Another Cabal Update

I never have been very skeptical regarding the idea of an elite, wealty cabal trying to rule the world. I've mentioned this many times before here on Augoeides. There's plenty of evidence that all sorts of plots to dominate society are devised by people with more money than they could ever spend and way too much time on their hands. The part that I have always been skeptical about is that the cabal has anything to do with occultism.

The idea that occultists and/or Pagans pose some kind of existential threat to "regular" people is ridiculous. It is nonetheless the mainstay of much fundamentalist Christian musing about what they fear is going on in the world. Their enemies can't just be garden-variety ultra-rich money-grubbing sociopaths - you know, the kind of people who actually pose an existential threat to everyone outside their income bracket. No, their enemies must somehow be metaphysically evil and depraved. As if starving the world just to amass unlimited wealth isn't evil enough.

Here's a new update on who these folks really are, or at least one particular subgroup of them. The original article was published in Wired but it is behind a paywall, so I am instead linking to this summary from Esquire that includes a link to the original piece. The cabal or sub-cabal in question is called "Dialog" and is led by perennial super-villian Peter Thiel, founder of uber-surveillance firm Palantir. And as usual, there's not an occultist in sight. Thiel himself appears to be some odd variety of fundamentalist Christian obsessed with the End Times and the Antichrist, which South Park parodied quite effectively in its latest season.

A source separately provided Wired with the registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant’s membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12–16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.

The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander of Europe and the head of U.S. European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021.

The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two U.S. senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.

Now at first I wondered about that Build-a-cult thing, because that at least sounds like it could be occult adjacent. But no, it's being put on by a Christian organization. That means that either (A) it's about how to create a Christian cult, or (B) it's going to be full of the usual fundie nonsense about occultism that has no basis in reality.

As a point, "Bring Back Nuclear" is a good idea in my opinion. It's emission-free and new reactor designs are incredibly safe. But that's likely about where my agreement with these folks is going to end. This sort of concentrated political and financial power is always going to be dangerous, and these are the same folks pushing artificial intelligence, the end of personal privacy (for everyone but them, naturally), and accelerationism.

So it's not that the conspiracy theorists are wrong, exactly. They just wander too far into the realm of fantasy regarding the cabal and its members. People don't need to be aliens or lizards or demons or wizards to be dangerous. Massive concentrated wealth and lack of accountability can do are plenty of harm all on their own.

Fake News Media Consolidation

After more than a year of legal back-and-forth, it finally has happened. In the biggest fake news consolidation deal probably ever, The Onion has finalized its purchase of Alex Jones' InfoWars. I have been reporting on the story since news of the sale first broke, but now it appears to be for real.

Families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting won a billion dollar judgement against Jones. He had repeated insisted on his show that the shooting was staged and their children were not really dead - which is a level of awfulness that as a parent I find hard to imagine. The Onion purchased InfoWars during Jones' bankruptcy auction.

The Onion confirmed the news in a separate statement along with a link encouraging people to buy satirical tote bags featuring a mashup of both companies’ logos.

"Finally. It took 17 months and hundreds of hours in courtrooms, but America’s Finest News Source has entered into an agreement to operate America’s Source Of Disinformation For Sovereign Citizens Who Reject The Idea Of Child Support,” The Onion said. “Big things are coming."

The fictional CEO of Tetrahedron, Bryce P. Tetraeder, elaborated on what “big things” might be in store in a story on The Onion itself. “The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry,” Tetraeder wrote.

“This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.”

So exactly the same, I guess? Except, of course, instead of pretending fake news stories are real news, the new InfoWars seems slated to instead embrace its fakeness. This raises the possibility of media consolidation in the sphere of fake news, so we'll have to watch carefully how this goes.

We may find that when fewer companies that control fake news, the variety of fakeness out there will suffer. Only time will tell.

The Cabal is Not Shadowy

Over and over again, I keep hearing online conspiracy theorists go on about the "shadowy cabal" of "satanists" who run the world. Some people go so far as to think they are literally shape-shifting lizards. Others insist that they're magicians, occultists, or pagans. In all these cases, though, they're secret. Nobody knows who their members are, and constant speculation goes back and forth over who might or might not be a member.

If you're one of these people wondering about the truth, do I have news for you! It is no mystery whatsoever who these people are, at least in the United Stats. As a matter of fact, a list of them is published every year. It's called the Forbes 400. Don't believe me? You should. Billionaires run nearly every aspect of the modern world, especially in the United States.

