QAA Podcast - Episode 172: Secret Rulers of the World w/ Jon Ronson

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

We interview Jon Ronson, who has been studying conspiracy theories and a variety of other topics up our alley for the last three decades. He’s the author of books like 'Men Who Stare At Goats' and 'Them: Adventures With Extremists'. He’s also also made documentary series like 'The Secret Rulers of the World', which saw Ronson infiltrating Bohemian Grove on the same day that Alex Jones did in the late 90s. Jon Ronson’s latest work is a Radio 4 and BBC Sounds podcast series entitled 'Things Fell Apart'. It covers, among other things, satanic panic and tragic QAnon figure Isaac Kappy. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Jon Ronson: https://twitter.com/jonronson Listen to 'Things Fell Apart': https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0b1rg7c (UK) and available internationally on all podcast platforms January 25th Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks) QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com)

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Chapter 172 of the Q&N anonymous podcast, The Secret Rulers of the World episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View. This week, we got a chance to sit down with John, John,

Ronson, who has been studying conspiracy theories and a variety of other esoteric topics that are right up our alley for the last three decades. He's the author of books like The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them Adventures with Extremists. He's also made documentary series like The Secret Rulers of the World, which saw Ronson infiltrating Bohemian Grove on the same day that Alex Jones did and covering the now infamous conspiracy theorist in his early days. John Ronson's latest work is a Radio 4 in BBC Sounds podcast series entitled Things Fell Apart It covers, among other things, Satanic Panic and QAnon, so, you know, and specifically

Cappy. So, yeah, I thought this was a really fascinating sit down. Let's jump right into it. Interview with John Ronson. Hi, John. Welcome to the show. Hi, Julian. Very nice to be here.

Nice to see you all. We're very excited to speak with you today because you've been covering a very similar beat to our show, but for way longer. I mean, famously, you spent time with Alex Jones in the 90s. when you were filming the multi-part series Secret Rulers of the World, and you ended up trespassing into Bohemian Grove. If I understand correctly, by the way,

you walked through the front just saying, hey, I'm rich, I'm supposed to be here, and Alex was waiting through the woods, like, you know. Like the Blair Witch Project. Yeah, so anyways, yes. That is exactly what happened. So when we went to the town, what was the town, Montereo or Occidental,

I think the town was Occidental. That's where we were staying. This is north of Napa, and we met a local lawyer who told us that if we wanted to sneak into the grove, which he had himself done, then the way to do it would be to go to the local Eddie Bauer preppy clothes store and dress preppy and just walk up the drive, giving the security guard to kind of, I rule the world wave. So yeah, that's how I got in. I mean, thank you. Thank you so much, by the way, for stopping Alex bringing a gun in. That could have been so much worse. And I just remember your voice just quietly being like, well, maybe. maybe, you know, maybe not, maybe. Yeah, also, I said to Alex, like, have you got a contingency plan in case you're caught? And he said, yes, I do. And I said, well, what is it?

He said, well, if anybody, you know, if I'm caught, I'm going to say to them, don't come any closer. Oh, man. That's your contingency plan? You're going to say, don't come any closer? But, you know, so he ends up at, like, the cremation of care play, and you're there as well. He has a camera in his bag. So anyways, you know, obviously your work is legendary, and I really enjoy a variety of different things you've made, you know, from your shows to your books, to the documentary stuff.

But before we get into kind of more contemporary stuff, I did want to ask you what your impressions of that period, mid to late 90s and kind of Alex, just in retrospect. Oh, sure. Well, he was different to how he is now. There was less malevolence. When I first started saying that, I said it slightly hesitantly because I wasn't certain. It's not like I've watched every episode of InfoWars, you know, from the mid-90s on. But that was certainly my impression.

And in the subsequent years, people who know a lot about Alex, I always check with them. I say, is this true? Like the Alex Jones of the 90s felt a less malevolent figure than the Alex of today. And it's always confirmed to me. So he was 26 years old. his girlfriend Violet Stroke Kelly

she went by both names said that he's the new sensation like he's going to be the biggest thing in conspiracy broadcasting at the time this was just in a little suburban house somewhere in Austin but at the same time

but I didn't doubt her the conspiracy you know broadcasters at the time were by and large uncharismatic dull yet really popular Like the VHS tables at the gun shows were always very busy. So looking back now, it seemed obvious that there was a great deal of demand for a charismatic conspiracy talk show host.

The closest they had at the time was Art Bell. But he was kind of, you know, he was a little more cautious, a bit more skeptical, whereas Alex, of course, was balls out. Like even though even decades before he started doing really malevolent things like, hounding the parents of children killed in school shootings. He was still very eloquent with his Mayan, an Aztec, this and that. But the stuff he was upset and angry about back then was more reasonable stuff like Waco, Ruby Ridge. Even though Oklahoma City bombing, I don't think you'd need to be insane to think, well, you know, maybe it's worth looking at whether they missed, whether the government missed things, for instance. Yeah, that's really fascinating. I think that

That footage, too, you know, shows Alex Jones expressing genuine love for another person, which is something I have never seen captured on tape afterwards. That's right. Yeah, he was very proud of, of, of, violet. He called her, you know, he says, you're so beautiful. You're the web, this is the webmaster of Infowars.com. He was so proud of her. Contrast that with the photo of him standing in his underwear in front of the fridge,

where you can see his butt crack and he's trying to get food in the middle of the night and his child is posting it on TikTok. I think, you know, I mean, he kind of did the conservative arc. Divorce is always the end and bitterness and anger. Yeah, well, and also I've got to say narcissism. Yes. What I went to Alex's custody hearing came out that he had a diagnosis of narcissistic disorder. And I really do think that that's the solution to an awful lot of mysteries,

not just with Alex Jones, but with a lot of leading queue people and so on. It just makes so much sense when you look at the narcissism checklist as to why somebody would then become a big peddler of alternative ideas. One of your approaches in secret rulers of the world is to basically kind of embed yourself with people who are kind of conspiracy theory-minded and then go and investigate what they want to investigate. So, you know, in the case of Alex, it was Bohemian Grove,

but you also went to, like, try to investigate the Bilderberg group. So I kind of have a question about, you know, these kinds of entities, like the Bilderberg group or the type of people who are members of Bohemian Grove. I mean, you're definitely dealing with entrenched power. So what would you say the trick is when you're studying these kinds of institutions that are quite malevolent or can be in the context of conspiracy theories? Like, is it possible to avoid ending up, quote unquote, defending them? Sure.

