QAA Podcast - Episode 215: Q Deposition, the Jan 6 Committee & Musk's Twitter feat Charlie Warzel

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

We cover Jim Watkins’ deposition in front of the January 6th committee and the ongoing debates around the so-called Twitter Files. To help us with the latter we're joined by Charlie Warzel, a staff writer for the Atlantic who’s been studying these shambolic developments, including private exchanges Musk has been holding with a motley crew of rich weirdos. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Charlie Warzel: https://twitter.com/cwarzel Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com Music by Cosmic Cars. Editing by Corey Klotz.

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 215 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Q Deposition, and Elon Musk's Motives episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View. First episode of the New Year.

Yeah, happy new year, everybody. While the mainstream press bothers itself with a struggle for speakership of the House of Congress and Brazilian ex-presidents wander Florida drugstores in a disoriented state, we choose instead to whiff a bouquet of shittier stories, like Jim Watkins' deposition in front of the January 6th committee and the ongoing debates around the so-called Twitter files. For those who joined us recently, Jim Watkins is the owner of 8-chan, now 8-Kuhn, the message board where Q continues to post sporadically.

Him and his son are also the prime suspects when it comes to figuring out who's behind the mysterious poster that birthed a conspiracy theory movement still coursing the veins of the American body politic. As for the Twitter files, we're going to be exploring how billionaire Elon Musk, who purchased the social media platform last year, has been faring as it's steward in what I can only describe as a self-made storm. It's like he hired an entire Hollywood cast to make his life hell, And then he's like, boy, we've got to get this ship to shore.

So, you know, we'll check if he's been having a good time at that. And to help us with exploring Elon and his beautiful Twitter, we'll be speaking to Charlie Warzel, a staff writer for the Atlantic who's been studying these shambolic developments, including private exchanges Musk's been holding with a motley crew of right-wing weirdos, tech mutants, and culture war freaks. 2023 promises to be a year packed with bullshit. But before we get into all that, let's hear it.

What kind of resolutions we got, boys, for this year? Well, I made a list. Yeah, you walked into the house and pretty much told me, you're like, quit and smoking by May, because I'll be, I don't want to say it out loud, but you're going to have the big 4-0. Yeah, yeah. The Acme Anvil dropped on your head.

Yeah, I'm going to be 40 fairly soon. Do you guys want to hear my list of outs for 2020? I'm not going to do ins. I'm just going to do outs. Just out, yeah, yeah, of course. Just to keep it. Yeah, to keep it negative. Make sure the listeners don't hear anything positive or uplifting from us.

Okay, so out. Feeling less anxiety about my health. So you're going to feel more anxiety? No, feeling less. Be not so worried about it. But you're saying that's out. That's out. Oh, my God.

You fucked up the format of out on the first one. You mean that anxiety is out. And less anxiety is in. Anxiety is out. Less anxiety is in specifically about my own health. Hell yeah. Number two, out. Saying sorry for no reason.

Okay? It's out. No more Canada. We're abolishing Canada. Out. Late night McDonald's. Late night McDonald's. God, I want that one out too.

Okay. Out. COVID-19. It's out. It's out. It's over. It's so out, dude. Okay. Out.

Dad bots. All right. No more. What do you mean? Dad bods are out. So you, but what, so what? Maybe for just me, me personally. What does that mean?

Like, I'm again on the treadmill, you know. Oh, you're, I'm going to, I'm going to de-twink bod. I'm going to de-softify myself, okay? He's going to be a hard, chiseled twink. Okay. Out for 2023, NBA 2K. It's out. Oh, my God.

NBA live, still in. I feel like I'm at a funeral. Out. trying to please everybody out worrying about what other people think damn out worrying about what i think okay worrying just out totally out just worrying out just worrying out he's reading this out of like a pink diary that has a little key well let me lock it back up till next year till next year till dear diary see you in one year those are yeah those are those are those are good outs good resolution whatever you want to.

Dear Diary, my dad bot is still well in effect here in 2024. Another night of McDonald's. Another night of McDonald's runs by. Another game of NBA 2K flashes on the television. What about Travis? Is it to start recording in like different rooms of the house? Because right now he's in his living room. Yeah, yeah.

I had to change my operation. We're getting some storms here in California. And I think they're screwing with our Wi-Fi because I had to. Normally, it was not coming into where I usually record. It had to move my entire operation closer to my router. So, but other than getting my Wi-Fi fixed, I don't know, I'll probably work on appreciating the fact that this year, my daughter is actually graduating from high school. So I'll probably, you know, spend more time in light of the fact that, you know, I don't really get to choose how much time. You have with your kids

But yeah So we're gonna do that So Travis is gonna have more time On his hand It is so over for you bitches Yeah You know This guy

This guy was trying to get us Back to work early This sir Hey if you're trying to peddle Some bullshit If you're trying to peddle some lies Or some conspiracies You're fucking out

You're out You're out For 23 We have unleashed the hounds Disagreeing with Travis Out Disagreeing with Travis Out

Full agreement 100% of the time. I can count on it. Fucking right. I don't know. I think I might wind up using any spare time I might acquire sort of wandering aimlessly in the woods and taking pictures, which I put in my

Instagram. So, yeah, you can check that out at, what is it? Is it Strain Photography? Yes, it's Logan Strain Photography on Instagram. If you're on Instagram, check it out. There's some really cool shots, some really cool drone footage on there. So this is where we're at. We're saying stuff like,

out caring and like fucking sharing our instas. Yeah. Sharing instos. Sharing is a new year. Yeah. Let's get basic as fuck. You know what? Because here's the thing, man. My entire life has been about words and thoughts and, you know, reason in doing the right thing. I got, you know, I got an English degree and then I, you know, I worked in basically in tech doing like marketing and writing and content. Just words, words, words. What I like about the Instagram photography is that there's no words. Just pretty pictures.

