Tag: conspiracy theories

QAnon Followers Are Arguing if the Beatles Were Involved in Witchcraft and Child Sacrifice

AS THE BIGGEST rock band of the 20th century, the Beatles were naturally also the subject of an infamous conspiracy theory. According to urban legend, Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by an imposter, with his surviving bandmates leaving cryptic clues to the coverup in their music and album art.

Decades later, a far-right fringe movement would make this kind of outlandish claim as a matter of course. QAnon followers, who started out as Trump loyalists believing that he was engaged in a secret war with the “deep state” and a cabal of pedophile elites, have floated the idea that JFK Jr. is still alive and suggested that President Biden is actually a robot. They come to these conclusions in much the same way as a Sixties stoner would have “proved” that Paul was dead: by interpreting images and texts in a way that no reasonable person ever would. QAnon, too, holds that the people running the world like to taunt us with hints of their evil influence — that the evidence is always hidden in plain sight.

So it can’t be a surprise that this cult, which now studies any artifact they can to advance a new “satanic panic,” is arguing about whether the Beatles were tied up in witchcraft and child sacrifice.

One lively conversation on the topic unfolded after “anti-woke” conspiracy theorist Sameera Khan shared the controversial “butcher” album cover for the collection Yesterday and Today, which was withdrawn by the band after a dispute with their label. In this attempt at provocation, Khan saw the touch of shaitan, or a demonic spirit in the Islamic tradition. Among the many replies speculating on the meaning of the image, one Twitter user referenced a book that alleges the Beatles were created and financed by the U.K. government. The text, The Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300, lays out the long-standing conspiracy theory that a secret group founded by the British aristocracy in 1727 controls all global affairs. Khan, for her part, has previously called the Beatles a “psyop” to popularize “wokeism.”

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NY Times Claims Balenciaga Pedo Scandal Is QAnon Conspiracy Theory

In the wake of the ongoing Balenciaga pedophilia propaganda scandal, the New York Times produced a piece Tuesday that essentially claimed the entire thing is some sort of QAnon conspiracy theory.

In the report, the Times suggests that only the likes of QAnon, Tucker Carlson, The New York Post, and Fox News are spreading the idea that the luxury fashion brand condones child exploitation.

The piece states “they ignited a firestorm that traveled from the internet to Fox News, fueled by allegations that Balenciaga condoned child exploitation. The controversy has become one of the most explicit collisions of internet culture, politics, fashion and conspiracy theories to date.”

It further posits that “As online criticism of the campaigns spread, the story was picked up across right-leaning media outlets, including The New York Post and the prime time Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight. The show has helped to publicize and mainstream QAnon, the internet conspiracy theory that ‘a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.’”

The report adds “Here you have a major international retail brand promoting kiddie porn and sex with children,” Mr. Carlson told viewers on Nov. 22, “and not promoting it subtly but right out in the open.”

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Crypto Developer Found Dead Hours After Claiming CIA/Mossad Were Sex Trafficking In Caribbean

A young crypto developer and millionaire was found dead just hours after making disturbing comments about the CIA, Mossad, and pedophile elites on Twitter.

Nikolai Mushegian, a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency world, claimed intelligence agencies like the CIA and Mossad were operating a “sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring” in the Caribbean.

“CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and caribbean islands. They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex gf who was a spy. They will torture me to death,” Mushegian posted to Twitter on October 28 at 4:57 AM.

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Former Content Moderator Claims AIs Are Using Fake Conspiracy Theories To Silence Real Ones

It sounds like something out of the X-Files, but a former content moderator claims that AIs are generating conspiracy theories and flooding online platforms with fake images, videos, and text in order to manipulate human society, and to discredit real conspiracy theories.

The moderator-turned-whistleblower, who calls himself Scott Chatsalot — and whose real name was withheld on request in the interest of their safety— says that he personally witnessed AI-generated conspiracy content being published onto tech platforms at a “massive scale.” He went on to claim in an email to a major news network: “There are definitely no humans behind these campaigns, which are by orders of magnitude the largest anyone has ever seen, and which platforms are totally covering up. Only AIs have the power to do this…”

After posting his allegations to Twitter in mid-August, Chatsalot alleges that he was fired by his employer for doing so, and subsequently deleted his Twitter account. When contacted, Chatsalot refused to comment and his personal Facebook account appears to have been deleted or shadowbanned, though Chatsalot has since uploaded an apology video to YouTube and has taken to his Reddit account, which still appears active, to make the same allegations.