Well, I think the best method is to just lose yourself, just become a, I deliberately didn't research the Bilderberg group before I went to Portugal to try and infiltrate them. It was a deliberate decision because I thought, I don't want to solve this mystery before I have the adventure. I just want to be a twig in the river of this story going wherever the story takes me. And I'm so pleased. I mean, I should say that that decision at the time was probably in part based on laziness. Like, I didn't want to spend that ages researching something.

But I'm very glad I'd made that decision because it meant that the excitement, the not knowing what's going to happen next, just becomes a very sort of pleasant part of the story. storytelling. And then your job, I suppose, is to try and sit through the eyes of the conspiracy theorists, to try and lose yourself in the maze of the story, and really not worry about rationality until you get back home. And you've got all the material. And that's when you start to pass through it all, thinking, well, what? How am I going to tell the story? And always, because I'm a rationalist, I'm always going to tell the story from a rationalist perspective. But

when I'm on the adventure itself, I'm not trying to be rational then. I just want to be a sponge. And but just in relation to these larger institutions, you know, once you look into them, how do you, how does that kind of compare and contrast work so that, you know, if the Bilderberg group is brought up in your movie, you still kind of do justice to, you know, people who do see them, I guess, as potentially malevolent, but maybe not Illuminati baby eaters? With the Bilderberg group, it was actually quite easy because the way that they see themselves isn't a million miles away from the way that some of the conspiracy theorists see them. Right.

They were set up in 1954 as a response to the Second World War. They thought, now what I'm about to say sounds foolish now, but maybe it didn't sound foolish then, which was that we want to take power away from politicians because look what happens when you have an ideologue as a, the leader of a country. We want to thwart future Hitler's. What's the safest way of doing that? We'll try and move power from politics to business. So the purpose of the Bilderberg group, in their words, was to invite up-and-coming politicians like Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher. They had a lot of success and introduced them to globalist-minded business leaders in the hope that they could offer them some wise, sensible words. So I think that is what the build of a group is. And

it's not a million miles away from how conspiracy theorists see them. Yeah. Yeah, globalists who want in store essentially a one-world government. Like that is, that's what's so interesting sometimes about Alex is like you get this core and you're like, well, that's, like you said, you can interview them directly. You know, or Alex or some of these conspiracy theorists could find out much more just sitting down with these people and asking them, hey, what are your intentions? And they actually do fit in with the fears often. Yes, sometimes they do. Lord Healy, who was one of the earliest members of the Builderbook steering committee,

he said to me, the idea that we were trying to implement a one-world government is exaggerated but not wholly unfair. So, yeah. So one of the oddest things about Alex, and maybe this is to do with narcissism, is that what we witnessed at Bohemian Grove, by the way, you mentioned my secret rulers of the world documentary, but in the documentary, I don't know. didn't really talk about me going into the grove, I concentrated it all on Alex, but in my book then, I talked much more about what I saw when we were inside the grove. But yeah, the thing that's

most baffling to me about that night was what we saw was really A, fucking nuts and B, extremely interesting. And yet, that, you know, that wasn't enough. You know, there's a phrase in Judaism, Dainu, which means that that is sufficient. Like for me, what I saw at Beavian Grove was Dianu. But for Alex, he wanted to put a whole, you know, just slap a whole load of lies on top of it. Like, why wasn't it enough that we saw this extraordinary ritual that was just absurd? You know, why did Alex have to pretend that we might have witnessed an actual human sacrifice?

Like, why wasn't the truth enough? Yeah, and you kind of mentioned there was like an orchard. There was an orchestra. This was a play. They had pyrotechnics, you know, stage directions and stuff. If you're going to do a human sacrifice, you don't invite the San Francisco symphony. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least you maybe like smudge that line in the script where it says, you know, take the baby and now, you know, sacrifice it. Yeah. I want to say that, yeah, I feel the same sort of interesting kind of frustration with conspiracy theorists whenever reporting about their beliefs or trying to look into their worldview. I mean, I thought a lot about this with, like, Epstein,

with the Epstein case, which is just a ludicrous, horrifying story about power and money and science and fame and, you know, the top point one percent society all getting together. So there's lots of horrifying things that you could dive into with the Epstein story. But the Q&M people, they kept adding on extra things, like the belief that, that Epstein Island had many underground layers in which, uh, in which, uh, children were sacrificed and eaten, which, you know, which there's simply no evidence for. That's not a defense of anyone. That's just, it's just a fact that no one has ever provided this kind of evidence. Right. So, um, yeah, I mean, my always goal, I'm sure yours, as like, I always want to try and

give it to, uh, the conspiracy theorist whenever they get something kind of right or whenever they're sort of like, have a point. But it's like, it's so frustrating that they add so many extra sort of exciting lies on top of was already a worthwhile story to tell. It's so odd. I think narcissism must have something to do with it because you, you know, part of that is wanting to be the smartest person in the room and to have special knowledge that other people don't have. So I guess that's why Alex felt that he couldn't leave Bohemian Grove with the same knowledge that I had. But by the time, but you know, by the town we got back to the motel that night, he was already starting to spin lies into the truth. I remember him saying

that he overheard two men saying, you know, walking along the path in this redwood forest saying, you know, yeah, we're going to get him elected. And I said, you know, Alex, that's exactly what you would like to have overheard and behemian growth to men plotting the election of someone. It's much more likely they're talking about the board of some company anyways. I mean, yeah, exactly. If he really did over here that I'm sure they were talking about the president. So I wanted to dive into something that really is at the intersection of all these things. On your new BBC radio show, things fell apart. One of the episodes is dedicated to actor Isaac Cappi, which is a martyr-like figure in the QAnon community. And I have to say your work was really illuminating. Even for people like us who've