Wow. It's a lot nicer. You don't even use hashtag? Yeah, no captions on his shit. You sound like you're in palliative care demanding a book of kittens, dude. That's fucking sad. That's it. I just want things to be easy as I decline.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's the year. 2023 year of palliative care. We're all entering it. Yeah. I'm going to get Travis a T-shirt made that says,

recline as I decline well yeah what can I say boys I mean I'm pretty much you pretty much spoke for me I'm gonna care less uh I'm gonna be hopefully mean more whatever people have been writing in comments that annoys them about my personality or the way I treat subjects or speak or laugh anything like that I'm increasing I'm putting up to 200% nice we're fucking going full speed ahead on all the most annoying aspects of myself right gonna put out uh Julian's gonna put out a 10 episode miniseries of him just laughing maniacally for 45 minutes for each episode. Yeah, that's right. And I'm going to force dick to something.

Yeah, laughing maniacically about this weird esoteric lefty bullshit. That's going to be, that's going to really draw people in it. So esoteric. That's so true. I do, I mean, I just think that the dolphins are part of the story. I don't have that many esoteric lefty beliefs. All lefty beliefs are esoteric in America where you have no left wing. You're like, ooh, hidden knowledge.

well i think that really um that that that explains where we're at we clearly are all decaying and just i can already feel like the year we're not even starting it fresh oh no it's started broken yeah it's like it's like we're we gathered our broken toys together to throw them out in the garbage yeah politics have like reverted back to like how they were in like the 1600s when like it was just like a bunch of people like yelling at each other in a room like good getting up leaving the room you know yelling at people outside going back in nothing nothing getting done i mean just a absolute clown show yeah i i i kind of it's so funny to me that whole situation just because it's so apparent that nothing good will come out of this but

we are so starved for any kind of stumbling in our enemies that we're just like yes look at them they're in chaos it's like the last time i fucking heard that shit we had donald Trump within a year. Yeah. The last time I heard that the Republicans were in chaos and would never get it back together. We were about to get fucked hard. So I look forward to that.

Can you guys explain something to me? How are they allowed to just hold like, hunt like, you know, 50 different votes? Like, it does it, do they vote? And then they go, all right, that one didn't count. No, it's because they couldn't come to a consensus that that has a high enough amount of votes to actually elect the speaker. So they just have to keep doing it over and over. But there's no real alternative to McCarthy.

in terms of like getting enough votes. So it's just obfuscation, right? So you just have like six, seven people, whatever, 10 people holding hostage the ability to proceed forward, which I love. Keep doing it. Keep being a bunch of miscreants. I just, you know, whatever.

I just hope we see less footage and attention paid to Congress. We should treat it like one of those buildings, like Willie Wonka's factory, like whatever. Stuff goes in, we don't see anything, and then nothing ever comes out. the candy and nothing ever comes out. Everybody's getting, yeah, get sucked into tubes or like drowns and like strange rivers.

I'm assuming Matt Gates is currently drowning in a lake of chocolate. And I think that's about as much attention to the situation as I'll be paying. It's going through the tubes. I could just imagine him, just stuck in the tube, his face pressed up against the glass. My chocolate, my beautiful chocolate. Don't just stand there, do something. help police murder

so the January 6th committee hit finally boo all right so before I finish the first fucking sentence of the first episode of the first year

I get booed looking forward to the rest of the year just just boose every single fucking sentence for the rest of year all right as I was saying the January 6th

committee. It finally ended his work. It produced his final report. It disbanded because obviously Republicans are going to stand for that to keep going on. So they wrap things up real quick. And the gist is that basically, like, Trump, he didn't have like a single coherent plan for overturning election. He just kind of like, he had like a bunch of different plans.

And he was just trying to marshal every resource he could to try and stop, you know, basically the results of the election from happening. and the mob that attacked the Capitol to prevent Biden from being certified as president was just the last resort. So the report, I think, it's like if you watched any of the hearings, there's no surprises. It provides sort of a chronological overview of the role like the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys, 3% of Groopers, these people, extremists who participated in the events of January 6, including extensive operational planning by Oathkeepers founder Stuart Rhodes, who we've talked about before, and Proud Boys chairman, Enrique,

Thoreo. Rhodes was recently convicted on seditious conspiracy charges related to his conduct. Well, Terrio and his proud boy's co-defendants are set to face their own seditious conspiracy charges and a trial in the coming week. So the drama around January 6 isn't over, even though the committee is wrapped up. Right. They also talked about the false slave elector scheme. This is basically where they tried to get a bunch of people who weren't actually electors to replace the legitimate electors, which failed. And also as part of sort of their January 6 committee wrapping up their work, they released a bunch of transcripts of the interviews that they did, the depositions of like major figures. This includes the interview with Michael Flynn, which is honestly kind of useless because he just pleaded the fifth over and over again.