Being a billionaire is not just being rich. I'm willing to bet that hardly anybody reading this has an accurate sense of how much money a billion dollars actually is. People seem to feel like a billionaire is somebody a fair amount richer than a millionaire. But a millionaire is a thousand times closer to being entirely destitute than they are to being a billionaire. The real difference in scale is staggering.

A million dollars is a sum that a lot of people will wind up earning over the course of their careers. If you work for 40 years and average $25,000 per year you will earn a million dollars. You'll need to spend most of it on expenses, of course, and won't have anywhere near that amount in savings. But a billion dollars? You would have to make 25 million dollars per year over that same span to earn a billion.

Not April Fools

For quite awhile the tradition here on Augoeides for April Fools Day has been to find an article with some relation to religion, spirituality, conspiracies, or whatever from satirical outlets like The Onion. This year, though? Satire seems tame. Both of the stories mentioned in the meme accompanying this article are apparently true. Former congressman Matt Gaetz is alleging that the United States Military is engaged in breeding human-alien hybrids. I suppose that might explain all the probing, and while outlandish it does make more sense than an alien race expending all the energy required for interstellar travel just to grab random humans and molest them - still not much sense, but a little more.

Gaetz made the shocking statement during a guest appearance on the "Benny Show" while speaking with host Benny Johnson. "I had someone come and brief me, wearing a military uniform, worked for the United States Army, that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race, that could engage in intergalactic communication," Gaetz said.

This of course ignores the fact that the universe we live in is not Star Trek, where seemingly every humanoid alien race can cross-breed with each other. The odds of aliens and humans being capable of interbreeding is vanishingly small, given how different the biology of real aliens would have to be. And Vice President J. D. Vance has his own theory that would seem to contradict the idea of hybridizing aliens. He thinks that UFOs are demons. I suppose the only way to combine these two claims is to argue that the US Military is actually hybridizing humans and demons, for which some folklore does exist. Still, it seems pretty unlikely that a corporeal human and an incorporeal demon (or spirit of any kind) could produce a child.

“Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people. I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens,” Vance said. “Every great world religion, including Christianity, the one that I believe in, has understood that there are weird things out there, and there are things that are very difficult to explain. And I naturally go, when I hear about sort of extra-natural phenomenon, that’s where I go, is the Christian understanding that, you know, there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also some evil out there. I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”

Now the interesting thing here is that Vance may not be entirely wrong. I do think that some UFO sightings might actually be the result of spirit activity. Where he's wrong, though, is jump immediately to the ridiculous Christian idea that spirits are automatically evil or "of the devil." From personal experience I can tell you that most of them aren't. Chthonic and Celestial spirits get erroneously classified as "evil demons" and "good angels" by Christianity, when the reality is a lot more complex. Spirits of both realms have their own unique personalities, and how friendly or hostile they are depends on circumstances.

Folks, I just can't come up with a satirical April Fools joke that tops this, so it will have to do. It's at least as unhinged as any of the other fake stories I've covered on this date.

InfoWars to Remain Fake News

The long saga of Alex Jones and InfoWars appears to be coming to an end. After declaring bankruptcy in response to the billion dollar judgment leveled against him by the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, InfoWars and its assets were put up for auction. In a delightful turn of events, the winning bidder was veteran fake news purveyor The Onion. You, from back when fake news was fake news, not just whatever news coverage folks like Jones don't happen to like.

The Onion’s monumental media scoop was made in partnership with the families of Sandy Hook victims, whom Jones owes at least $85 million after he lost a $1.5 billion case for claiming that the massacre, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six adults, was a hoax.

Ben Collins, The Onion’s CEO, playfully shared the news on social media, asking if anyone needed “millions of dollars worth of supplements.” As the news broke, The Onion—in true form—published an article by Bryce P. Tetraeder, the so-called CEO of Global Tetrahedron (The Onion’s “parent company”), in which the faux executive praised the conspiracy network as an “invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses.”

“With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal,” the satirical piece read.

Congratulations to The Onion for successfully taking over the dubious operations of InfoWars and kicking Jones to the curb. Bad fake news is all Jones knows and he will undoubtedly set up some other platform from which to broadcast his nonsense, but it's also true that judgments cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and whatever new platform he sets up is going to be more marginal than the one he spent decades building up. And maybe, just maybe, he'll think twice next time about setting his rabid followers loose to harrass a bunch of grieving parents.

Alex Jones Is Toast

Or at least that's the outcome I'm pulling for, and a recent screw-up by his attorney has now made that outcome more likely. Jones is on trial over promoting the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged. His remarks prompted his fans to harrass and threaten parents grieving over the loss of young children, which is flat-out deplorable. While I understand that mass shootings are politicized on both sides of the gun control debate, that has little bearing on the nuttiness of suggesting that these parents murdered their own children as part of a government plot, or that their obviously-dead children were somehow still alive.