been studying nonstop, you got access and, you know, had interviews with the man's family and friends and kind of compared that and went deeper on, you know, things like the night of his death and how, you know, Linwood came in. So I wanted to definitely go over a lot of that with you. Sure. But first, you know, how did you kind of come to focus in on Cappy? Because you could have done any other number of stories around QAnon. Yeah. I think it was the Hollywood connection that first interested me. Because I've noticed that there was a few leading Q&ON people who had been in Hollywood. There was that guy neon revolt as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah, who turned out to be. Oh, we're familiar

because he dubbed Travis Tapwater Goblin, or no, tapwater, what is it? Yeah, yeah, Tapwater Goblin. Yeah, that's Tapwater, Travis. He also called me Rat Tail Travis. He was an early fan of mine. He put him in a Q-Man centipede in which he was, I guess, just one in a chain of different journalists eating and, you know, well, you know how the centipede works. So, yeah, so sorry, go ahead. So I should say, by the way, that the show, things fell apart. It's right. As we speak, it's only on the BBC. But by the end of January, it will be everywhere where all podcasts are, so people will be able to hear it.

It's fantastic, by the way. The episode was great. Yeah, I've always been interested in telling stories that take place on the fringes of Hollywood. I've done that a few times. I find it such a melancholy place. And also, it's sort of personal. When I was starting out, I was on the fringes of Hollywood. trying to hustle my way in there.

And my son spends time on the fringes of Hollywood, too. And I always find it so melancholy. I really want, you know, as a digression years ago, I was in L.A. talking to a really successful screenwriter, and I said to him that that morning I'd been in a cafe and everybody, like in the cafe, was writing their screenplays on spec. And I said, don't you just feel for them? Like, you know, you're such a success.

And they're just trying to make it. And it's so sad. You just really want everybody to be successful. And, you know, don't you really feel for them? And he said, no, the reason why I don't feel for them is because I hate them. Yeah, that's it. L.A. L.A. is like, yeah, if there's melancholy, it's also just coded with envy. Yeah, I know, right?

But then my son told me something about how a friend of his would lie about where he is on Instagram. He'd say he's on the Warner Brothers lot when he's not. You know, he'll put his geo thing to somewhere where he's not. And I just found all that stuff desperately sad. I'm always thinking there but for the grace of God go I. You know, making it and not making it of, there's a very thin line between making it and not making it. And so I always really feel for people in Hollywood trying to make it. And I think that was the thing that first interests me about as a happy. So I was making a show about, you know, things fell apart is a series of eight stories about tales from the history of the culture wars. But by the time we get to episodes seven and

eight, we're kind of up to the present day. So I wanted to tell a QAnon story, specifically because I told a satanic panic story earlier in the series. So I put those two things together, and that's why I wanted to tell Isaac story. But at the beginning of Qaeda, you guys were way ahead of me. Part of the reason why I've listened to, you know, a number of your episodes is because because I was really behind on Q&R. When it started, I thought, well, I'm not interested in that because I did that in the 90s, and I never want to repeat myself.

But then when Q&Non just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, I regretted that lack of curiosity. So I spent quite a lot of time catching up. But it's for all of those reasons why I wanted to do the Isaac Kappa story. It's funny that you mentioned the kind of thin line between making it and not making it, because I feel like he kind of was lost in that liminal space, you know?

I mean, he was on the end. edge of larger fame, but always plagued by his kind of more conspiratorial beliefs. But if you, you know, as you do, and by the way, a really, really great episode of the show, you trace back the beginning when he was just hopeful and he was, you know, subjected to a conspiracy that is more credible, which is that the Democratic Party conspired to block Bernie from being the nominee in 2016. And so you kind of mentioned in your show, well, that's not so irrational. and the great disappointment and this kind of vision that he had of this conspiracy

apparently seems to have just been pushed him over the edge and later he ends up in Pizza Gate. I mean, do you think that this kind of conspiring in powerful circles when people realize it and see it, that it can then lead them, you know, in the military or major political parties, that it can then be a catalyst for people descending into darker stuff like PizzaGate or QAnon? Yeah, I think he was conspiratorial-minded anyway, But I think, and sometimes I think just some people are.

I've spent my whole life wondering why some people believe things that are clearly not true. But maybe the sort of bleak fact is that some people are just born that way. And in fact, with Isaac Cappy, it's only a 30-minute episode like they all are for this new series. But there's easily a feature-length episode to tell about Isaac Cappy. And in fact, somebody that I spoke to who's not. in the show, somebody who was close to Isaac, basically said that he was born that way. But yes, that Bernie, I was really surprised and didn't anticipate that one of Isaac's best friend said to me that Bernie being ousted was a big push in a more conspiratorial direction

for Isaac Happier. Didn't anticipate that at all, but it really makes sense. And I assume that there's a whole bunch, you know, that there are, that Isaac isn't the only Bernie fan that you'll find in Q, right? Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it is something that we see recurring. Obviously, these people shift allegiance very strongly once they get into the new conspiracy theories. But we've seen that great disappointments combined with real kind of conspiring that's quite visible to the public can push people into a much darker places, much less hope. And they want to burn the system down at that point because they, you know, Bernie wasn't an expression of wanting to burn the system down. It was more

for them, I think, a last ditch hope. Like, do we have any control over the way things are going? And then, you know, by the time it's two years later and by the time they've gotten into the Pizza Gate stuff, they are, you know, rabidly calling for authoritarianism that is, you know, kind of diametrically opposed to any of Bernie's values. And that's because, you know, people snap. People snap. I feel like a lot of people are already on the edge of snapping, of feeling I'm, you know, like I'm totally powerless in the face of this Byzantine and all-powerful and ever-unifying

and scrutinizing system. So, yeah, it is. That, I see that tragedy. And, but I do, you know, I do hear. people say, well, you see, so then there's an equivalent or whatever, you know, like this means this. And that's where I find that there's not actually that much of a connection. It's just that great disappointments, especially to do with having, you know, feeling like you have any political volition or power in the country, that can, that can really shatter you, especially

if you were brought up thinking, you know, your vote counts and this is a fair and democratic system. Yeah. As you say, disappointment, you know, the loneliness of Nella can seep into your bones. It really can. These spectral figures hiking Griffith Park every day. I should say, I'm saying this from a position of loving L.A. I'm going to live there in a minute. Like many Brits, I totally romanticize L.A. and think it's an incredible place. But it's also, if things aren't going right for you there, it can be the loneliest place I've ever been to, I think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Can we get a fact check on that, Jake? 100%