They also interviewed Ait Coon owner Jim Watkins, which is relevant to my interest. So like we discussed previously, I think there is compelling evidence that he was, or one of his associates, was involved in the posting. of the most recent Q drops in 2022. But in this deposition, he said that he never had contact with the person posting as Q. So, Jake, will you please play Jim Watkins for this Q&A they had at the Capitol? Of course. So are you going to play the other person, Travis? Or should I play the other person?

You play the other person. Okay. Have you ever had any communication with the Q account? There is no Q account, sir. Sorry, the Q user. I've had communication. with a lot of people that said they were the Q user, but I doubt that. Okay, and you've never had any confirmation of who this person is?

No, sir. It's not me. Some people say it's me, but it's not me. It would be impossible to be me because when they started doing it, I was under medical treatment. I was still under medical treatment when I went to see the Congress last time. Got it. I don't quite understand his alibi here. So he was under medical treatment, but he was well enough to testify to Congress, but he was not well enough to post as Q. Yeah. I mean, they're trying to interview a drunk guy. Oh, no.

I'm sorry, Your Honor. I was too sick to post. I was fucking sauced up. It was really strange because in his testimony, Jim Watkins repeatedly called Q&N invention of media matters for America and George Soros. This is actually not the first time he said this. He's said this previously on his stream. But so during the interview, he was asked to clarify this belief. So I had one other follow-up question on the issue of QAnon that we were discussing.

You mentioned a couple times that you thought George Soros was funding that. You should bring him in here and depose him. So why did you think he was funding QAnon? He is funding QAnon. It's you can go to. I believe it's open. Open society, I believe, is that. the name of the company that he owns and funds it. And he funds it. And then he pays companies like

the Daily Beast and Mother Jones and NBC. And if they post his paragraph in their story, they get paid. That's interesting. Why is that? Well, because he's promulgating propaganda to get his narrative known. Okay. Because he wants to take over your country and my country. He wants the United States to cease to exist. And what is the evidence for saying, what is that based on? That's my opinion. Okay. Thank you for clarifying.

So wait a minute. So he's basically like, he's like, there is no such thing as QAnon and I'm not him. It's George Soros who created, like basically comes back with another conspiracy. I mean, as usual, he's just really bad at communicating. But I think what he's trying to get at is the idea that QAnon as like a term and a phenomenon isn't actually something that was born of the drops, that this was actually somehow born in the coverage that these mainstream media outlets did of it and their denunciations of it or whatever, their characterizations of it, which is an extremely funny perspective on things by Jim. But it's also perspective that echoes QAnon followers themselves and also one of the Q drops. I said there is no, I said there's Q and there are nons and there is no QAnon. It's like they have this perspective.

Yeah, but that's like, that was like patchwork. That was something they applied way later, like a fucking Band-Aid. I mean, it wasn't like that defined early Q. Like it was, you know, it did define early Q, but like I don't think he's talking about early Q either. But I think he's taking the same perspective in that like, oh, Q was just a poster and the People who follow Q are just people who are investigating and researching, so it's no big deal. But QAnon as this phenomenon, as this extremist movement, well, that is just a made-up thing by the liberal media and George Soros. But you can't because the reason that Q&on first sort of punctured the mainstream media sphere was because there were people who like murder, you know, there was like episodes of violence that could be tied to somebody that had post.

or, you know, subscribe to QAnon style beliefs. That's my first memory of it sort of breaking in once there was kind of like these sort of like, you know, real world scenarios where Q was somehow, I don't know, part of it. Yeah, I mean, I think he'd argue that those were all like false flags setups or whatever. But I think when it really, I think, broke into the mainstream was when it showed up at Trump rallies in the form of signs and became known as a kind of, you know, Trump supporter. subculture essentially that was starting to like gain some momentum so there's no way that the media couldn't have reported on that so I mean they tried not to yeah so and then after a while they had

to because it just became it became bigger yeah and more people like I guess you know kind of mentioned it or whatever but I mean they always you know cut loose any of the mentally ill people who take you know violent action and then mention QAnon they they never actually say yeah that's true. Like we, you know, we take responsibility as a movement for that. They just go, oh, look at them trying to smear, uh, smear us again. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jim Watkins also claimed in this testimony that the QR research board on Ait Koon is not related to QAnon, which is crazy anti-reality bullshit. Like the majority of Q's posts are on that Q research board. Its entire purpose is like decoding Q-Drops and bringing the Q&N community together at like the source and coming up with

Q&N-related conspiracy theories. But here is how Watkinson. Hopkins described Q research in exchange with January 6th committee. So this exchange happened right after they discussed a Q1 follower who said that Q offered a glimmer of hope for them. So can you describe to me what Q research is? QRESHC is an image board on Aikun. Is it related to the Q&N theory? No, sir.

So when he says in the third full paragraph that Q offered not just a glimmer of hope, but the only glimmer of hope. Can you make it larger, sir, maybe? Maybe I have this letter. I will look. So I guess in the meantime, what is Q Research and why is it called Q Research if it's not related to Q&on? Well, I didn't make Q Research. Q Research is made by the people that are using Q Research. Okay.

