizen period that could have gotten it. We had enough to do it and we could have gotten it done. Not just like a long time coming. It could have been done fast and like he's, like Biden said, it could have been done by June.

It could have been done where there wouldn't have been a single person who wasn't eligible for the vaccine. They wouldn't have been wanting. We had it here and we could have stopped it and we didn't because, just because, for the same reason we still have fucking packs of measles out

there it's because people are so privileged they don't think that it can ever affect them yeah what should have happened is delta should have arrived here and had nowhere to go right because delta should have hit the fucking wall of herd immunity right that's that the 20 of our population right now is kids that cannot get the vaccination right so? So 20% is just, you write that off. We are not there yet. The vaccines are not available probably until September, maybe October for 20%, one out of five human beings in this country right now are ineligible. So it is even more incumbent upon the rest of us that have the incredible luxury and privilege of the free solution to this problem. Yeah. Delta should have arrived and hit a fucking brick wall of,

of, of fucking herd immunity. And the fact that less than half are fully vaccinated, according to the New York times this morning, 48%, less than flip a coin. Yep. That's,

that's it. Flip a coin. Now it's better in Illinois and it's better in certain areas. And I'll tell you what, like you can draw a one-to-one correlation. Red and blue states, man. Red and blue counties. Red and blue counties. Oh, you know, Cecil, I was looking at Illinois counties.

I was looking at where I live and where you live and where I work. And I was just looking at, like, the seven-county region around Chicago Metro. And then I was like, you know what? I'm curious. And so I was like, I wonder what it is in Pike County. Dude, it's through the roof. Yeah. It's through the fucking roof.

I mean, granted, there's 11 fucking people down there, but on a percentage of change basis, it's through the fucking roof. Yeah. It's through the roof because nobody down there, it's fucking rural America, man.

It's fucking rural America. And rural America, the red counties, to your point, the red states, they're getting fucking destroyed. And the Republicans are finally cottoning on to what damage this is going to do. Because initially, this was a blue problem because of population centers, right? And I think they saw the political hay they could make at the beginning of the

pandemic and say, this is a blue state problem. Look, blue states are getting hammered. Well, yeah, that's where population is. And there are no mitigation measures that are established and in place, right? Now that mitigation measures are established in place, who's getting crushed? Who's getting fucking crushed? The red states. And they're getting crushed because disinformation and misinformation has been peddled by authorities and then amplified online, man. And now you're looking at these people trying to backpedal, but they've sold these other lies. And so now people don't believe them

or they're not listening to them. Or in this case, this guy earlier who said he wouldn't get the vaccine, he didn't even know. He didn't even know that that's what that guy said. Well, the thing is too, that leading up to the election, people are more tuned into what their political leaders are saying.

Now it's post-election. So a lot of people are less tuned in to what their political leaders are saying. Also, we're out of lockdown, so people aren't reading the news as much. So all those factors play into the difficulty of getting messaging out now as opposed to the golden fucking opportunity we had. It's insane that we're just allowing people to just lie like this, especially leaders in this country to lie, to say misinformation. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene this week was taken off of Twitter because she was spreading misinformation. She's spreading just heinous lies.

There has to be. There's nothing. They just get to do whatever they want. Yeah, well, and I got to tell you, she gets taken off of Twitter for 14 days. I know. And then they get put back on. Like, Facebook has, I was just listening to a daily.

I'm sure you probably listen to the same thing. There's like, there's a dozen people that are responsible for 65% of the COVID-19 misinformation. Facebook doesn't take, does not just delete their accounts. Sure. They could delete 12 accounts and they could knock off 65% of the COVID misinformation like that, like that. And they just don't do it because people are making money and they're making political gain from this. And meanwhile, cases this morning, when I checked the times this morning, cases are up 140, 150, 160%. I remember what it is.

There are 41,000, man. Yeah. Six weeks ago, they were at 10 it is. There are 41,000, man. Yeah. Six weeks ago, they were at 10,000. There are 41,000 again. Yeah. It's unreal. And 41,000 is, you know, that's pandemic numbers.