Cracked has a surprisingly good overview of the events in question, which you can find here. Jones was sued by the parents and lost the case, and now a jury is trying to determine how much he should pay. His case was not helped when his inept attorney accidentally sent important evidence of Jones' pattern of lying about, well, everything really. He previously claimed under oath that he had no text messages about Sandy Hook, but his attorney sent all his cell phone records to the plaintiffs. The records prove that Jones lied.

Jones, who was the sole witness for the defense during the trial, did not fare well Wednesday as he was cross-examined by the plaintiffs' attorney, Mark Bankston. In a remarkable moment, Bankston disclosed to Jones and the court that he had recently acquired evidence proving Jones had lied when he claimed during the discovery process that he had never texted about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Bankston said that Jones' attorney had, in an apparent mishap, sent him two years of cell phone records that included every text message Jones had sent.The cell phone records, Bankston said, showed that Jones had in fact texted about the Sandy Hook shooting. "That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have text messages about Sandy Hook," Bankston said.

Georgia Guidestones Bombed

All the way back in 2012 I posted an article here on Augoeides about the Georgia Guidestones, a monument erected in rural Georgia by a mysterious rich guy in 1980. The Guidestones have figured prominently in conspiracy theories usually advanced by conservatives about some sort of "New World Order" that apparently made the bizarre decision to post its entire secret agenda on stone tablets for everyone to read.

This sort of paranoid thinking always amazes me - evil villains who are supposed to be so smart that principled Americans stand no chance against them, but so dumb that they give away the plot immediately to anybody who can read letters on a stone monument. And that paranoia now seems to have peaked. Today a bomb was detonated at the Guidestone site, causing significant damage to the monument.

The preliminary information indicates that someone detonated an explosive device at around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations.

GBI officials said officials with the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office found the explosion destroyed a large portion of the structure. The Elbert County Sheriff's Office asked the GBI to assist with the investigation.

The guidestones sit on a site 7 miles north of Elberton on Georgia Highway 77 and are often referred to as an American Stonehenge.

In my previous article, I talked about how this whole thing was basically a rich guy posting his ideas on a monument, and that was it. I noted that the statements on the stones range from ridiculous to unworkable to watered-down meaningless platitudes, and wrote up my own set of similarly nonsensical principles. I talked about how conservatives freaking out about the message on the stones was silly, and how paranoia surrounding them was entirely misplaced. But a recent investigation by John Oliver's team at Last Week Tonight set me right. The stones really do have a sinister origin, but not for the reason conservative conspiracy theorists think.

Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Nigeria Exposed!

I know that lately the sorts of articles I used to post here have fallen by the wayside. It turns out that it takes time and planning to put together the material for the Ritual Night Talks, especially now that I am running the workshops in-person and am also creating and posting the Tuesday night videos. I hope to get back to some content besides the Ritual Night Talks soon, and here's a bit of a preview. Have any of you ever been contacted by the Illuminati? My guess is that many of us have probably seen this particular spam email. It's been around for a long time - I even posted an article on an earlier version of it all the way back in 2014.

While I always have dismissed this as a scam (and it is), I also have idly wondered what happens if you actually reply. Back in 2019, intrepid YouTuber Pleasant Green did just that - he responded to see what would happen and recorded his results in the video embedded above. As it turns out, it's a whole lot less weird than you might expect, and is pretty much a straightforward advance fee scam that can be linked back to - you guessed it - Nigeria. Just like the spam email I mentioned in my 2014 article. The scammer did go to a little more effort than some of the others I've seen debunked, though. In order to make it look like the scammer was in New York, they were using a server farm there located that passed a cursory investigation.

There is of course no "real Illuminati" today. At this point the rumors endure because it's become something of a joke in the music industry. The real Illuminati order was founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in Bavaria as an alternative to Freemasonry, and didn't even last twenty years. Far from being an all-powerful secret society, it quickly folded in the face of repression by the Bavarian government. The modern idea of the Illuminati owes a lot to Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy than to anything historical. While it's true that there are a few very wealthy people who run a lot of things all over the world, most are simply pursuing their own self-interest rather than coordinating on some grand scale.

As I've noted here on Augoeides multiple times, the way to get power in the world is to get vast amounts of money, and people who are that focussed on getting vast amounts of money are not generally going to be occultists. You might find some interest among the super-rich who inherited their wealth, but to be a successful entrepreneur at that level requires a degree of obsession that leaves little time and energy for other interests that are time-consuming and require significant effort. That pretty much rules out super-rich magicians - or at the very least super-rich effective magicians.