But it's... Do you know what it's referring to? Yeah, it's a place where they talk about the current world affairs, and they try to research and find meaning behind things and why they, oftentimes post-propaganda and how to find their way through propaganda. But you're... It's people researching and looking into things to try and find facts. But it's your contention that it's not related to the QAnon theory.

The only possible way you could relate it to QAnon is the fact that that's QR research board is the reason that Media Matters and George Soros have invented QAnon is to make it a boogeyman. God, this makes no sense. Yeah. Oh, my Lord. It's a really absurd claim. Yeah, it reminds me that bit in The Simpsons where Millhouse told Bart, he was like, remember you killed my goldfish and you said that I didn't have a goldfish?

Why did I have the bull, Bart? Why did I have the bowl? It's the same thing. If it's not related to Q and on, why is it called Q Research, Jim? Why is it called that? And, of course, he kind of like he breaks down. He just goes back to the, well, QAnon is made up as a George Soros Media Matters thing. It doesn't even make sense.

He says, the only possible way you could relate it to QAnon is the fact that that's Q Research Board is the reason that media matters and George Soros have invented QAnon is to make it a boogeyman. Yeah. It's just. Well, they've put together Q and Anon and they've made it into something that they can, you know, essentially smear. It sounds like they're speaking two different languages to me. But at least he's about to write Tom Sawyer. You're right. Yeah.

So unfortunately, during the deposition, they, I mean, it sounds like the people who are asking the question has tried to press Jim Watkins about some of the really ugly, frankly, genocidal kind of nature of some of the posts that appear on Ait Kuhn. And so as a consequence of that, they read aloud some of these posts. and so in his deposition, the N-word appears 13 times. Yeah. Four off from 17. Come on, Jim.

You can do it. The January 6th committee also released new testimony by former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Back in June, Hutchison testified that Marjorie Taylor Green met with Mark Meadows in Georgia in the lead up January 6 and told him that a lot of Q&O supporters from among her constituents would be there. So here's what Hutchinson said. I remember Marjorie Taylor Green bringing Q&ON up several times, though, in the presence of the president, privately with Mark. I remember Mark having a few conversations, too, about more specific to Q&N stuff, and more about the idea that they had with the election and, you know, not as much pertaining to the planning of the January 6th rally. Ms. Green came up and began talking to us about Q&N and Q&N going to the rally, and she had a lot of constituents that are Q&N, and they'll all be there, and she was showing him pictures of them traveling up to Washington, D.C. for the rally on the 6th. Now, this is very fascinating to me because Marjorie Taylor Green hasn't, like, mentioned Q or QAnon at all publicly since December of 2020, in which she kind of recommended an article from, like, from Gab about like how the Q&ON people are kind of good.

But this reveals that, like, at least privately when she's talking to like other power players in Washington, she's very aware of Q&ON, she's talking about them as constituents, as supporters, and she seemed to be kind of tuned into the Q&ON community. Hutchinson also testified that Trump aide Peter Navarro would bring her materials about the election to pass along to Mark Meadows. Hutchinson said this in her testimony. And at one point I had sarcastically said, oh, is this from your Q&on friends, Peter? Because Peter would talk to me frequently about his Q&N friends. He said, have you looked into it yet, Cass? I think they point out a lot of good ideas. You really need to read this.

Make sure the chief sees it. We have Peter Navarro saying, I don't know. what these good ideas are. So, uh, so representative Liv Cheney, who is the, the January 6 panel's top Republican, asked Hutchinson whether Navarro was being sarcastic about his Q and on friends. And here's how Hutchinson responded. I did not take it as sarcasm. Throughout my tenure working for the chief of staff, he would frequently bring in memos and powerpoints on various policy proposals that he would then expand on. You know, Q is saying this. Now, this is kind of baffling to me because Q, I guess, promised the people who believed in it

that to provide inside information about what the White House is up to. But here's a guy who literally works in the fucking White House. He knows what the White House is up to. He talks to the people who are doing it. And still he goes like, oh, here's this secret source about what what's really going on. It's like,

no, man, you are part of the secret the ball running things. I think that sometimes Trump stays up and he goes Q Plus. It's when he takes some Adderall and he writes through the night, he makes some PowerPoints and he sends him to himself in the future. where, you know, when he won't remember what he did, but that's cute. And in order to believe it, he has to send it through AIDS.

Yeah. You know, if it comes from himself, he's like, I don't trust it. But, like, if it's brought to him on like a printout or whatever, yeah, he launders his own, late-night ideas. Yeah, yeah. Smart. So we also have to talk, unfortunately, about the ongoing drama concerning Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. So I have already broke down and made the Mastodon account. This is the decentralized.

compared to your Twitter. Neither of you. Yes, yeah. So I could be found at macedon. Dot LOL slash Travis underscore view. I have a feeling that I'm going to be alone among my co-host being there, at least for a while. That's good. There'll be at least one place where Travis can post links to new episodes if we all, if we're all still alive. Masto do not follow him. Mastso don't follow this man. If I get banned, if I get banned from Twitter, I will wipe my hands. Maybe I'll like stream on Twitch or something. I don't know. I, I, I will wipe my hands of having to scroll that fucking terrible, terrible website that every now and again provides me like a nice smile. Travis is currently on heroin and Suboxone.