Yeah. That's back in the pandemic. We're in the thick of it again, brother. Yeah. Yeah. There's no difference. So, SheWork uses the urban landscape

for a fast-paced workspace with no boundaries. Huh. If parkour is using the city as your gym, SheWork is using urban landscape for a fast-paced workspace with no boundaries. Huh. If parkour is using the city as your gym, SheWork is using the city as your office. So correct me if I'm wrong. People are paying you to use the free public charging station? So what? All the great male entrepreneurs do it, okay?

They take something that already exists, claim it was their idea, throw in some fancy furniture, and charge double for it. For letting people sit on your junk and smoke? Exactly. This story comes from The Guardian. Companies claim there's a labor shortage. Their solution? Prisoners. Of course. Man, first of all, there is no labor shortage. Economists agree that there is no labor shortage. That's not a thing that is actually happening. Economists agree that there is no labor shortage. That's not a thing that is actually happening. There are some shortages in very specific industries, but broadly speaking, across our entire economy,

there's no labor shortage. The labor shortage is a right-wing narrative. It is not borne out by the numbers, and that's really important to know. There are companies, however, which are having a hard time. What's in it for the right wing, Tom, to have a labor shortage? I don't know. There are companies, however, which are having a hard time. What's in it for the right wing, Tom, to have a labor shortage? I don't know. Maybe so they can strip fucking unemployment benefits from people. Maybe so that they could say that, you know, like people are lazy and they just,

they just want to live off the government teeth. They want to just, all they want to do is just exist. They are just lazy. Not that they're treated poorly and they're quitting in droves because of shitty conditions. The great resignation doesn't mean that people quit and then don't find jobs. The great resignation means people are quitting bad jobs and poor paying jobs. The labor shortage is specifically tied to companies and industries that provide their workers with a poor quality of life and poor compensation for the work that they do. Sure, sure. So companies, rather than reckoning with that and saying like, okay, well, this is going to hurt our bottom line, but we're going to do the right thing. We're going to pay people a living wage and we'll just make less money, right?

Instead, they're looking at essentially slave labor, right? Or the nearest closest thing, which is prisoners and people who are on work release programs who make a pittance, a fucking pittance. We've been doing this forever. I mean, this slave labor, this happens all the time. This is one of the reasons why they specifically want people in prison. That's why there's these crazy sentencing laws that put people behind bars for a long time. It's to feed this other work. They get paid essentially nothing and this company gets to live off the backs of slave labor. That's what this is. This is not a fucking like,

there's ways to say this to make it, to couch it, to make it seem like it's not what it is. But it is what it is. Yeah, it is. They talk about immigrant, this is directly from the article, they talk about immigrant labor,

prison labor. It's all about exploitation, nothing else. That Chuck Stiles, director is directly from the article, the talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it's all about exploitation, nothing else. That Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters Solid Waste and Recycling Division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage

that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line. So they're talking, again, specific industries. What is the waste industry? It's hard work. It's grueling work in bad weather conditions. They get very few days off, very few holidays off. It's extremely dangerous work.

I never really realized how dangerous waste management was until not that long ago. I read a long-form article, I think in the Times or the Atlantic about it. It's incredibly dangerous work, like wildly, wildly dangerous work. And they're just like, yeah, all right, well, we could pay more for people to do this grueling, arduous, difficult manual labor. Cuts into our dividends. But we don't want to. Sure. We don't want to. We don't want to. Because the people at the top want to, they refuse to do anything to stop

Stop their gravy train, brother. to stop their profit. They want to make sure and they cut into, I saw a story this week that was posted somewhere where they were talking about, they're talking about

a pizza place and this pizza place for one day, the owner just didn't take any profits and he gave them to the people that worked there.