The author of the alleged email, which was not independently verified claimed that the company that he worked for, referred to by Chatsalot only as Widget, was hired by a large tech company as a content moderation team, whose work he describes as “very sensitive.”

On Reddit, Chatsalot alleged that in 2019 he was promoted to lead a large content moderation team of 2,500 employees tasked with policing posts from “all over the internet, including Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.”

According to Chatsalot, the team’s job was to police “all kinds of posts,” from “pornographic to political to religious to everything in between” and its work was “extremely secretive, and there was no oversight,” meaning there was “no one to tell you what was wrong.” He says they “just made it all up on the fly, and nobody else cared.”

Things changed in late 2021 when their moderation team began seeing a huge influx of AI generated media. Chatsalot claims that the content in question was all “generated by AIs and never human hands,” and that the images “are generated completely by artificial intelligence and machine learning trained off all the worst content from social media platforms, which Widget had unique access to.”

He says he saw the AI generated content via the massive Widget content moderation platform used by major social platforms, and that, “the scale at which this was being generated is insane. Billions per second insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He claimed that the platforms “don’t want to talk about it, because it makes them look bad.” He also claimed that whoever is generating these images, text, and videos, “the goal is to generate controversy to get people to click on your content and earn likes and money.” He says the AIs are using A/B testing to see what people respond to most negatively.

He also claimed that Widget itself was using AI to manipulate content across various platforms, and that, “It was using AI to target the conspiracy theories themselves for clicks and revenues.”

“Basically, the AI was teaching itself to know what was a conspiracy theory and what was not. That was its job.”

“The AI could generate a conspiracy theory from nothing and it would always seem real and people would look at it and like it,” he said, “It was actually producing this stuff, and it would use a real photo of something else and alter it, and then post it with a new face or caption that was totally different.” He goes on to claim that “The AI knew that it would make people mad and it would make people click on the image.”

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Why Society Needs Conspiracy Theories & Conspiracy Theorists

It seems like you can’t catch a news headline or social media post these days without coming across the terms conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist, or phrases like ‘spreading conspiracies’. One has to wonder: why are they so frequently employed?

In my most recent published work, I referenced an article from Canada’s National Post which ran with the headline ‘CBSA says it’s investigating border officer spreading COVID conspiracies online.’

The problem with these kinds of articles is that they are too often merely used as hit pieces to ridicule, degrade, and discredit any individual or group that goes against a certain narrative or disagrees with an author’s (or their publication’s partisanship or funders’) views.

Moreover, their authors very seldom make specific references or claims as to why they label their targets when using such over-used and over-abused disparaging rhetoric. When this is the case, it leads me to believe that the overall purpose of their pieces is to disparage their targets more than anything else.

Another recent example of this involves that from the article entitled ‘Network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified – study’ written by Mark Townsend from The Guardian (UK). In the article, the author claimed “journalist Aaron Maté at the Grayzone is said by the report to have overtaken Beeley as the most prolific spreader of disinformation among the 28 conspiracy theorists identified.” Maté had to refute the claim made against him which also involved contacting Townsend by phone. His counter article and the phone conversation appear on his Substack page (see ‘NATO-backed network of Syria dirty war propagandists identified)’ and is definitely an interesting case on how these ploys take place.

Countless other instances could be cited, but suffice it to say that there is no shortage of them.

But what is perhaps even more laughable with this phenomenon is the fact that these authors wantonly use these terms without even knowing their true meanings and where they actually originate from.

Before looking into these, though, we must first and foremost examine the meaning of the word ‘conspiracy’ itself. Oxford defines it as:

a secret plan by a group of people to do something harmful or illegal

Conspiracies have been an integral part of humanity ever since people have bonded together in groups for a better chance at survival.

Lord knows that history is riddled with an abundant supply of conspiracies and we will look at some notable examples later on.

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5 “CRAZY” CONSPIRACY THEORIES THAT ACTUALLY TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE

Deception, lying, and hiding the truth are nothing new. Whenever there was a struggle for power, influence, money, or dominance, there was a conspiracy… Countless conspiracies turnout out to be true and today we will explore some examples.

As it turns out many of them hail from the United States, the land of “the brave and the free” (just kidding…). So, let’s check out some of the theories peddled across multiple sites over the last couple of decades. 