Eating Their Own

I suppose in hindsight something like this was inevitable. The QAnon conspiracy theory derives much of its support from conservative Evangelical Christians, which I'm convinced is where the whole "Satanism" angle comes from. It's a holdover from the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s (which, as you might recall from the other day, comes from porn) that at some point was basically shoehorned into the earlier Pizzagate trafficking narrative. And as I've mentioned, the minute somebody proposes that massive groups of Satanists are doing anything, you can know that it's false because there are no massive groups of Satanists anywhere. I don't think there are even tiny groups of Satanists that do the things QAnoners accuse them of.

But for once, today's post isn't about that. It's about QAnon turning on the same Evangelical Christian leaders that have given the movement some validity in Christian circles. This has happened with pretty much every "blood libel" conspiracy throughout history, and that adenchrome nonsense definitely places QAnon among those. Conspiracies that rely on flat-out demonization are dangerous things that are hard to handle, even when you are on their good side. The idea that political opponents are unspeakably evil instead of just being political opponents is not just unrealistic. It engenders a level of paranoia that can easily be turned against anyone, including onetime political allies.

Earlier this week, Right Wing Watch noted how MAGA pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, who is running a primary campaign to unseat Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, has openly embraced QAnon conspiracy theorists as part of his campaign, only to become a target of their conspiracy theories. QAnon activists accused the pastor of pedophilia and child sex trafficking in July after he posted a photo of his young daughter wearing red shoes.

Similar allegations are now being leveled against several high-profile evangelical leaders. Late last month, self-proclaimed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow posted a “prophetic alert” on his Facebook page in which he warned that “many of our most famous pastors and Christian leaders are about to be exposed as sexual deviants, pedophiles and worse.” We had no idea what that meant at the time, but now it appears to be related to allegations being put forth by a woman going by the name Madyson Marquette, who claims to have been a former adult film actress who was sexually abused and trafficked by several well-known evangelical leaders, including Kenneth Copeland, T.D. Jakes, Rick Warren, and even the late Billy Graham.

This is Where it Comes From!

I've posted and posted here on Augoeides about fundamentalist Christian ideas about what "witches" and "Satanists" do, and how it has hardly any bearing on how real witches, magicians, and even Satanists practice. I've argued that making magick less mysterious and increasing magical literacy among the general population would help people see the ridiculousness of those ideas. The supposed "black magic" of fundamentalist imagination is mostly fiction, and doesn't even consist of workable or effective magical methods.

Fundamentalists have been insisting for decades that this fake magic is out there and very real. It was one of the big motivators behind the "Satanic Panic" that sent hundreds of innocent people to prison in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the dawn of the Internet, primers on that same fake magic were circulated first on UseNet news groups and later on Christian websites. Even today, it has managed to fold itself into the QAnon network of conspiracies. The latest crop of Satanists is described the same way as the last one - evil people doing evil things for no other reason than to be evil.

The sheer perniciousness of this particular urban myth has always made me wonder where it came from. Some of the ideas, like "blood libel" sacrifices, are very old accusations commonly made to persecute marginalized groups. But some of the others seem bizarre even from an occult standpoint. "Being evil" isn't something that gives you magical power. It might make you more willing to engage in unethical applications of the power you have, but that's it. Really, it gives you no more advantage than a garden variety psychopath, so the idea that it serves some magical purpose is laughable.

But I'm burying the lede a bit here. What I wanted to bring to your attention is that I think I found the origin of at least some of these silly ideas about witches and Satanists. They come from porn. I suppose it makes sense - most porn these days that has plot or structure is a parody of some sort. If that's the origin, it's entirely reasonable to consider "fundie Satanism" a parody of real magick. That fits nicely, and explains why when you look into these alleged practices it's clear that most of them would never work.

QAnon Has Lost Its Shaman

This article is from a week ago, but with Donald Trump's second impeachment trial not yet underway, it's still relevant to current news events. After not receiving a pardon for storming the capitol on January 6th along with a violent MAGA mob, the (apparently now former) "Q-Shaman" has announced that he is willing to testify against the former president.

"QAnon Shaman" who was seen in pictures of the Capitol riot wearing horns and red, white, and blue face paint is willing to testify against former President Donald Trump — because he feels "betrayed" he didn't receive a pardon for what he thought was following Trump's orders. Jacob Chansley, of Arizona, is accused of breaking into the Senate chamber and leaving a threatening message for former Vice President Mike Pence — who became a target of the rioters' wrath due to his refusal to overturn the election certification using a fringe legal theory.