And they made $72 an hour that day. Holy shit. And he was just like, as a thanks. And that's all great and fine, but how much

are you making? Yeah, but the other 364 days, they're making nothing. Crushing. They're making nothing, right? And that's the thing is when you get a chance to look back, and there's plenty of examples of companies out there

that have done a good job of paying their workers a good amount of money, and their company has succeeded, and they've become prosperous, and their employees have become prosperous. This one guy said he wasn't going to have anybody started his company for less than $75,000. I know that story.

Their company's taken off. Takes off. We have this bullshit narrative that it is antithetical to success to pay people well. Yeah. But we cannot have a thriving middle class. And the thriving middle class is what drives our economy. 100%. If we don't have consumers, we don't have people to buy the shit that we make.

So we are doing a bad job making more consumers. We are shitting on ourselves in order to funnel more and more and more money up to the top. I totally hear people say, look, a company has to make a profit, right? A company that doesn't make a profit can't exist. They'll go out of business. Companies should make a profit. People at the top who take the risk and create the company, they should make good money. Absolutely. If I own a business and I roll the dice and I invest my whole life savings and I do all that work, I should make a good living from that. But if I can't make a good living at the same time that the people who work for me also make a living wage, then that is not a viable business. We don't have a viable business.

Companies should make profits. That's our system. I don't think any reasonable person is against that. The problem is that the wage disparity is so vast. It's insane. It's not like two to one or three to one or six to one. It's hundreds to one. Orders of magnitude define this

difference. So we want to thank our patrons. Of course, we want to thank all our patrons. We want to thank our newest patrons, Leftover Hamsters. Leftover? Lynn, Elizabeth, James, L. Becker, Douglas, Rory,

and a future atheist mortician and people who up their pledges. Bob, Chris, Tiffany, and Grindhouse Video, thank you so much for your generous donations. Your donations pay salaries, genuinely pay salaries. They pay Ian and Sarah's salary. And we could not do the show

and create the show without them. In fact, the guest we have tonight was fully facilitated by our employees. We did nothing to get the guest. We did the interview, but they got it all the way there. It wasn't going to happen without them. Yeah, 100% suggested and gotten

by Sarah and Ian helped getting the communication set up so we could have the conversation with them. So 100% not us. And it would not have happened if we didn't have employees. So we want to thank, of course, our employees for working for us, but we want to thank you for paying for them. Yeah, they're wonderful.

Thank you so much, guys. We're getting a ton of these messages, Tom. A ton of people are saying, look, once Trump came in, I sort of changed my mind about a lot of things, specifically religion and skepticism. And we got one from David who says the same thing. You know, it's kind of funny because the evangelicals lined up behind Trump, but then a lot of evangelicals just stopped being evangelicals. Yeah. They just tapped out. And

Catholics and just a whole bunch of folks just like, I'm not, this is not what I signed up for, man. Right, right. This is not my, I didn't think the band was playing Nazi songs. Yeah, exactly. I'm out of the band. What am I doing here? We got a message from Eric and Eric says, talking about what you can do with your body after you die. Anyone interested, you can donate your body to science or medical students to practice on. You can still do organ donation and they cremate you at the end of the cost

is $0 and $35 with an earn. And there's a link we'll put on this week's show notes. If you're interested in maybe doing that for you or a loved one or something, you can donate your body to science. A lot of people send in messages about specifically about the conversation we had last week, Tom, where we're talking about- Really struck a chord. Yeah.

How are we going to get disposed of when we go? And my thought was, I want to feed the worms. Like that's what I really want to do is feed the worms. And a lot of people, we had a lot of suggestions. We'll get to some of those as we go on. But this also struck a chord. They said, hey, you know, you could donate your body to science too.

So yeah. Yeah. I got to say real quick, I would never donate my body. I just know they would make fun of it. I know, right? Like I don't want the last thing that my body ever does is to be like, Oh,

look at this shitty, shitty body. I lived my life. I don't want to be a cautionary tale. You know what I mean? I don't want to be a punchline after the fact. I mean, I do it enough for myself as I'm living.