Yeah. Yeah. So loneliness also I think being attacked, being criticized. None of this, by the way,

is in any way, like I think as my documentary shows and as you know and you will have said too about Isaac Cappi, he did a bunch of things that you can't excuse,

but you can try and understand. Yeah. And I think another, so there was the loveliest, but also just in general if you're prone to narcissism and you start getting criticized, that seems to be something that can really put a person over the edge. Yeah, one thing I really loved in the episode is, you know,

you kind of looked at his tenuous grip on reality because he had fallen in with a new crowd in Hollywood. Some of them were kind of the sons and daughters of famous people. Some of them were screenwriters or directors or actors. And so he starts to fall in with these people and he aspires to become famous to make it. And then he has this very crucial night that you explored, where he explains to his friends that he believes essentially in Pizza Gate. And this couple of close friends in these kind of Hollywood circles, they basically start to put on an act and they pretend, oh yeah, it's real. And we're holding a child in a secret room in this house. And somehow they let him walk away without ever clarifying. It's not clear what happened there, but could you kind of

explain that? Yeah, well, what you said, Isaac confided in these two friends who were, you know, successful Hollywood people that he believed in Pizza Gate. And yeah, they put on an act. They said, we have a child. It's all true. And I've got a bookcase. And if you come with me and we press a button on the bookcase, then there's a dungeon and there's a child. And if you rape the child, then you will be a successful person in Hollywood. And yes, for some reason, Isaac left that night without any sort of closure, without, without them saying, presumably, without them saying, we're fucking with you. Because he certainly left that house believing that they were, that they weren't kidding. And he was haunted by it.

Yeah. And to me, that is an insanely cruel act. It's, well, it's definitely a prank gone wrong. Maybe they didn't know. I mean, I've never spent, I didn't, I emailed one of them and didn't get a reply. So I've never spoken to them, and I've never had their point of view. So this is like totally conjecture. Right, of course.

But, yeah, maybe they didn't know just how deep he was. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like, you know, whenever there's like baseless conspiracy theories about some kind of industry or whatever, maybe this is the kind of ways that they joke about it themselves. And these friends of Cappies mistook Cappy as someone who was in on the joke. But, you know, unfortunately, like you mentioned, these people, were like actors, so they put on a good performance of acting like Pizza Gate is real, which is a, I think, an important lesson.

If you are successful in Hollywood, do not joke about Pizza Gate being real, because this will only make people believe that is, in fact, real. They'll interpret it as a confession rather than a put-on. Yeah, and also, like you said, people are lonely and they're sucking in information in Hollywood. This is a place of, you know, hungry ghosts, and don't feed the ghosts trash. Yes. I agree. I've made that mistake from time to time after Charlottesville. I, because I'm Jewish. I, you know, I sent a couple of unwise tweets about how I'm going to replace people. But then I sort of quickly realized actually that's not something that you should be fucking with. So I agree with you. Fair, fair. So, you know, after this, he has this kind of phase where he starts to tell his loved ones that he's sorry, that he's done dark things actually and that he should have looked inside himself. And, you know, however it happens, he's supposed to.

to be visiting his parents and on a bridge in Arizona on his way from California to his parents' place. He ends up at 7.30 a.m. sitting on the edge of this bridge. So could you tell us kind of what happened that day? Yeah. So Isaac's parents and friends are pretty convinced because the official lie is that it was suicide. They're convinced that it wasn't. Of course, There's a third narrative, which is that it was murder, which is what so many queuing on people want to believe. But what the most plausible story, I think, is the parent's story, which is that he was on his way home to see them.

This was Mother's Day. He was going to give, he was depressed. But he's on his way to see his parents. It's early in the morning. He's sitting on a bridge with his back to the drop. Taking in the morning light, looks like he's, you know, just enjoying the sunrise. Some guys come over, drive towards him, think he's about to kill himself,

try and save him, drive up really fast, and he doesn't see them and that he sees them and he topples backwards or, if you believe the official report, you know, pushes himself backwards and dies. So, yeah, that's what his parents believe that it was an accidental death. they're not suicide. Yeah. Um, yeah, very tragic. Something I didn't have time to put into the show, but I'd like to ask, you guys, was this dead men, dead man switch thing? Did you know about this? Yeah, the idea that he had kind of put aside some documents that would be released in case of his death. And they were released, and it was this absurd video in a bathhouse. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I did,

I did hear about that. Um, yeah, there's nothing to that. There, that happens every time a major conspiracist dies. When Robert David Steele, major Q&U promoter, promoter of adrenachrome, the X-CIA, died. There was lots of rumors on Twitter that there was a dead man switch releasing previously unseen emails, which is kind of ridiculous. But like, yeah, the same kind of thing happens very frequently whenever a conspiracist dies. I mean, the same thing happened with what's his name, the antivirus guy. John McAfee. John McAfee. Same thing. Yes, yes. When John McAfee died, the exact same thing. People claim, like, oh, there's going to be a dead man switch and there's going to release all the secret information. I mean, it's just like a common trope whenever a major conspiracist dies. There was this also thing with John McAfee where after he had passed away, somebody posted a large cue to his Instagram account, right, Travis?