"Lawyer Albert Watkins said he hasn't spoken to any member in the Senate since announcing his offer to have Jacob Chansley testify at Trump's trial, which is scheduled to begin the week of Feb. 8. Watkins said it's important for senators to hear the voice of someone who was incited by Trump," said the report. "Watkins said his client was previously 'horrendously smitten' by Trump but now feels let down after Trump's refusal to grant Chansley and others who participated in the insurrection a pardon. 'He felt like he was betrayed by the president,' Watkins said."

One of these days I hope to be able to quit posting about all this QAnonsense, but it's important to keep it in perspective at the moment. The fact that people believe in it at all is ridiculous, and I should point out that "Q-Shaman" must not have believed it that much if he's now willing to excuse the child-torturing and adrenachrome-huffing that he was advocating against only weeks ago. Is he now suddenly okay with torturing children?

I mean, so much of this QAnon stuff isn't really happening, but it's a serious question. If he really believes it's a thing, or even really believed it was a thing, would he just give it up the minute he felt betrayed by his beloved president? I think - or at least hope - that on some level a lot of the people involved realize it's not happening and were just pushing the narrative because they thought it helped Trump, the focus of their obsessed personality cult.

Every movement has dead-enders, and I expect QAnon will be no exception. But if the whole thing really was mostly a cynical ploy to demonize liberals, at least it means a lot fewer people have completely lost their damn minds - even "Q-Shaman," who sure looks like he has in the footage from the insurrection.

Moral Panics, Old and New

Here's a blast from the past. Remember when religious prohibitionists tried to crack down on "backwards Satanic messages" in popular rock music? It happened decades ago, so if you don't recall or weren't even around back then, Ars Obscura has an in-depth article covering the moral panic over these alleged messages that peaked in the early 1980's. That may seem like ancient history, but the tale also holds some important lessons for today and for the current political situation.

On April 27, 1982, members of the California Assembly’s Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee gathered in Sacramento to hear Robert Plant endorse Satan. This was not a straightforward testimonial. For one thing, the Led Zeppelin frontman wasn’t actually in attendance. Also, his pro-devil paeans could only be heard when you played “Stairway to Heaven” backwards.

After circulating pamphlets with the “backward masked” declarations spelled out, that’s precisely what Assemblyman Phillip Wyman and panel witness William H. Yarroll II did. The relevant portion of the eight-minute classic was first played forward for committee members and then reversed. Here’s what Wyman claimed could be heard:

“I sing because I live with Satan. The Lord turns me off. There’s no escaping it. Here’s to my sweet Satan.” Yarroll, who identified himself as a “neuroscientist,” noted that a teenager need only listen to “Stairway to Heaven” three times before these backward messages were “stored as truth.”

One of the biggest problems religious prohibitionists face is that many religious prohibitions exist only for religious reasons and cause no real harm to anyone in society at large. As an early-eighties teenager who enjoyed both classic and progressive rock, it made no difference to me whether someone who belonged to an evangelical church believed that such music was sinful and therefore chose not to listen to it. Logically it should go the other way - I listen to the music I like, they listen to the music they find acceptable. We're done, right?

Sheeple Are Waking Up

Here's a welcoming development from batshit crazy conspiracy world. Donald Trump's presidency ended Wednesday with the inauguration of Joe Biden as our 46th president. Meanwhile, many followers of the QAnon conspiracy now don't know where to turn.

The whole point of the conspiracy was that events surrounding the former president were not as they seemed, and that they were a ruse to take down alleged satanic pedophile occultists running the government. Arrests of said satanic pedophile occultists were supposed to be imminent - several years ago. It was alleged that once those arrests happened, Trump's true role would be revealed and he would stay in power. Only it wasn't, and he didn't.

Trump's role as president has been so central to the belief system that his leaving could create some genuinely jarring cognitive dissonance for true believers. Travis View, who hosts a podcast about the conspiracy theory called QAnon Anonymous, shared a video of one woman who is struggling to cope with the realization that the whole story behind QAnon is collapsing.

"So, who else is feeling just a little silly?" she asked. "Just a little... went too far down the rabbit hole, and now I'm back out again. And if nothing happens on the 20th, how many of you are going to feel stupid as hell? I can't do it anymore!" She shifted to talking about Q, the pseudonymous writer behind the cryptic posts that have fueled the QAnon conspiracists. Q's predictions have repeatedly proven false.