So what really prompted me to make a Mastodon account was Twitter banning several journalists who had criticized him. This includes CNN's Donio Sullivan, New York Times, Ryan Mack, the Washington Post drew Harwell. So must claim that these journalists had violated his new doxing policy by sharing his exact real-time location, amounting to what he described as assassination coordinates. So this was all bullshit. None of the band journalists appear to have actually shared must precise real-time location. I don't know.

I think it's dope to think of it as like a hitman, and he's getting a side quest. And it's like, go harass Grimes at a gas station. He drives up into the little yellow circle. Yeah. Yeah, it's the GTA mission. So this policy was obviously an excuse to ban the Twitter account Elon Jet, which takes publicly available flight tracking info to document where Elon Musk's jet flies to. And this is despite the fact that Musk explicitly said he would not ban that account.

So I called it online the Lolita Express Protection Rule, because the rule has written would forbid you from tracking the movements of a jet owned by a billionaire pedophile, hypothetically. Yeah, hypothetically. now everything about this has been chaotic now in the especially dumb move he banned links to competing social networks on Twitter so a tweet from Twitter about this policy said quote we know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms however going forward Twitter will no longer allow free promotion a specific social media platforms on Twitter free promotion okay so the banned platforms included like Instagram and Facebook Facebook, but also, like, smaller ones, like Macedon and tribal Noster, which I have never fucking heard of, post, which is another, like, small upstart kind of alternative. And also former President Donald Trump's truth social. So very weird. At least now you know all the alternate synthetics that you're going to be on within a year. Yeah, well, it's going to be on the

mastodon, the tribal, the Noster. Yeah. Taking a dose of post every day. I, my, my conspiracy is that Mastodon will become like, uh, telegram for liberals. That it'll be. because they won't you won't have any opposition on there whatsoever and and they'll be free to you know run run rampant so that policy of like banning other social media platforms that lasted less than 24 hours and um and then then musk said in a tweet that quote going forward there will be a vote for major policy changes my apologies won't happen again so he followed this up with a Twitter poll asking if he should step down from the head of Twitter and this closed with 57.5% of the vote saying yes. Now, despite that, he has not stepped down because

Musk is a bullshitter. He just says things. You know, it's like, this is why I hate reporting about, like, Musk says that he's, that so-and-so is going to happen. Maybe he's lying. Maybe everything is coming out of his mouth as a truth. Yeah. I also want to mention that the Washington Post asked Elon Musk about Q&ON, and his response via email was L-O-L. Nice. Yeah, that's good stuff. L.O.L. Washington Post. Yeah. Now, before we talk to our guest, I have to touch briefly on the Twitter files. Now, this is a series of internal documents from Twitter that must release to a handful of journalists and authors.

Now, so far, those who have had access to the Twitter files are Matt Taibi, Barry Weiss, Lee Fong, Michael Schellenberg, and David DeWig. So these documents, you know, they cover a bunch of topics related to Twitter's moderation processes, including the supposed what they call sort of like the moderation of certain users, Twitter's response to the January 6 attack, decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform, and communications that Twitter has had with like DHS and FBI. Now, I think it's helpful to remember that the first batch of the Twitter files were hastily released and they were clearly released in response to the fact that Kanye West, after returning Twitter was banned again after doing after he couldn't stop doing Nazi shit. Yeah, so clearly what happened was that, is that, yeah, Elon Musk said, we're bringing back Kanye West. We're a free speech platform again. And then all of a sudden, it just blew up in his face, absolute disastrous. He just did this awful business and then he was forced to ban him again for doing Nazi shit.

And so he had to change the subject very quickly. And so he very hastily tried to get Matt Tabie to do the first of the Twitter files. now they've been like eight or so, so far. Yeah, I've stopped following it. And that's sad. I feel like there could be an interesting story there, and I don't care. It's so fucking aggravated because there is obviously, I think it was wrong to dismiss this as a nothing burger. It's right to sort of say that this is a political project from Elon Bach to try and sort of endear himself to the right and sort of demonized liberals and try to demonize pre-Musk Twitter.

But, I mean, if anyone was given access to the internal communications regarding Twitter, you could find something substantial there. Yeah, and we also, a lot of this stuff. that is interesting about it, we've already talked about in the last few years. I mean, I know that we haven't, like, covered it extensively, but we've spoken about how intelligence agencies are involved and, you know, kind of integrated into these social media companies and how they work, you know, hand in hand with, you know, these private companies to draw ban lists and stuff like that. So, yeah, I guess we could have made more noise about it, but like, yeah, this was not exactly news to me. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, reading through it is,

aggravating because it's like, I think it's like some of the things that they, that they post is clearly just like internal moderation, which is innocuous. Other stuff is, what it talks about, like, for example, uh, like Lee Fogg had an article for The Intercept about how the, um, how Twitter and the Pentagon look worked together for, uh, basically a propaganda campaign, which is really fascinating. But other stuff, um, was, I don't know, it's like, so in order to, like, really sort of get the gems of the muck, you have to like read through it doing work. And by the way, Twitter threads with no editor is perhaps the worst way to report on news items. He could have done this the right way if he gave you shit.