That's right. Someone with access to McAfee's account posted a large cue after he died. So that was a lot of fun. Well, now I'm interested, though, John. Tell me, was there anything interesting in that video? or, I mean, what do you make of it? Well, so it was a short video. When I first saw it, without any context, I was like, what the fuck is this? Without any context, it's a startling video. It's very short, and it's these very young girls wearing kind of togas, like something. Oh, wait a second.

Yeah, yeah. That is actually just footage that has nothing to do with him. That is an image that's been passed around to talk about child sacrifice for right because it turns out to be a spa in turkey or something and it's some kids playing dressing up yeah yeah right what I couldn't figure out and I don't know if you know is that particular video is is considered to be the Isaac Cappy dead man switch but is it just a bullshit thing that has no relation whatsoever as far as I know that video was floating around before Isaac Cappy passed away that is a video that gets floated around or screen capped

and put into memes about, like, you know, child sacrifice and supposed proof. Yeah, so I've seen that passed around a lot without his name now. I might be wrong, and we might have to cut this entire part out, but we'll see, we'll see. But, yeah, no, I wouldn't give that one too much credibility. I don't think he shot that video. I think it has nothing to do with him. Whether it was introduced after his death or not is kind of irrelevant to the point that, yeah, that is not Isaac Cappy's video.

Isaac Cappy isn't in it. There's nothing about it. Yeah, the only sort of salient thing was whether or not, that video was directly linked to Kappi's death, but clearly it sounds like it wasn't. Oh, because it's clearly bogus. Like, whatever it came from and whenever it first came out, it's bogus and it's been debunked. But I just didn't know whether it really was the thing that Kappi was referring to what he was talking about, Dead Man Switch. Yeah, that is fascinating.

Yeah, because there is video. I mean, he was so paranoid and clearly mentally ill in those last few days and weeks and all the videos he made were very worrying. you know, he seems emaciated, he seems depressed, and yeah, it's very clear, I think, to anybody except the QAnon people who just wanted to use him at that point, that this is a man who was very vulnerable and was going through a really difficult part of his life. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, after that, this Q&on lawyer, Linwood, who we've covered quite a bit on the show, he pops up a year and a half after Cappy's death.

Can you just tell us a bit about what happened there? Sure. So Linwood, this is a week before January 6th, Linwood just does a tweet storm about how there's evidence that John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States, and I think some other and some various election officials who were controversial at the time because they wanted the election to go unchallenged,

controversial in key circles, were being kidnapped. John Roberts, there was a video of Chief Justice John Roberts being forced to kill a child. And Isaac Cappy was given this evidence, and he was going to give it to Trump, but was murdered before he could. So Linwood was posting all of this stuff in the days before the January 6th insurrection, which was so surprising to me because when I first heard of Lynn Wood, it was very... Linwood had defended Richard Joel.

He defended the Covington, Kentucky. kid, which turned out to be a miscarriage of justice. So he'd done some good work, Linwood, and then suddenly something happened. He just, as Jonathan Swan said to me, the Australian political columnist said, well, they're all swimming in the same mire. They're all reading the same stuff online. You know, you would think that this incredibly important lawyer would have proper information at his fingertips, but no, he's reading the same shit that everybody else is reading, and they're all succumbing to it together. Yeah, I think. that's a really interesting kind of point that we can depart from, which is the idea that,

you know, at this stage, you know, it's like, I can't believe Linwood did that. I mean, Donald Trump was retweeting Q. Donald Trump basically, you know, at least he failed to turn on Q. So there's this irrationality at the top that one would assume doesn't exist in a system like this. And you kind of covered a really interesting aspect of this in the men who stare at Goats and the documentary that came out of it. And it explores this kind of new age, irrational idea class. And it explores. that seem to float into high-level American military and intelligence agencies thinking. And there's all these project names that are incredible, like Project Jedi, Project Stargate. Yes.

And the First Earth Battalion. I mean, this is fascinating. So tell us broadly about, you know, irrationality at high levels and how New Age irrationality, you know, has kind of been a historical thing. Yeah, absolutely. I should say, I give Trump less credit for being credulous because there was a really interesting quote of Trump's when he was talking about citizens. Sidney Powell, another sort of Liddward partner in crime, where he said, like, Sidney Powell was on the phone and he's got her on speaker phone, and she's like, ranting about this and that, about Dominion and this and that. And Trump puts her on mute, and he's laughing, and he's saying she's crazy. And then he says, but sometimes maybe you need a little crazy.

So for me, that says Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he was utilising. the craziness of the people around him, like Linwood and Sidney Powell, unlike, I'd say, the people from the First Earth Battalion back in the 70s. Yeah, I mean, I look at Linwood and Powell, and they were kind of like these berserker heretics, like, sent to self-immolate, you know? Right. Yeah, Trump's interesting, because at the same time, he seems to believe a lot of this stuff, but also understand how it can be used politically, and that feels much more cynical

and much more rational. When Trump says, she's crazy sometimes, but sometimes you need a little crazy. is in the days before January 6th, you've got to think, well, that's a rational act. Yeah, I mean, he was tired of Pence who gave him the actual rational response and said, no, actually, I won't play along. So I think he was looking, you know, for just people who are willing to destroy their own reputations and, like, sacrifice themselves to the great Moloch mouth of Trump, you know? Yeah.

So after Bohemian Grove, after my Bohemian Grove adventure, I was giving a talk in Ireland. And somebody said to me, look, I know what you think of Bohemian Grove. I know what Alex Jones thinks of Bohemian Grove. This was during the Q&A. But what did the grovers themselves think of it? And I thought that's such an interesting question. And I said, like, I think I was the only sane person in the entire Redwood forest.

