Tag: conspiracy theories

A 13-Year-Old Girl Is Apparently The New Leader Of the JFK-QAnon Cult

When Michael Protzman, the leader of the QAnon cult that believes former President John F. Kennedy and his son JFK Jr. are still alive, died in June, people hoped the end was near for the group. The family members of those who joined the cult hoped it would disband so that their loved ones would finally return home.

But instead, a new leader has seemingly emerged: a 13-year-old girl known to her followers only as “Tiny Teflon,” the name of the Telegram channel she uses to communicate with her followers. According to multiple live chats on Telegram reviewed by VICE News, Protzman appears to have groomed the girl as his protege, hosting her on his live chats on Telegram, where he had tens of thousands of followers.

Many of Protzman’s followers have permanently broken family relationships, emptied their bank accounts, and destroyed their lives to follow his wild conspiracy theories. And now it seems they are ready to do the same for a child, whose real identity is not known.

Tiny Teflon has created her own channel, conducted live streams with followers, and most worrying of all, has announced her plan to indoctrinate more children into the cult by teaching them how to decode real word events using the movement’s bastardized form of Jewish numerology, gematria.

“I definitely think I’m gonna have more kids involved in this,” Tiny said during a live chat on her channel on August 6. “Maybe they could share more code, because I don’t want to be talking the entire time when I do this show in the future. So I’ll definitely think of having kids share codes and teach what they know too.”

“It’s worrying to see this young girl be put on a pedestal by a bunch of adults after the passing of Protzman,” an open-source researcher who uses the nickname “Karma” to avoid being targeted by the members of Protzman’s cult, which she has tracked closely since its inception, told VICE News.

When alive, Protzman used gematria to convince his followers that he could see into the future and communicate with everyone from former president Donald Trump to JFK Jr. Before becoming a cult leader, Protzman  was a demolition expert in Washington state. He first gained attention in November 2021 when he convinced his followers that JFK and JFK Jr. were going to reappear in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Around a thousand people traveled from across the country to Dallas only to be disappointed by the Kennedys’ failure to appear.

Despite this, many of Protzman’s dedicated followers remained loyal, and followed him across the country for the next 18 months. Many of them destroyed their families and finances in the process. Protzman continued to claim JFK Jr. was alive and continually changed his predictions, at one point claiming Trump was just JFK Jr. in disguise, and finally, shortly before his death, claiming he was in fact the reincarnated JFK Jr. 

Protzman died on June 30 in a Rochester hospital as a result of “multiple blunt force injuries” after he “lost control of his dirt bike” according to a report from the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner’s Office, which was obtained by VICE News.

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Maui wildfires spark conspiracy theories about space lasers, Oprah land grabs and suspicious trees

The Maui wildfires have drawn bizarre conspiracy theories that elites — such as President Biden and Oprah — may have used lasers to intentionally set the deadly blaze for their own nefarious ends.

Photos claiming to show space lasers raining destruction down on the Hawaiian city have gained millions of views across social media, while images of trees still standing amid the inferno’s aftermath have been cited as evidence that the fires were not natural.

“Everything is burnt but the trees, but don’t point that out or ur a conspiracy theorist,” wrote one user on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, alongside footage of people driving through the cindered remains of a neighborhood.

But the unlikely internet sleuths’ hypotheses were easily debunked.

That post, along with others like it, was flagged by readers who linked to a Britannica article concisely explaining why the trees were still standing.

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No, a WEF official did not call for ‘eliminating’ conspiracy theorists

A July 25 article in The People’s Voice included a headline declaring “Top WEF Official: ‘Dangerous Conspiracy Theorists Must Be Eliminated.’”

“A top World Economic Forum (WEF) official has called for so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ to be banned from accessing the internet due to their ‘dangerous’ belief that a global cabal of elites control the world,” the article began.

It’s a reference to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims among other things there is a satanic cabal of global elites taking part in an international child sex trafficking ring. 

The article was shared more than 300 times on Facebook in five days according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool.

There is no evidence, in the article or elsewhere, that Yuval Noah Harari made any such comments. The article also incorrectly identifies Harari as a World Economic Forum official, when he has no role with the organization. The People’s Voice routinely publishes baseless claims.

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The Urban Legend of the Government’s Mind-Controlling Arcade Game

IN A SUBURBAN ARCADE NEAR Portland, Oregon, in 1981, a dull, digital glow bounced off the faces of teenagers who clutched joysticks, immersed in the game. Tiny lines and dots danced or exploded with high-pitched beeps across them all, but one game cabinet, Polybius, drew the longest lines.