I don't think he actually gives a shit. If he could have like had, he could have like, you know, taken his time and had like a team of people working on this with lawyers and editors and people who put it in a nice package and a multi, you know, multi article report and to really emphasize the sort of the substantial elements that might be revealed about like what was going on inside of Twitter because is obviously some elements of it are newsworthy, but he didn't do that. He just sort of like, you know, he sees this as a way to promote new Twitter more than a way to actually promote transparency. Yeah, and also, if he cares so much about the intelligence agencies, which I doubt he does, he would be, you know, confronted with his own conflicts of interest.

He has relationships with these entities and contracts with the Defense Department and stuff like that. So, you know, I think that making this kind of a messy, obvious, if anything, like, it kind of almost discredits the very real stuff that's being revealed, right? It's like, this is a mess. And so, hey, you're only going to really be paying attention to this if you're some sort of right winger or whatever. And then people will just kind of mock you in the media for being paranoid or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it'll get written off with some like right wing op not worth looking at or

disinformation or whatever. Which is kind of, I mean, it's a form of limited hangout. you're like, here, here's some selected information on this, like, bigger, uh, scandal or should be scandal. And we'll give you just chunks of it and we'll also make it real messy so it's easy to discredit, uh, which I think is kind of, uh, you know, if you're going to have this stuff coming out, this is, uh, pretty much how the agencies would like it to come out, right? I mean, it's, it's sloppy. To talk more about Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, we are now joined by Charlie Roselle. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of the newsletter Galaxy

brain. He was also one of our earliest guests on the podcast. He appeared on episode 35 about YouTube. Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show again. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. So I wanted to talk to you because I think you have an interesting perspective on what the hell Elon Musk and his associates are motivated by because I don't feel like I'm able to judge whether or not Musk is being successful in his goals with respect to Twitter because I don't even know what his goals are exactly. But you argue that the text between Musk and other Silicon Valley power players offer a kind of skeleton key into his mindset. Now, first of all, where did these texts come from and why are we even able to see them?

Sure. So the actual provenance of the text messages is really interesting. We were able to see these messages because Elon Musk got in a lawsuit with Twitter over trying to back out of the purchase of the website. And the board of directors was basically like, they got a great deal on it. And they were like, we're not going to let you do that. So they sued. It went into this big thing. And then I spoke to a couple of people who like understand this happened in the Delaware Court of Chancery, which is like the, you know, Delaware Corporation business court. And some experts there basically told me that these documents didn't have to come out at all. What ended up happening was Elon Musk's legal team decided supposedly, this is how it's

explained to me, to sue for for these to be unsealed. They were confidential. There was no reason, like, Twitter wasn't trying to, like, dredge these up to make fun of Elon Musk. But Elon Musk's legal team was basically trying to, the theory goes, tie Twitter's legal team up in busy work, right? And redact all these, having to redact all these files and basically, you know, like, drag them through the mud. Like, you're going to sue me, okay, we're going to, you know, like, do all these, you know, these stupid little requests. But Twitter's team was like, that's fine. If you want to, if you want to, you know, unseal all these files, that's great. And so Twitter's team redacted. And so Twitter's team redacted. Every single piece of Twitter communication, like fully. The pages are just black. There's nothing there. But because Musk's team, like, wasn't on top of the ball there, all these text messages just came out. So this was, like, a complete unforced error, supposedly on the part of Musk's legal team. Basically, I think it's, like, another example of this, like, classic hubris of, like, we're 10 steps ahead of you.

We're going to, you know, run legal circles around. And Twitter's lawyers were like, that's fine. All this. we'll let all this stuff come out. So just the fact that we can see them is kind of, it's indicative of a lot of what happens with Elon Musk. He thinks he's playing like 40-dimensional chess, and it turns out he's playing like Tetris, you know?

Well, Eni, you know, a challenging game in its own right. That's true. That's true. Yeah, regarding the content of the text themselves, they're, you know, they're him chatting with other fellow billionaires talking about their plans for Twitter, essentially. And you kind of make the point that they kind of like, you know, they kind of like banter back and forth like normal people like friends.

But at the same time, they behave in ways that reveal that they are totally alienated from normal people. So what do you think sort of these texts reveal about him in the circle of associates? Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing, like when these first came out, I scrolled through them, like that day was happening. Everyone was kind of reacting to him on Twitter and places like that. And the first thing I noticed was like, wow, like these are our visionary geniuses. Like these are the guys.