"And who the fuck is Q? Who is he? Who is this person?" she asked. "Cause none of it has come true! And I was just thinking — what if this person knows that none of this stuff is true? And they're just messing with people? Like, getting inside their heads? I thought something would happen today, in Trump's speech. Nothing!"

I've been pointing out for a long time that none of Q's predictions ever come true. Remember Calm Before The Stupid from 2018? Yeah, "The Storm" was the conspiracy theory that eventually morphed into QAnon. It was named based on a tweet from Trump about "the calm before the storm" - which is a figure of speech that could have meant anything, especially given the vague language found in some of the former president's tweets.

"Q-Shaman" is a Thing?

They say that you eventually become what you hate. So I suppose it was inevitable that followers of the QAnon conspiracy, who hate occultists, would eventually develop their own school of magick. Or not so much a school, really, as an incoherent collection of paranormal beliefs drawn from various fringe figures from popular culture. The dude behind it is apparently Jake Angeli, who was seen storming the Capitol on Wednesday in a ridiculous getup.

One of the most visually striking of the angry thugs was the shirtless “Viking” dressed in war paint with a Viking-style horned headdress and tattoos associated with neo-paganism and white nationalism. The so-called “Q-Shaman” has been a regular fixture at pro-Trump rallies across the country, a longtime “Q-influencer,” and yesterday the man news organizations identified as Jake Angeli, 32, seized the dais in the Senate chamber in the name of Donald Trump. He is also a believer in wild conspiracies that are ripped straight out of Ancient Aliens and other similar cable TV programs.

I want to point out here that my Scandinavian ancestors would have had nothing to do with this douchenozzle. He's certainly no Viking. I doubt anybody from Finland is happy with him appropriating "Shaman" either.

Angeli appears to be the same man who operates a YouTube channel (which I will not link to here) that has posted a series of conspiratorial videos since the November election. The man in the videos has the same look and build and the same set of distinctive tattoos. He also identifies himself by the same name. In the videos, Angeli presents the standard QAnon belief system, including pedophile rings, a “cabal” of evil liberals and globalists, and a quasi-religious infatuation with Donald Trump—many of which were ideas that emerged from the 1980s satanic panic and were packaged as a right-wing mystery religion by Ancient Aliens star David Wilcock and other conspiracy mongers in the months before QAnon adopted them wholesale.

Inept Flat-Earthers Fail Spectacularly

This is not really a paranormal or religious story, but since it has to do with the conspiracy theory that the Earth really is flat and this fact is being covered up by powerful forces, it came across my Augoeides radar. It also is pretty darn funny, which is always a good way to close out the year. Recently a flat-earther couple in Italy decided that it would be a good idea to sail to the edge of the world. Presumably without falling off.

Many flat-earthers believe that the edge of the world is Antarctica and that what every reasonable person calls Antarctic ice sheets are really a giant ice wall keeping everything from falling off the edge. At one point, I covered a proposed flat-earth reality tv show that would send people across Antarctica looking for the non-existent edge - which would be absolutely hilarious to watch.

But these folks apparently believed that the edge was near Sicily, which is kind of like me living in Minnesota and posting that the Earth is flat and the edge is "somewhere over in Wisconsin." What convinced them of this ridiculous idea is completely beyond me.

Despite Italy's lockdown, a couple from Venice recently set out to prove Earth's flatness once and for all by sailing to the edge of the world, which they believed to be somewhere near Sicily. It's amazing how people who live locally never visit famous tourist attractions, like the leaning tower of Piza or the edge of the Earth where the sea meets the infinite void.

"The two left the Veneto during the lockdown for Lampedusa, violating all restrictions," Salvatore Zichichi of the Maritime Health Office of the Ministry of Health told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "In Termini Imerese they sold their car and bought a boat. For them, Lampedusa [an island of the Italian Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean Sea] was the end of the Earth."

The trip, always destined to end in disappointment, hit some snags immediately. Firstly, if you're planning on taking a trip to the very edge of the world, this year, when most of the world has been ordered by law to stay at home, perhaps wasn't the best one to choose.

Using a compass (a navigation system that relies on the principle that the Earth is not a pancake), the couple set off in their boat and attempted to navigate their way through the Pelagie Islands to reach Lampedusa, La Republica reports. You probably won't be surprised to learn that a couple that sold their car in order to reach the end of the world perhaps hadn't thought things through, however, and they soon found themselves lost, tired, and washed up on the island of Ustica instead.

Since the global pandemic is still on, the couple was placed in quarantine by health officials, but in their determination to find the edge they escaped and sailed away once more, possibly figuring the police's authority ends where the rim meets the vacuum of space. They were caught three hours later.