Gamers who tried it couldn’t stop playing, and began acting oddly: they were nauseous, stressed, had horrific nightmares. Others had seizures or attempted suicide, many felt unable to control their own thoughts. It was only later that they recalled how Polybius was serviced more often than other games. Men in black suits opened the machine every week, recorded its data, and left, with no interest in its coins. Soon after it appeared, the mysterious arcade game vanished without warning—taken by the men in black suits, leaving no record of its existence.

That’s the story, at least. This legend is one of the big unsolved mysteries of the gaming world, though most concede that the game never existed. It’s since become an urban legend on gaming and conspiracy websites and the internet horror wiki Creepypasta, and like all good stories, it is kept alive by its fans.  

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Jen Psaki and Dem Lawmaker Peddle New Conspiracy Theory: Biden Investigators are Captured by Foreign Agents

Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and House Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), two key perpetrators of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, had another conspiracy theory to peddle on Psaki’s CNN show on Sunday.

On MSNBC, the interlocutors bantered about the baseless speculation that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) was an asset of foreign agents, due to his investigations into alleged Biden family corruption.

“I want to ask about the work of the Oversight Committee, because you and Congressman Dan Goldman sent a letter to Oversight Chair James Comer this week requesting that he hand over any information he’s received from Gal Luft, with the man who the GOP claimed, for those who haven’t been following this in detail, he had evidence of corruption by the Biden family — who was charged with arms trafficking, sanctions violations, and acting as an unregistered agent for China,” Psaki said. “It is almost like part of a movie that is happening right now. According to an indictment on sale this week. What information are you seeking about James Comer’s involvement with Luft and what do you want to know?”

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Nobody is Torturing Children to Harvest Adrenochrome

There is a certain relatively small, but enthusiastic percentage of the population that are prone to believe in conspiracies. Having been someone who has put in some time debunking conspiracy theories over the years, I can tell you a little bit about their patterns of thought and the way that they argue. Usually, conspiracy theorists have such a poor understanding of the subject that they’re talking about that it seems like magic to them and thus, anything seems possible. On occasion, after being dragged over and over again for their conspiratorial beliefs, they’ll learn a little something about what they’re talking about, but their knowledge is often badly flawed because their goal is to “prove” their conspiracy theory right, not to actually get to the truth.

Their style of argumentation is usually illogical and incoherent. They tend to throw pretty much anything against the wall to see what sticks and then insist that you disprove every single thing they come up with, while completely ignoring the much larger piles of evidence supporting some mainstream belief they’re trying to undermine.

If you talk to 10 conspiracy theorists, they will typically all have different arguments supporting their beliefs. Disproving the pillars of their argument has no impact on them because their beliefs have no real logic or structure to them. If you disprove one of their key pieces of evidence, they just move on to the next. They also almost universally ignore the fact that theories don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re measured against competing theories. If I say the world is round and you say the world is flat, then how both competing theories handle questions and statements like, “If the world is flat, where’s the edge?” or “People have looked at Earth from space and we see that it’s not flat,” matter a lot. They do not look at it that way. They believe what they believe, and no amount of contrary evidence is going to change it.

It also must be noted that conspiracy theories often rely heavily on a “them” that you’re supposed to believe are capable of anything. This leads to statements like, “Of course, they’re behind (insert horrible thing here)! You don’t think that the ‘Republicans/Democrats/Jews/Karl Rove/Bushes/Clintons/George Soros/Rothschilds/Illuminati/Big Pharma/white supremacist Martians from Venus/whoever’ are capable of that? Are you naïve?”

After reading this basic rundown about how conspiracy theorists argue things to get you prepared for the aftermath of sharing this article everywhere someone promotes this idea (hint, hint), let’s start to talk about adrenochrome.

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QANON LEADER 

Conspiracy cult leader Michael Protzman dies at 60 from dirt bike crash injuries 2 years after claim JFK would reappear

QANON cult leader Michael Protzman has died after being involved in a dirt bike accident, according to reports.

Protzman died of multiple blunt force injuries after losing control of his dirt bike at the Meadow Valley Motocross track in Millville, Minnesota, on June 30, a medical examiner’s report obtained by Vice News showed.