Like, everyone was taking this ritual seriously, except for me. And that's what gave me the idea to write the men hysteric goats. Like, okay, I've done irrationality at the fringes of society, but now I want to try and tell a story about irrationality at the heart of power. And we were flailing around forever. We wasted like two years, trying to find the story. And then suddenly, then I was talking,

I was in Las Vegas, and I was talking to a guy called Ray Hyman, who was a famous skeptic. And we knew there was a tiny bit of this iceberg that was above the surface. And it was this, that there'd been this thing called Project Stargate, which was remote viewing. Military people were told to sit in a room

and try and be psychic. And they were in there for years. And because they were black ops, they had no coffee machine. It's like being black ops tends to be a real problem because you've got no budget. So you have to bring your own coffee into work. And when you're building needs maintenance, there's no maintenance budget because you're black ops. So they were just getting more and more kind of miserable inside this room at Fort Meade trying to be psychic, having to bring their own coffee into work, which they're very resentful about. And then they kept this team of psychic spies were being passed one minute there with military intelligence, one minute there with special forces, one minute there with the CIA for funding.

And when it goes back to the CIA, there was some people in the CIA who thought, oh, we don't want to do this anymore. We don't want a team of soldiers trying to be psychic. So they brought in this guy Ray Hyman to assess it, knowing that he would. to assess it skeptically and it would be closed down, which is exactly what happened. So I met Ray Hyman. And I didn't want to do a remote viewing story because a good journalist called Jim Schnabel had already written a book about it. So I didn't want to like do somebody else's story. But when I was with Ray Hyman, I said to him, you know, when you were there assessing these psychic soldiers, did you happen to notice anything else happening? And his eyes like lit up. And he told me the stuff that

He'd never really told anyone before that there was a lieutenant colonel who was trying to train his soldiers to fast for months at a time. And there was a general who thought he could burst clouds just by pointing at them, and this was General Stubblebine. So suddenly I had a couple of names, and it turned out the General Stubblebine wasn't only trying to burst clouds. This was a two-star general with 16,000 soldiers entered his command, but was also trying to walk through his wall at Arlington because the atom is made up mostly of space. and the human body and the wall are both made up mostly of atoms. Like, clearly, the problem here was the word mostly. Because he'd, like, you know, literally try to walk through his wall and would just, like, bump his nose.

And then I'd learned more that they were trying to kill goats just by staring at them. This was being done at Special Forces at Fort Bragg. And one guy had actually managed to do it. A man called Guy Savelli had managed to kill a goat just by staring at it. And I said, you know, this is great. But the guy said, but the problem was that his heart got damaged in the process. And I was like, what was the goat psychically fighting back?

And he was like, no, no, no. It's what's known in paranormal circles, this sympathetic injury. So suddenly this whole secret stuff, killing goats by staring at them, trying to walk through walls, all of the shit that nobody knew anything about was just open to me. So that's how I entered writing that book. Yeah, I love the kind of tiny subsection. of the story where you explore that they started with dogs, but nobody wanted to do that to dogs. Yeah. And they switched to goats. It was determined by an animal psychologist that people

find it hard to form an emotional bond with a goat. Or harder. I think the reality is that dogs have really strong psychic defenses, and they found that out very early and said, no, you know, we need a more vulnerable target like a goat. I met the goat stare at Gaisa Valley. They were filming me. I met him in Ohio. near Cleveland. And they were filming me the whole time. And they finally confessed to me that the reason why they were filming me

was in case I was Al-Qaeda and just pretending to be a journalist. Right. Right. And I think the moment that they realized that I wasn't al-Qaeda was when Gaisavani told me that his daughter was in the chorus of the movie Chicago

as one of the dancers. And I just sort of screeched, you know, oh, I love Catherine Zeta Jones. They all kind of relaxed. I think they probably thought even a deep cover Al-Qaeda operative wouldn't think to go that effeminate. No, no, no. You were back undercover.

Yeah. And I can't help but wonder, you know, that there's like this recent rash of red-pilled New Age influencers that worship the military. And, you know, they love the intelligence agencies or at least some of them. They pick the good ones and bad ones. But, you know, these Wu ideas, I mean,

they've been seeping into, you know, places of power for a long time from places that are sometimes as innocuous as, like, the Esselin Institute in Big Sur California. Like my friend was like, you should go there, you know, great meditation. It's a bit expensive, but like you can be nude in the hot tub, like right under the rocks. Like, you know, and then years later, I see it up here at the end of Mad Men. And I start to understand that the Eselan Institute was deeply involved with, you know, intelligence and high level military and stuff like that.

So yeah, tell me, like, what do you think about the, is there any connection there or is it just this unending? Yeah, there's a literal connection. I mean, I don't know if there's like an at all a sort of. conspiratorial connection. But the literal connection is that Jim Channon, who was like the main guy who was trying to make the U.S. military more paranormal, training soldiers in these paranormal ways, he went on a fact-finding mission to come up with these ideas. And I'm sure the first place he went was Esselin, because this was the early 70s just after Vietnam in Esseland. You know,

at that point, Jane Fonda was going to Esselen, Abby Hoffman was going to Esselen, Timothy Leary, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen. So it's no surprise that Jim Channan would end up at Eslin. But I don't think, I think he probably went, my guess is that he went to Eslyn, you know, went to the workshops, did a total encounter group, did all of this stuff.

But it's not like there were people at Eslin who were saying, you need to take this back to the military. Like I don't know if that happened, but I doubt that happened. I think just like you would experience if you went to Eselan, that's what Channon experienced. And then he took what he wanted back to the military and just adapted it in military ways.

Yeah, which is very funny because, you know, now we have this, you know, like Havana syndrome and whatever. And I think it's kind of representative of the fact that all of this ends up weaponized. You know, when you hung out with these guys, they all wanted to twist your fingers, show how they could psychically knock you out. Like, it all ends in like this brutish, kind of boring violence. Yeah. And it seems like they brought, you know, some of the drawings, oh, you'll carry a baby goat into battle. or, you know, you're going to have a speaker that plays soothing tones to the enemy. And those ideas are very quickly stripped down to, like, oh, no, I'm going to explode your brain with my mind.