So no, they didn't find the edge. This shouldn't be even a little surprising as an enormous amount of global trade is conducted between nations on the Mediterranean Sea and places that are across oceans well beyond Sicily. How are all those ships supposed to cross the edge? Teleporters? And that doesn't even take into account planes. Pilots would surely at least see the edge, as the airspace over Europe and the Mediterranean is pretty busy.

But I suppose if the ridiculous amount of evidence proving that the world is round won't convince these folks, why shouldn't they think it would be near Sicily? If you're going to buy into a delusion, you might as well go all the way. "Hey, wanna know something? The Earth is flat. I can prove it, because the edge is in my closet. Take a look, it's right there. Don't fall off!"

Against MKUltra Umbrellas

Lately the QAnon conspiracy has been getting more time in mainstream news outlets, so that means it's not weird or fringey enough for "prophet" and Christian talk show host Mark Taylor. Taylor, as I have previously noted, has made exactly one accurate prophecy in his entire life. He predicted that Donald Trump would be elected president in 2016. According to Nick Silver, Trump had a 1 in 3 chance of winning a week before the election, so it was at least a little unlikely that he would win at the time.

Since then, though, Taylor has made all sorts of ridiculous predictions and just doubled-down on them when they didn't come true. That's the opposite of being a prophet. That's being a false prophet. In addition to making nonsensical false prophecies, he also passes along every weird bit of conspiracy crap that he can get his hands on. Recently, he explained the existential threat posed by MKUltra umbrellas. Oh, and also Hillary Clinton and the Queen of England. This one's a real doozy.

Relying on the claims of an outlandish conspiracy theorist named Gina Phillips who has appeared several times on Chris McDonald’s program (where Taylor is a regular guest) to spread outrageous tales of “Satanic ritual abuse” and the like, Taylor uncorked a bizarre explanation for the nation’s current civil unrest.

“All these kids we are seeing in the streets, the MK Ultra, it only takes like an hour,” Taylor said. “They have it down to an art. They have it down to a science. They will fragment your mind into a 100 pieces, and each piece is separated with a disassociated wall of amnesia so they can program each piece. The programming is in you.”

“When you see Hillary [Clinton] or the Queen wearing purple, that’s end of the world programming,” he continued. “If they’re wearing green, it means this. If they put out something verbatim like on Twitter, it activates the code, so maybe assassination codes, so maybe other codes. … All these teachers are doing it in daycare, they’re doing elementary, junior high, high school. Churches are doing it.”

“Now with all these guys in the streets, this is why they can’t be reasoned with,” Taylor added. “You can’t reason with someone that’s been mind controlled. Do you notice the guys in the streets with the umbrellas? Those are their handlers. That activates the programming. What that does, the umbrella reminds them and activates the violence programming, saying that, ‘If you don’t get violent, we will activate the tormenting spirits that we have placed in you to torment you until you do.'”

Evangelicals Denounce QAnon

The QAnon conspiracy cult of Jim and Ron Watkins has finally become prominent enough in the news that Evangelical leaders are starting to denounce it. Not all Evangelical leader, as one commenter defiantly pointed out, but it still is good to see some of them coming around. QAnon has seen its greatest popularity among Evangelical Christians, so this denunciation is a significant and hopeful new development. This article from Christian Post includes statements against the movement from several prominent Evangelical leaders.

The theory has garnered criticism from multiple Christian leaders, including Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler Jr. On an episode of his podcast, “The Briefing,” posted online on Monday, Mohler compared QAnon and conspiracy theories in general to the early church heresy of Gnosticism. “Gnosticism is the belief that only a few, an elite, a privileged few are able to see, have inside information,” explained Mohler.

 

“The ancient Gnostics believed in one way or another that this particular secret knowledge was the key to salvation or illumination, or whatever would be the promise of this particular information. Christianity has nothing to do with the secret truth. It has everything to do with a public Gospel,” the theologian added. “Christians don't have secret beliefs we hide from the world. We're not saved because we have come to some secret knowledge.”

Since this is Augoeides, I do want to point out that "secret information" of the sort Mohler is talking about had little to do with the idea of gnosis. Sure, it means "knowing," but the "knowing" consisted of direct experience, the "baptism of fire" that conferred salvation according to the early Christian gnostics. This isn't "information" that you could read off a tablet or a scroll or in the modern era look up on the Internet. It consisted of spiritual practices that resulted in the gnostic experience. But that's a whole other conversation.

Tyler Huckabee, senior editor at Relevant Magazine, a Christian lifestyle bimonthly, wrote in a piece published earlier this month that QAnon’s claims are “farfetched” and fueled by “confirmation bias.” Huckabee also considered QAnon “a logical extension of the culture war, providing real plot and vocabulary to the ‘us vs. them’ model that became popular with the rise of the Moral Majority.”