Like they're, you know, sitting there. One of the guys, Mattias Duffner, who owns the media conglomerate, or this is the CEO, the media conglomerate, Axel Springer, like sent a text message to Elon, you know, kind of stroking his ego. And he's like, I have a plan for this. We got a step one is to solve for free speech. And it's just like, I mean, you just have. these guys who are um they're so their egos seem so inflated here and they just they just seem to

think that no task is uh is too difficult for them and so looking through these messages what i kind of what's what's really interesting is that you have a ton of people's kind of sucking up to musk's power right they're they're telling him oh you know you're the guy to solve this you can do this you can do this and everyone's really giving him a lot of bad advice. You know, they're saying to him that they, you know, that, you know, that, you know, he definitely has to go along with this. He should go along with it. And I think Jason Calcanus, one of his advisors, has his whole idea of adopting a plan

where if you pay a certain amount of money, you can just spam that DM any of your followers, like just at once, like just these terrible ideas to like raise money that go against, you know, the idea of what Twitter is as a service. And then what I realized when I went through the second time is that there's one person in the whole thread that gives him good advice. And it's the current then current CEO of Twitter who basically says, hey, I'm on board. I want to work with you. This is all going to be great. You know, we'll talk to each other like engineers. And then Musk is tweeting, he's tweeting something about like Twitter being a terrible product, like right before, you know, he's going to come on the board. And the CEO says, you know,

You can tweet whatever you want, but this is not helping us. Like, this is a distraction, like the media is getting involved. Can you stop? And Musk, like, that changes, that one text from the CEO changes the entire course of Twitter's history. Because within two minutes, Musk texts other people and says, this isn't working. I don't want to deal with this bullshit. I'm going to go try to take the company private and I'm going to buy Twitter. It's like the one time somebody, like, in his entire phone, like, treats,

him, you know, like an adult and says, like, hold on, man, he absolutely freaks out and decides on this, this impulsive decision to buy Twitter. And, and, you know, if you look at what's happening now, I mean, it looks like that's going to cost him, you know, billions and billions of dollars in his net worth and possibly, you know, even Tesla. Yeah. I mean, it is really, really baffling how, like, all these people simultaneously, they are convinced that the only reason any problems exist anywhere in business or society because it hasn't been worked on by their golden brains quite yet. And also they seem to believe that anyone who like pushes back against them who says that maybe you are on the right track is a moron and they need to be dismissed and you need to plow straight

through them and just do the most outrageous things that you think will solve the problem. I think you talked about this before. It does kind of like, you know, pop the myth of these people as, you know, genius visionaries who have, you know, who understand the future and her place in society better than anyone. Yeah. And, you know, they're behaving, to some extent, like, this makes sense, right? Like, when they're conducting whatever, their business over text and, like, I think the writer Matt Levine, like, he cited one of the pieces I wrote about this and said, like, well, how do you expect anyone to behave over text? Like, it's kind of a medium that dumps things down. Like, you're sort of going to look like a jackass if you're, you know, texting about the future of your company to some degree. And I get that, right?

Like, the, the format is going to make them look, you know, too casual. But when you look at what is actually happening in these messages, like, you have, you know, you have, there's also, there are a couple of direct messages between Musk and Mark Andreessen, the venture capitalist. We're like, Andresen's just like, yeah, I'll give you, like, a cool $200 million, like, no strings attached. I don't even need to see a plan. I don't need to see anything. He texts the billionaire, Musk texts the billionaire, Larry Ellison asking for, like, two. billion dollars he's like yeah you got it whatever you need um there's no like due diligence being done on any of this there's no like hey so what's what's your like even over text right there's no

what's your plan for twitter uh what do you think you want to do it's just like now man like your brand is good enough i'm going to do it and that's why the whole reason i wanted to go back and sort of focus on these messages a couple months after they came out was because like the other character in these texts, like the other sort of looming figure is Sam Bankman-Fried. So, like, you have the two big, like, tech meltdown stories of the year. Like, both of the characters are in these messages. And, like, you have all these people trying to connect Musk and SBF being like, oh, this guy, he's just like you. He's a genius. Like, he's trying to build things. He, you know, he cares about, you know, the future of whatever. He's, you know, a great effective altruist.

And meanwhile, you just see no vetting going on, right? It's like everyone's just, like repeating what they read on Twitter and it's very easy to sort of understand like oh of course this is how you get like you know the mythos of Elon Musk this is how you get the you know mythos of Sam Bankman Fried and these like house of cards that just collapse and like you would think that those two guys like would be able to come up with something like much shadier and like more successful like you know Elon could have been like okay I'm doing Twitter blue or whatever and you can only pay in like crypto and like this kind of crypto or whatever and it's a partnership with with sbf and he could have made like you know a bunch of like maybe millionaires like overnight who would then be like you know feel forever loyal to him you know for for you know pumping whatever crypto you know they i don't know whatever meme coin or whatever and yet we got the the like dumbest and like most ineffective like sort of like version of it Which is ironic because it wasn't Musk quoted as saying himself that, like, the outcome that usually happens is, like, the silliest and stupidest. And he was, I don't know, he had some stupid quote like that. And it's like, well, you've done it.