Right. Yeah. Jeez. So we got a message from, this is from Mads, I guess. It's hard to tell. I don't know. But I think it's from Mads. And they sent in a long message about what you can do if you want to have what we suggested,

which is, you know, if we don't want to be embalmed, Mad says, no single state in the U.S. requires it. And any funeral home, mortuary or mortician who tells you this is lying to you. You don't need, you don't need to state a religious exemption. It's as simple as having the person in charge

with the death plans. Tell the funeral home and the mortuary not to embalm you. Yeah, that's awesome. That's great. That's great. I don't want to be involved. I don't either. That's just like I don't want to last longer. Once I'm dead, it's just

the last thing. Finish it up. Look, I didn't last that long in life. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? I was never impressive for duration in life. Right, right. We got a message from Jackie who says, listening to 586, thought I'd share my experience

with disposing my dad's remains. He didn't share his wishes with me or my sister, but we found information on his computer about a Glendale Memorial Nature Preserve. And for a tax deductible donation, they'll just put you in the ground there. And it's a non, with non-bio, you can't have any non-biodegradable items,

but a small marker is placed and there's a map where you can locate have any non-biodegradable items, but a small marker is placed and there's a map where you can locate the marker. It's in a forest. And so, yeah, it's just a beautiful, peaceful location and they just chuck you in the ground in this nature preserve and you literally feed the flora and fauna, which is what I want,

man. There's a shitty part of me that's shitty, Cecil, that just wonders if that's not some guy with some forest. And he's like, man. There's a shitty part of me that's shitty, Cecil. It just wonders if that's not some guy with some forest. And he's like, yeah, it's about here. Yeah. And meanwhile,

it just like burns the bodies like on the cheap off to the side. Yeah, he's just got a jart and he throws it out there and he's like, hey, your grandpa's over there. Yeah, he's over there.

He's over there. Yeah, watch it. You got to wear this helmet though when you go out there. We got a message from Not A Terrible Karen and she says, the obvious retort to the Catholics

disrespect to bodies argument is to point out the worldwide distribution of unmarked graves associated with Catholic activities. Yeah, it's not real respectful. 100% true. It's just like, you know, if you're talking about

what to do with something when they die and they're going to shame you, how fucking dare you? Yeah, maybe you should check the ground you're talking about what to do with something when they die and they're going to shame you, how fucking dare you? Yeah, maybe you should check the ground you're standing on. I don't think it's that solid. Unreal. We got a message from Abby and Abby says, I just wanted to say that the Jews are buried within 24 hours of their death in a plain pine box in a shroud without being embalmed. And you can do

it too. We also personally, with shovels, bury the box until it's completely covered with dirt. We bury you in about as earthy way as possible. And she says, for the price of a dozen bagels, I'll let you come to my funeral and see. First of all, Abby, I love the idea that you've got a cover charge at your funeral. Yeah. That's great. I want a two drink minimum of my, Cecil,

if you outlive me, two drink minimum. Two drink minimum and at mine, I want an everything bagel. That's what I want. Everybody's got to bring one everything bagel.

I put it in the coffin with me so I could eat them across as they go across the river sticks. I can jam them in my mouth. We got a bunch of messages, good feedback about Demon Haunted World. We're going to be reading next week.

We're going to be reading the chapter, Science and Hope, chapter two. And we got a ton of messages from people saying, man, I never read this book before. Thank you so much for opening my eyes. I've never seen it before. Other people saying, I read this book decades ago and I loved it.

And other people saying, well, we have people saying, I put in my PhD thesis. You know, there's- So many messages. Just massive connection with the audience. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe one of the most popular things we've agreed to do.

Yeah. We got, okay. So last week on the live stream, we talked about Candace Owens. The first time we ever really talked about her. Fucking knucklehead. She wanted to have a phone made up called the Freedom Phone,

where you could have Parler and all these other places that weren't being sold on the Apple Store. And they were going to have their own app store and they were going to have... And come to find out, it's a cheap knockoff Chinese phone that they just called the Freedom Phone, hilariously, from China. China. Yeah, from China.

