Curiously Curated Conspiracies, Cover Ups and Corruption. All content is 'for your consideration' only. "The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears." ~ Hunter S. Thompson
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
TATAMAGOUCHE, Nova Scotia – The QAnon Queen of Canada leans so close to the windshield of her motorhome her face is almost pressed against the glass when she screams into her walkie-talkie.
“Ignore them!” her voice crackles over the radio. “Ignore them!”
The small collection of Romana’s Didulo’s ragtag group of cult followers-turned-servants who populate a rural Nova Scotia property look at me with a mix of horror and apology. One man, wearing a security hat straight out of a dollar store costume section, tries to take control and meekly tells me I need to leave the area. Another follower, a bit bolder than the security guy, coldly says “absolutely not” when I ask if we can speak to their so-called “queen.”
There are three motorhomes strewn across the front lawn of the property and our conversation has to be loud in order to hear over the cacophony of the dozen or so dogs barking and fighting. Here is where Didulo and her followers, who have been proselytizing her unique brand of QAnon conspiracy-cum-alien stuff-cum-soverign citizenship beliefs across Canada for the better part of a year, stayed over the winter. Here is where Didulo made her most loyal followers sleep on the floor of RVs so her dogs could sleep on the bed, and made people sit in their filth for weeks, eat expired food, and face torrents of abuse.
Marching from the motorhome housing their spiritual leader, Didulo’s second-in-command comes storming towards us. Pointing her phone at us she begins to take control of the situation.
“No comment,” she screams repeatedly. “No comment!”
Independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald succinctly summarises how ‘regime media narratives’ are formed and disseminated, and that any journalist who questions the process ends up a target for destruction by the establishment.
During his “System Update” broadcast on Rumble, Greenwald noted how “Journalists who spread conspiracy theories that the CIA wants them to spread get promoted, and the journalists who question the conspiracy theories of the CIA get destroyed.”
“It’s not prohibited in American corporate journalism to spread false stories and conspiracy theories,” Greenwald asserted, adding “In fact, that’s the only way you can thrive in journalism.”
“The people who have lied the most, and who spread the most conspiracy theories, are the ones who have been promoted and enriched most within corporate journalism,” he further urged.
“The difference is, the way to advance in journalism is to tell lies and spread conspiracy theories on behalf of the CIA, and that advance the interests of the U.S. government. That is not only permitted. That is required to be promoted,” Greenwald emphasised.
He continued, “What you can’t do, the thing that [Seymour] Hersh did that got him expelled from journalism, is he spread what are called conspiracy theories that are against the narrative of the U.S. security state, that undermined U.S. foreign policy. That is the only thing that is prohibited. That’s what gets you kicked out of journalism.”
Disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn loves a conspiracy theory—except when it’s about him.
Flynn, who has boosted countless conspiracies over the last two years, from claiming Italian military satellites helped steal the 2020 election to claiming COVID was a hoax perpetrated by the “global elite,” filed a lawsuit last week against a man who has spent the same time repeatedly and consistently accusing Flynn of being Q.
Jim Stewartson, who previously worked in developing alternate reality games, has attained a level of notoriety online for his wild accusations about Flynn being part of a Kremlin-funded psyop to destroy U.S. democracy.
“Mike Flynn, the worst traitor in history who stole 2016, created Q, planned the insurrection,” Stewartson tweeted on Wednesday, repeating conspiracies he has posted obsessively for over two years.
Stewartson has, as usual, failed to produce any convincing evidence to back up his claims, which have been debunked and dismissed by journalists and researchers who closely track the development of QAnon.
In Flynn’s lawsuit, filed last week in the circuit court in Sarasota County, Florida, where Flynn lives, the former Army general claims that “Stewartson sought fame through the trend of defaming prominent conservative figures.”
The lawsuit contains a long list of the accusations Stewartson has made against Flynn in social media postings, Substack articles and on his podcast.
The lawsuit includes a lengthy list of Stewartson’s “pernicious lies” about Flynn, which it says include “accusing him of committing treason and domestic terrorism, working for Vladimir Putin, being a Russian asset, stealing the 2016 election, working to overthrow the United States government, planning and executing a violent insurrection, being a leader of QAnon, being a Nazi, waging psychological warfare on the American people, wanting a second Holocaust, using ISIS radicalization techniques on the American people, torturing prisoners, and literally trying to murder former Vice President Mike Pence.”
The lawsuit says Stewartson has made these claims to boost his profile and profit from subscriptions to his podcast and Substack account. Flynn is seeking $150,000 in damages from Stewartson.
Stewartson has 20 days to file a written response to the lawsuit. When Stewartson was contacted for a comment by this reporter, who he has repeatedly claimed is part of the Flynn-Russia psyop, Stewartson replied on a public Twitter thread, saying, “I think that @GenFlynn is a psychological warfare expert who knows how to protect himself with his ‘army of digital soldiers’ including you.”
Stewartson shows no sign of changing his approach; this week he published a Substack post entitled, “Q sued me.”
Hellbound and Down 
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