So what do you think about, you know, this phenomenon? Well, so years later, when musical torture was being used in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and so on, I was curious, like, is there a path that led from music being used to pacify the enemy on the battlefield in the First Earth Battalion in the 70s to music being used as an interrogation technique in the War on Terror. And, you know, it feels like there is a jagged, circuitous path that takes you from one to the other.

Some of the same individuals were involved. So people who were fans of Jim Channon back in the 70s were involved in coming up with these new out-of-the-box ways to interrogate people 40 years later. So there were actual individuals who can connect. connect the two events. But yeah, the thing that got me interested was this guy at Guantan... It was either Guantanamo or somewhere else.

It might have been Al-Qaim, which was another place up in northern Iraq, was saying that, well, his story was that he was taken into a room and played a CD of covers of Fleetwood Mac songs at normal volume. So I'm like, what the fuck was that all about? And he was like, I have no idea. So were they embedding, given that they were using music to fuck with people's brains at the same time because people were being blasted with Metallica, Barney the Purple Dinosaur, whatever. So we know that music was used in the interrogation arena.

Were they trying some weird shit out with him that underneath these Fleetwood Mac songs was subliminal messages or something? Like, I have no idea, but it's not impossible. I mean, in Al-Qaim, they were putting them in shipments. containers and blasting the music into the container and the people are emaciated and they've clearly been kind of tortured. And then they were also flashing lights on and off into the container. So I mean, you see the end result and it doesn't feel much like a listening session to Fleetwood Mac and regular volume. That's a very, that's a much more brutish way

of using music to fuck with people's heads. And that was undoubtedly happening, not just there, but at Abu Ghrae, but Guantanamo. What I don't know is, whether they were also taking the opportunity to try and use sounds in different ways. Because there's a big history of the military doing that stuff. There's a place, I can't remember. Somewhere in Virginia, there's a place that's run by some of the old remote viewers where they do this thing called hemisyncing, where they try and align your left and right hemisphere using sounds.

So sounds to change the way your brain works is definitely something that's been that's historically used in the military. So you have these kind of, yeah, you know, stuff that is written in the documents and, you know, employed by the military. And then you have theories about foreign sonic weapons coming up with Havana syndrome, which when I watched, you know, your work, I was just thinking, oh, my God, it's just an inversion of that, right? The enemy is actually doing this stuff, which, by the way, we haven't really proven works, but they're doing it. They have a secret weapon, and we are catching this specific syndrome from it. So, I mean, what did you make of Havana syndrome? To be completely honest, I've been so busy this year making things fell apart that even though, obviously, I've seen articles about the Havana syndrome.

I haven't really done any proper research. You probably know more about it than I do. I mean, has anything been proven yet? Well, we have a good episode on it and no. In a rationalist chain, there's multiple breaks. One is proof that this weapon exists. Second, proof that it was used by the Cubans or the Russians or the Chinese. Then proof that the syndrome exists.

Then proof that the syndrome is connected to this said attack. I mean, there's lots of chains that are just totally shattered. There's no actual connective tissue there, unfortunately. But there is a bill passed by Congress now, so it doesn't matter. I have a feeling that, you know, this kind of pilling or woo thinking has just, it's just become, I mean, maybe it always was, but it is endemic. Yes. I think they would say, the military people would say, and in fact did say to me, the way

that they justify it is if the military, it's part of the military's really. met to try out-of-the-box stuff to blue sky, I think. And they would point to things like the high-visibility jacket, which was apparently an early military endeavour. Like, that was kind of created inside the military and look at how it's changed the world. The taser, I think, has a similar lineage. So they would say, look, we have tried this out-of-the-box stuff and there's occasions when it's worked.

They will also say their stories about women, you know, a kid gets, a baby gets trapped, underneath the car, and the parent can summon up enough energy to lift up the car and get the, you know, we can do these superhuman things when needs be. So they would argue, and I have some sympathy for the argument that, you know, given all of that, then maybe we should try and kill goats just by standing at them. Like, what's the problem? Yeah. I mean, they do very much qualify themselves as warrior monks, and they see themselves as like an integral part of the structure. And apparently they've been giving high-level presentations at the very least. So you do have, you know, basically high-level military sitting in a room doing mantras.

Yes, that definitely happened. And yet, they were very, I mean, people, in Iraq, there was a First Earth Battalion. There was an informal First Earth Battalion during the Iraq war. It was informal. It was just a fan of Jim Channan's, and they were there in Iraq, and I think this guy was getting them to do yoga every morning and so on. And I was invited, but the idea of being embedded in Iraq in the mid-2000s was just, I just didn't I didn't want to go.

Yeah. Even with the yoga? Even with the yoga. My wife was like, I let you do anything, but don't go to Iraq. Don't go to the hottest place on earth currently. Well, yeah, I wanted to speak a little bit about this approach you have, this faux-naife approach, you know, in which you sort of play along with people instead of being confrontational. And then you have also a certain empathy towards your subjects that's consistent across your work.

Could you tell us a bit about the reasoning behind that and what kind of situation? it's probably gotten, you know, you into. Sure. You know, of everything you just said, I'm never, other than when I was really young and starting out, like I don't believe my naivity is foe. I think it's pretty genuine. I think I have a genuine curiosity for the stories that I do,

and I just go in with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity, and that can come over as faux naivity or naivety. But really what it is is curiosity. It's just I've left any ideology that I have, I've just left at home. Unless it's somebody truly terrible, I made a documentary years ago in but 2001 about a pedophile gang in,

well, a bunch of musicians and club promoters and so on where there was an awful lot of underage sex. And some of the people that I met there were just so repulsive and so hideous. I just, but most at the time, if I'm with somebody that I'm really curious about, Alex Jones or, you know, whoever it is, I'm curious. I feel weirdly privileged that I get to live a life where I can sneak into Bohemian Grove and get chased by the Bilderberg group or whatever. It feels like a privilege. And as I said earlier, I only really regain my rationality when I've gathered all the material and I'm back home trying to shape it. And that's where I think it becomes very important that you don't fuck up. But that only happens right at the end of the process. I very rarely when I'm like on a