I mean, what's really funny to the first part of that is, like, I've had a bunch of people try to, like, who would know what they're talking about with finance, explain the FTX stuff to me. And from, from what they, like, tell me in their summaries is, like, the real crime of FTX, and SBF's whole thing because he owned an exchange and a hedge fund should have been just printing money. Like the thing that should have happened is not an implosion. It should have been like front running trading where they just absolutely printed money, right? And like the whole idea with something like Twitter should be like, yeah, you could, you know, if you were like the evil genius kind of, you know, billionaire person could be getting all these like addled people like really extracting the money from them, right? like, you know, saying, like, if you want all these communities, if you want access to your followers, sorry, man, four bucks a month, right? Like, locking everyone in, not just like the super

fans. Um, but they're not even good at like the evil genius part, right? They're just, like, stepping all over themselves because they seem to just go into these, they seem to have no plan. They go into these things thinking the right people will explain the problem and my brain will come up with the solution because I was able to do that maybe in one other instance, right? Or a lot of people have told me that's what's going to happen. It's this really, really interesting, like they created their own marketing. The marketing was successful, but they're unsuccessful because they believe it, right? They wrote it and they believe it. It's kind of, I would really almost prefer it if, like, the evidence show that Elon Musk had a really well-thought-out evil plan.

very calculated that marshaled his resource in a very focused way and he was acting out of even rational self-interest because if there was a plan and there's like you know there's something you can contend with that you can grasp that but if he's just he's just thinking it's like well I'm just going to stroll into this multi-billion dollar disaster and just figure it out with my genius obviously I'm a genius look at all the magazine covers I've been on then that's harder to reckon with because how exactly do you there's nothing there's no substance there It's just constantly changing. This is why I actually, like, I kind of cringe every time I make the comparison

because it sounds just like classic, like, pundit hack thing to be like Elon Musk is like Donald Trump. But there is like a very, like one just core similarity is that just like that blundering in with no plan, but also with no, no like no real shame about not having the plan, right? Like there's a lot of people who don't have a great plan but really want to be seen as knowing what they're doing. These guys don't care. Like, they feel that they are above having to care about that. And so, when this is what's bothered me about the media cycle around Elon Musk, of which, of course, I'm a part of it in a way, is that, like, people quote, like, media articles

quote his tweets and they're like, Elon Musk's new plan is X or Y or this. And it's like, no, no, there's no plan. Like, it's very clear that whatever he says today, you know, he'll try to spin it if it, if it fails, you know, like, oh, I was, you know, it was a trial balloon. Like, he did the whole, you know, should I step down as the head of Twitter thing and got, like, the poll was just, like, such an own goal, right? Everyone was, like, absolutely stepped down. Yeah. And he was like, see, I was trying to fish out all the bots.

It's like, it's like putting a seventh grader in charge of a company and then having all these, like, you know, reporters and people be like, sir, sir, sir, like, you know, why did you make that decision? It's like, he's seventh grader. He's not, like, going to be able to articulate why and he's just going to, you know, backtrack. this is a school project you know like like Larry you know Larry Ellison uh sending over two billion dollars is like I don't know giving you know giving like a friend in need like a thousand but you know if you're doing well and you're like here's man here's a thousand dollars

like get you know get you on your feet or whatever like there's no there's no concept of money or or value to anything so they're just like playing with toys I mean that's kind of how I feel about it is like Elon got like a new toy you know and and it just doesn't really, doesn't really care necessarily about what happens with it. He's, now he's just got it now. The hard part for me to conceptualize on, like, really and truly, and I don't mean to say, like, I, you know, I think these guys are super smart or anything like that. But when you look at the finances of the Twitter deal, like, it, like, legitimately doesn't make any sense, right? Like, there's, you know, I think $1.3 billion in interest that's, you know, being accumulated every year on the

loans like I think you know you have big investment banks that are like holding a lot of debt on their books and like you know they're going to do it for a little while for Elon because you know he's Elon Musk and like they want to keep a rich man happy but after a while they're going to be like no no way right um and then like these bills are going to come do like he seems to sort of you know try to like he's like turned on like the you know like the game genie like cheat code thing, right? Like he, you know, he doesn't, the rules of gravity don't seem to apply to him in most interactions. But this is like, like, the whole thing is going to turn off and he's going to be like, he's going to be on hard mode like the rest of us having to answer for shit. And that's what I

think's really interesting. Like, that is, the bill is going to come do. Like, we're seeing it now. Charlie, thanks again for coming on. Pleasure as always. Where can people learn more about your writing? If you just search Galaxy Brain and Charlie Worsell, it'll all come up, all that stuff. And that's where I publish most of my stuff now with the Atlantic. So thanks. Awesome. Thanks so much, Charlie. Take care, guys.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Q&on Anonymous podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash Q&on Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes, plus access to all our ongoing series. We've got trickle down, ten Eps down. We are halfway through Man Klan, and Brad and Jake are cooking up the next little mini series. Yeah, it's cooking. It's cooking. It's going to be a lot of fun. Yes, sir.

When you subscribe, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent. And we've also got a website if you were looking for merch, whatever, link to the Discord, that kind of stuff. 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 AutoCube.

General Flynn was on a show recently, and he basically did a rant against Q and against, you know, all of this stuff. And again, this is in line with what Dave just explained. Same idea, okay? There's no way General Flynn is going to go, yeah, you know, I've been thinking about this Q thing. And I talk to some people at the top. And I talk to the president, talk to Q plus. And, you know, I'm free to tell you now that. that it's a thing.

He's not going to do that. It's not going to happen. Anybody that knows, anybody that's telling you that they're in touch with Q and that they are in on the operation or that they know for sure that X is happening and that they have intel at that level, that, no, just no. I'm just telling you, step away from those people. Military intelligence for 33 years. Yeah.

Most of which involves psychological operations. Anything that Flynn tells you, you have to realize, is part of a sci-off. Which means there's a very good likelihood that what he's telling you isn't true. And it's for your own good.