But one of the funny things is that the people who are talking about and trying to promote this device, Candace Owens herself and two other people who are talking about promoting this device,

they posted to Twitter and all their accounts underneath say, from Twitter, from iPhone. It's amazing. It's so perfect. Oh, it's so good.

It's so perfect. Yeah, buy my phone. I mean, I'm not used to it. I mean, don't get me wrong. Look, it's amazing. It's so perfect. Oh, it's so good. It's so perfect. Yeah. Buy my phone. I mean, I'm not used to it. I mean, don't get me wrong. Look, it's a totally useless piece of shit brick thing.

It comes with spyware from the authoritarian regime of China. Anyway, freedom phone. Yeah. Uh, we don't make a lot of money. We make all the money. It's amazing though.

It is a cheap knockoff phone and they're trying to make as much money as they can. I mean, it's, it's, it's so funny because the grift never stops. Never. It just never stops. It's always like a fucking train and they're all trying to grift and none of these people ever get shunned. Nope. You know, Candace Owen next week could make the fucking Freedom Pager and people would buy it.

You know I'm not kidding. I mean, I'm half kidding. I'm half kidding. Oh, my telegram's going off. I got to dial in the signal. Hang on a minute. Hold on a second. I got to go to a payphone. Oh, that's the number I get when my Klan meeting is about to start.

There's like one payphone in the middle of Iowa left. That's it. We also got a message that people are buying Demon Honored World because of this. And a bunch of people were saying on our fan page, like, hey, how do I get in there? How do I buy it? Because a bunch of these places, you're not able to buy it new anymore because it's not being printed anymore. It's not being printed. So

you go on Amazon to go try to buy it and people are selling their used copies for $60, $70. That's bonkers. And so we talked, I sent a link to A Books. I love A Books. A Books is a used book site that you get it from booksellers. These are brick and mortar. A lot of these are brick and mortar bookstores that just buy used books.

And they sell this stuff online and they'll ship it to you anywhere. And you could get it for relatively inexpensive. They start to go up after a while, but there was maybe 20 or 30 copies on there that you can get for under 20 bucks. And then it starts going up from there. And there's other used bookstores and book sites out there. But you can pick this book up. A lot of places you'll have to buy it used because like I say, it's not in print anymore. Someone, some very naughty someone, I thought I saw someone posted the PDF somewhere. I'm not going to share

that PDF, but I will say that there is a naughty individual out there who may be sharing a PDF version that is 100% printed. I bought it on Kindle. Yeah, you get electronically 100%. So if you're looking for it electronically, you can buy it electronically. You don't have to pirate it. You can buy it. But yeah, we encourage people to get it and listen to it. It's a great book.

It's just a great book. We're going to do chapter two next week. We hope people join us for that. We're really excited about it. It's a great book. It's just a great book. We're going to do chapter two next week. We hope people join us for that. We're really excited about it. We want to thank Michael Rothschild for joining us today. Really interesting interview. You should check his book out. The storm

is upon us. We're going to put links on this week's show notes to all his Twitter account and to any place that you want to buy this book. If this guy sounded interesting, trust me, he's a good storyteller place that you want to buy this book. If this guy sounded interesting, trust me, he's a good storyteller. You're going to enjoy this book. Yeah, the only thing, Cecil,

is can you trust a Rothschild? I don't know you can. That's anti-Semitic. Way to turn it down at the end. Okay, George Soros told me to say that, all right? It's a competition between the two. It's a whole thing. He's been writing for many years as a a journalist so i think that this is this book

is gonna it's like he said it's gonna be a page turner so check it out that's gonna wrap it up for this week we're gonna leave you like we always do with skeptics creed credulity is not a virtue it's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue hypnolon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night info-docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage,

death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption.

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