Protzman, known as Negative 48 by his followers, emerged as a QAnon guru in early 2021 when he garnered over 100,000 followers on his Telegram channel over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A believer that former president John F. Kennedy and his son JFK Jr. were still alive, Protzman convinced thousands of followers from across the US to travel to Dallas in November 2021 to witness the former commander-in-chief’s “reappearance” at Dealey Plaza – the site of JFK’s assassination in 1963.

He claimed Kenndy would reinstate Donald Trump as president and help him carry out the persecution of a global cabal of pedophilic, blood-drinking liberal elites that QAnon, or Q, devotees believe run the world despite no evidence.

When his baseless prediction never came to pass, he would change his conspiracies to keep his followers in line.

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QAnon ‘momfluencer’ sentenced to jail for accusing Latino couple of abducting her children

A social media influencer with ties to the QAnon movement has been sentenced to jail for falsely accusing a Latino couple of trying to kidnap her children, Law & Crimereported on Friday.

“Kathleen ‘Katie’ Sorensen, a white mother of two, made an Instagram video in which she made up a story about Sadie Vega-Martinez and Eddie Martinez — a Hispanic couple she did not know — trying to kidnap her then 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter,” reported Jason Kandel.

She was sent to prison for 90 days Thursday on a count of knowingly making a false report of a crime, the website reported.

Sorensen, who lives in California, originally went viral in 2020 as she claimed in a video from her car that a couple, later revealed to be Eddie and Sadie Vega-Martinez, tried to abduct her children at a Michael’s craft store.

But her story fell apart almost immediately as police found “inconsistencies,” and it turned out the whole thing was fabricated. She was arrested in May 2021.

Prosecutors believe she fabricated the story to boost and monetize her following, prosecutors noted — but there may have been a political and conspiracy theory basis for it, too.

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Is TikTok Really To Blame for Titanic Conspiracy Theories?

The Titanic never actually sank. Or maybe it did, but not because of an accidental run-in with an iceberg. It was really a dastardly plot by Irish Catholics, or perhaps banker J.P. Morgan or an Egyptian mummy’s curse is to blame.

Those—and plenty more—wild conspiracy theories about the disaster that unfolded in the North Atlantic during the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, have been circulating for years, with some starting almost immediately after the Titanic reached the ocean floor.

But now they’re also spreading on TikTok, and The New York Times seems convinced that the social media app is a uniquely dangerous place for kids to encounter ideas that they might otherwise have to find in books, in movies, or elsewhere on the internet.

On TikTok, “musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content—a demonstration of TikTok’s potent ability to seed historical revisionism about even the most deeply studied cases,” the Times‘ Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari declare in a piece about the video site’s “Titanic Truthers.”

But the story’s dramatic framing and its specific targeting of TikTok seem at odds with reality—a problem for any article, but especially one that’s supposed to be combating misinformation. Indeed, near the bottom of the piece, Hsu and Maheshwari admit that these TikToks are “just the latest recycling bin for false narratives about the Titanic.”

Is there something uniquely dangerous about the way these ideas spread via TikTok? I asked Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who has written extensively about conspiracy theories (including in the pages of Reason), whether this is a worrying development.

“No, we should not be worried,” says Uscinski. “The ability of social media to turn people into conspiracy theorists is vastly overrated, largely because people don’t believe everything they hear and see, and oftentimes, the things they hear and see are things that they sought out purposely because those things match their preexisting beliefs.”

If TikTok—or social media in general, or even the internet as a whole—was causing people to believe in more conspiracy theories, researchers would be able to see that trend. Instead, surveys by Uscinski and others have found that, at the mass level, conspiracy theory beliefs tend to be stable over time.

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‘Fake Melania’ conspiracy reemerges after Fox News misidentifies Trump aide for wife

In 2017, a new conspiracy theory emerged on the far right when MAGA Republicans started claiming that then-First Lady Melania Trump had a body double. And the “fake Melania” conspiracy theory was reignited on June 13 — the day of former Donald Trump’s arraignment in Miami on 37 federal criminal counts — after Fox News reporter John Roberts (not to be confused with the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice) mistook Margo Martin, the former president’s director of communications, for Melania Trump.

According to The Sun’s Caitlin Hornik, the woman in Miami could not have been Melania Trump because the former first lady was in New York City on June 13 and didn’t go to Miami with her husband. Martin, however, was with Donald Trump in the courthouse.

Reporting live in Miami, Roberts saw Martin and said, “There she is.” But around 15 minutes later, Roberts told Fox News viewers, “Apparently, it was not Melania. A day like today with so many comings and goings, it’s easy from a distance to mistake two people.”

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