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New York Times Claim: ‘Russian Bots Are Meddling in US Midterms’

The Russian bots and trolls blamed for former president Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory have reportedly returned to US social media platforms, ahead of next week’s midterm elections.

The New York Times claimed on Sunday that they are focusing their discord-sowing, disinfo-promoting attacks on alternative networks like Gab and Parler, citing researchers from Recorded Future, Mandiant and Graphika.

Questionable accounts believed to be linked to Russian “troll farm” Internet Research Agency are targeting conservatives ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, the researchers said, hitting familiar themes like voter fraud, Democrats’ perceived leniency on crime, the administration’s blank check to Ukraine, transgender children, and other hot-button issues.

The researchers acknowledged that any influence campaign waged on Gab, Gettr, or the former president’s Truth Social is necessarily much smaller than the IRA’s Facebook campaign from 2016, and admitted some of the content “did not spread virally to other platforms.” A Gab account held up as an example of an IRA personality resurfacing to meddle in the midterms had just 8,000 followers, with a post receiving as few as 43 responses.

However, they argued less effort was needed to sow discord than in previous elections. “Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas, because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them,” Twitter executive turned election security expert Edward Perez told the Times.

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In Defense of “Crazy” Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories. What to some is a sign of critical thinking is, to others, a sign of dangerous insubordination.

I was taught by my father that a good argument can stand up to criticism and that finding someone who disagreed was a fine way to test your theory. I’ve never been too bothered when folks disagree with me. In fact, I’m eager to know why. I want to learn whether or not I’m missing something.

But these days, it seems that I’m in the minority.

The “danger” of conspiracy theories

The term has long been used in a derogatory fashion to belittle the ideas of a person who doesn’t necessarily accept that everything can be taken at face value.  These days, it’s used to denote a train of thought that is downright dangerous, even an existential threat to civil society.

What’s everyone so afraid of?

Normies – folks who aren’t big into questioning the status quo – used to just shake their heads and smile at the “quirky” conspiracy theorist in their life. They considered it a harmless past-time, an eccentricity.

However, now we have the media breathlessly warning people of the innate deadly danger of conspiracy theories and the people who espouse them. Outright FEAR is being stoked. Let’s take a closer look.

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Suspect in assault at Pelosi home had posted about QAnon

The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.

David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store.

DePape was arrested at the Pelosi home early Friday. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she expected to file multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elder abuse.

Stepfather Gene DePape said the suspect had lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and had been a quiet boy.

“David was never violent that I seen and was never in any trouble although he was very reclusive and played too much video games,” Gene DePape said.

He said he hasn’t seen his stepson since 2003 and tried to get in touch with him several times over the years without success.

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Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers

On June 1, David Leavitt, the prosecuting attorney for Utah County, stood behind a lectern in his windowless Provo office before a gaggle of reporters. Wearing a gray suit and an exasperated look, he wanted to make something categorically clear: Neither he nor his wife were guilty of murdering or cannibalizing young children.

It was, by all accounts, a strange declaration from the progressive Republican prosecutor, a Mormon and younger brother of a former Utah governor, Mike Leavitt, who had earned a name for himself by prosecuting a well-known polygamist in 2001. But David Leavitt was up for re-election, Utah County voters would start casting ballots the next week, and the allegations, ridiculous as they may have sounded, had started to spread online and throughout the community. 

Some of Leavitt’s most high-profile political opponents were willing to at least wink at the allegations against him: Utahns for Safer Communities, a political action committee opposing Leavitt’s re-election, posted his news conference to YouTube with the caption, “Wethinks He Doth Protest Too Much,” and on their website, the group wrote that Leavitt “seems to know more than he says.” 

Leavitt lost the election, most likely not just because of the allegations against him but because of his liberal style of prosecution in a deeply conservative county where opponents labeled him as “soft on crime.” But the allegations’ impact on Leavitt was clear. After decades of serving as a city and county attorney with grander plans for public office, Leavitt now doesn’t think he’ll run again. 

“The cost is too high,” he said recently in an interview from his home.

Leavitt’s experience is one of a spate of recent examples in which individuals have been targeted with accusations of Satanism or so-called ritualistic abuse, marking what some see as a modern day version of the moral panic of the 1980s, when hysteria and hypervigilance over protecting children led to false allegations, wrongful imprisonments, decimated communities and wasted resources to the neglect of actual cases of abuse.

While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights. Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice. 

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