adventure, think, okay, this is how I'm going to make this work structurally. I don't even bother thinking about that until I get home. And an empathy, I think it's just as you get older and you accumulate more and more baggage and, you know, things go wrong in your own life and you have difficulties and you no longer feel that immortality that the young feel. You feel fallible and mortal. And I just think it's much easier to be empathetic to people when you've had your own batterings and so I do it. And so I try and navigate that stuff, curiosity and empathy, but also a responsibility

if you're dealing with people who do bad things, a responsibility to not let them off the hook. Right, right. But do you think, for example, in 2022, you could embed with Alex Jones and go into, you know, I mean, he's much more famous now, but don't you think there would be some, at least some accusations of like, oh, you're enabling or you're platforming someone like him? Yeah. And, you know, I just have mixed feelings about the whole platforming thing. I have mixed feelings about it. So when Alex Jones was deplatformed from, you know, from social media, I didn't feel this sort of free speech absolutist rage. Well, I thought, you know, this is outrageous that somebody is having a voice taken away from them. Like, I didn't feel that way. I felt that

it was appropriate, given everything that had happened with Sandy Hook, for Alex to be de-platformed. Plus, it was private companies who could do what they want. Plus, every time Alex goes on a rant against me now, instead of getting 100 emails, I get like one email because de-platforming works. But at the same time, when I was doing Alex back in the 90s, if anybody had said, why are you giving this person the oxygen, I'd have said, you know, because I'm against de-platforming.

We need to... So I can see that there's probably a... It's like in balance there. But I think my basic view is if you're dealing with something responsibly, you know, I worry about the whole de-platforming slippery slope that you see on university campuses, that somebody gets de-platformed to, you think, well, you know, I can understand why that person wasn't welcome in Oberlin.

But then, you know, the next person you think, oh, you know. So it's complicated. I don't feel that the tech companies were wrong to de-platform people like Alex, but at the same time, I'm pretty resistant to de-platforming, I suppose, is my position. Fair. So, yeah, your latest show, once again, is called Things Fell Apart, and it's going to be available on all podcasting platforms on January 25th. For now, it's mostly for people in the UK, as far as I can tell, right?

Yes. It's a BBC show, so it's, it's, mostly geared towards British people for now, but on January the 23rd, it's going to be released everywhere to the whole world, thank heavens. And I think there's a few episodes that will probably appeal to listeners of QAnon Anonymous. There's a satanic panic episode and there's the Isaac Cappy episode. Yeah. There's also, I think, some really moving episodes, particularly one, particularly episode three, which is about the day that Tammy Fay Baker interviewed Steve Peters, a gay pastor with AIDS. The ripples of this meeting between these two people across enemy lines is so moving.

Yeah, because you look at there's a pretty fascinating look at how abortion was really not a major conservative Christian issue in America. And through a series of really weird and tenuous circumstances, it became one of the main ones. Yeah. I mean, a 17-year-old kid dreaming of making Fellini-type Hollywood movies in the Swiss Alps. There's a direct line between this kid's Hollywood ambitions and decades later the murder of abortion doctors in New York. I think that's what I try and do with the whole series. Things fell apart. They start in very odd places and when you begin to realize, oh my God, this is where it's going. It always feels quite revelatory, I think. Is there anything else, you know, that you had to leave out of the show,

but you think might be interesting before we let you go? Well, I had to leave a bunch of things out of the Isaac Cappy episode. There was, I mean, one of the first things you discover when you Google Isaac Cappy is that he was accused of choking Paris Jackson at one of the parties. But it's disputed by some of Isaac's loved ones. There's certain aspects of that story that are disputed. And I realized really quickly that I either do the whole thing. like do the choking incident and properly research it and investigate it and tell the counter

story or, or I don't put it in at all. And given the wide scope of that particular story, I decided I just had to leave that out for that reason. If I ever make a 90-minute story about, as a copy, I'd certainly go there. Yeah, that kind of connects with the Jabberwock episode of this American life where you had to profoundly explore a series of basically fistfights in Texas to understand. whether Alex Jones was lying about being a coward or whether he had really found, you know, the cops doing something dirty.

And the whole story is fascinating because you get to find out that, yeah, Alex Jones loved to, like, dye his tongue blue and tell people he was Satan in high school. It just scare people, you know, you just enjoyed that. Anyway, it's very, very fascinating. And I just want to say thanks for all your work. And people should definitely check out the series. It's great. I really enjoyed it.

And, you know, thanks for letting us get a little sneak peek. So check that out on January. 25th, folks. And thank you so much for joining us, John. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It was really a pleasure. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Q&on Anonymous podcast. Please go to patreon.com slash Q&Nanonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. When you subscribe, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent. For everything else, we have a website, QAnonanonymous.com. Listener, until next week. May the Deep Dish bless you.

and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's auto-cube. And now, a Christmas message from Her Majesty, the Queen. As we all prepare to end the year 2021, I want us to reflect on my late husband, Prince Philip, eugenicist and human exterminist, and wish you all a horrible death.

On this Christmas, remember that Christ was crucified upside down and that Satan rules Britannia. I hope you all will die a miserable death from a deadly virus, the reincarnation of Prince Philip. Hal Hitler. Ladies and gentlemen, I've got some bad news for you. The Queen of England and Bill Gates say Christmas is canceled, and Fauci said, don't have family over unless they've had the poison vaccine. I'm going to follow the orders of the Queen of England and I'm not going to see my family. I'm going to live in fear and drink their Kool-Aid. Oh, but I forgot the world's waking up and saying, burn in hell, Queen Elizabeth, burn in hell, Bill Gates.

We know who you are, you monstrous killers. We know Prince Philip wanted to come back as a virus to kill 80% of humanity. And we hope that you will lead by example instead of trying to kill all of us. we hope that you this Christmas give her by the great gift of leaving the planet burning hell and to everyone else that's pro-human and believes in a pro-human future Merry Christmas and a happy new year