So as many of you know, but some of you don’t know, we do a live internet radio show on Sunday nights. The first hour is just us kind of chillin, playing great local tunes, interacting with our chat room, and getting settled in. Sometimes we have an interview or a deeper dive into something, but it’s usually super casual. The 2nd hour is the hour that we release as the podcast. This is the part where we cover the “regular news” so to speak, but with an eye to the absurd. Then from hour 3 into hour 4 and sometimes into hour 5 even, we cover conspiracy theories and the lunatics who peddle them. This part of the show is called “Red Light”. Our $5 patrons get the entire live capture including the upfront hour and Red Light, but the podcast release is that “normal news” hour.
Around the time we coined the term Red Light for the show after the show, we were covering some of the following during that segment: Chemtrails, Flat Earth, False Flags, anti-semitic Soros conspiracies, and of course the loons who propagate these ideas. But over the last 2+ years, a funny thing has happened. A lot of what we used to cover in Red Light seems to have crept its way into the “regular news” part of our docket for The Plex.The ideas that we used to have to go looking for in the depths of YouTube are now being paraded out on cable news by the likes of Lou Dobbs and the morons and bimbos who bring us Fox and Friends. Rush Limbaugh? Check. Michael Savage? Check. And even CNN and MSNBC have had people on to peddle this false flag tinfoil hat nonsense, sometimes unchallenged, sometimes with a very weak challenge by hosts and other guests who couldn’t bear to think of themselves as someone who might “take sides” in this war of stupid ideas. The spurious stories get picked up and repeated by the shows who are reporting what everyone else has on their front pages. Before long, even a biblical prophecy hoax like the QAnon meta-conspiracy will get onto Lou Dobbs's radar screen, and he makes a calculated decision to report it as truth, using the reputation that he built during years on CNN but likely pretends does not exist now that he’s on Fox.
But it’s not just the mainstream media and right wing radio hosts. We have Jimmy Dore who, during the election, pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy theory and when asked about Pizzagate on a panel with some conspiracy loons, well, Jimmy couldn’t be fussed to even say “Nah, I don’t believe that”, probably because he was aware that some portion of his audience believes that bullshit.
Nor is it just the right wing media and the dumb-dumb left (s/o to Majority Report) media doing this. We have senators, house reps, and oh so many candidates doing this shit. This isn’t about the chemtrails and 5G loon who ran in House District 101. This is in reference to 3 mainstream republican candidates for office, in addition to our current president, spewing anti-vaccine rhetoric. And this is not counting all the local races, which we can only presume were full of assorted crackpots of all varieties, but not this guy, he didn’t do his paperwork. There’s still a floor somewhere, it’s just way down there.
We also have fake smart people like Jordan Peterson out there spewing conspiracy theories about “Cultural Marxism” in academia, going so far as to say we should eliminate entire fields of study because many in that field of study do not agree with Mr. Peterson. We have a fake neuroscientist cutting out parts of his podcast at the behest of a known white supremacist and Men’s Rights Activist because there was criticism of said white supremacist’s words and associations. We have the guy who runs Skeptic Magazine talking to that same white supremacist and afterwards praising the guy for being an “excellent skeptic”. Stefan Molyneux is a person we would have previously only covered in Red Light because he’s a conspiracy loon, but now we have super smart criticalthinkers™ kowtowing to him and even praising him. Speaking of Skeptic Magazine, they are spreading disinformation too, with the same goal as Jordan Peterson so far as we can tell. Let’s face it, the current group of famous public intellectuals leaves a lot to be desired.
Speaking of Stefan Molyneux... white supremacists. Holy shit! What the fuck?
And a lot of this is happening on Facebook. But Facebook seems to have paid a marketing firm to spread a conspiracy theory about people who are critical of the company. And of course it’s a conspiracy about George Soros. And at the same time it’s also because those critics might be anti-semitic. But you probably only saw one of those messages. Because algorithms. But surely the boy king Zuckerberg did not know, nor did Sheryl Sandberg. And we’re supposed to believe that, because, who knows, maybe they’ll say you’re a pedo or something if you say you won't believe them. People still love Elon Musk, and he did that shit.
So here we are. At a time when conspiracy theories are entering the mainstream and neo-nazis seem to be ascendent. The criticalthinkers™ are mostly off complaining about how not everyone agrees with them when they’re not having these white nationalist types on their shows to try and better understand them, but hey, at least they’re not having conspiracy theorists on their shows, oh wait nevermind. We have massive companies spreading conspiracy theories in our society to discredit people who might criticize their corporate behavior. With all this happening, it seems maybe we need the humanities more than ever, but people in those fields usually can’t code, and super genius public intellectuals are suing them and suggesting we remove the entire field from academia.
We’re all the way down the rabbit hole here everyone. The news cycle has crossed over and we’re now somehow qualified to help demystify the news because the whole world has gone Red Light. Let us be your guides.
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