Trump's New Covid Expert

Just like my post the other day about Christians protesting dishwasher detergent, the whole religious conservative universe seems determined to degenerate into self-parody. Stella Immanuel is apparently a new "coronavirus expert" supported by Tea Party conservatives and the Trump administration.

Also a relevant point: if these really are the sorts of experts Trump is listening to, the executive branch response to COVID-19 is likely doomed. At the very least it's going to involve somebody stepping up and making a point of ignoring these yahoos. I have to say, this development makes me even happier that Minnesota's governor is a former science teacher who has been handling the pandemic reasonably well.

And look, I know full well that I'm a political lefty and don't like Trump, so I'm biased. But I dare anybody of whatever political persuasion to read this and still stand by Immanuel's claims.

I'm going to quote pretty liberally - no pun intended - from the original article, because, well... it's a whole lot of crazy to unpack. And understand that even with that, I'm going to gloss over some of it.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.

In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proof that the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.

“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.” Immanuel said in her speech that the supposed potency of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment means that protective face masks aren’t necessary, claiming that she and her staff had avoided contracting COVID-19 despite wearing medical masks instead of the more secure N95 masks.

There was early evidence from one Chinese study that hydroxychloroquine appeared to be effective as a COVID-19 treatment when combined with azithromycin, a common antibiotic. But a number of groups tried to replicate the study and failed to do so. Because this is science, that means there's no proof that it works. And it is known to have some serious potential side effects, so it's not like taking it is risk-free.

Analyzing Conspiracy Theories

I talk a lot about narratives that can be dismissed as "conspiracy theories" here on Augoeides. Usually the stories I cover are the sorts of things that are outright unbelievable or impossible. And keep in mind, if I take a look at your conspiracy theory and describe it as unbelievable, that assessment is coming from someone who is serious about casting spells. So there's that.

But here's the thing - while many conspiracy narratives are absolute garbage, it also can be an easy hand-wavy way to discredit anything that sounds weird by calling it a "conspiracy theory." Government agencies like the CIA, for example, have a long history of doing just that when information about dubious plots or projects get out into the public eye.

What we really need is an objective way to analyze a narrative and see if it holds up, no matter how weird it might sound. And according to this article, a team of artificial intelligence researchers are on the case. They compared debunked conspiracy theories with real conspiracy narratives that turned out to be true, and found significant differences between them that their algorithm could identify.

A new study by UCLA professors offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix.

The authors, from the UCLA College and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, illustrated the difference in the storytelling elements of a debunked conspiracy theory and those that emerged when journalists covered an actual event in the news media. Their approach could help shed light on how and why other conspiracy theories, including those around COVID-19, spread—even in the absence of facts.

God Will Punish Mild Inconvenience

That was the claim made by anti-mask Floridians at a public hearing in Palm Beach County. But honestly, I have a hard time imagining a universe in which God cares very much about something that for most people is just a mild inconvenience. To be clear, I don't have a problem with medical exemptions for people who legitimately have problems wearing masks or other face coverings, but that's a very small percentage of people. There's no way everybody without masks in recent pictures from Florida would qualify.

As Palm Beach County, Florida, battles an alarming spike in coronavirus cases, some speakers at a heated public hearing attacked county commissioners as “communist dictators” who follow “the devil’s laws” as they prepared to vote on a mandate for wearing face masks in public.

During public comments before the unanimous vote in favor of the mask requirement on Tuesday, a majority of speakers opposed the move, according to local news station WPTV. Some of these speakers, as The Daily Beast reports, denied that masks were effective against spreading COVID-19 and accused officials of playing God, violating the Constitution and threatening freedom and lives by imposing the measure.

One speaker threatened to perform a citizen’s arrests on the officials for going “against the freedom of choice.” “Every single one of you that’s obeying the devil’s laws are going to be arrested. And you are going to be arrested for crimes against humanity,” the woman declared.

“Every single one of you has a smirk behind that little mask, but every single one of you are going to get punished by God. You cannot escape God ... not even with the mask or 6 feet.”

A serious question - does anybody really believe that the Christian God of the evangelicals supports "freedom of choice?" Sure, there's a lot of theological debate about the nature of free will, but when you get right down to it you follow the rules or else. Modern evangelicals appear to believe the only rules that count are related to abortion and homosexuality, but still. They uphold the overall basic premise. And there's no rule prohibiting Christians from wearing masks anywhere in the Bible.

So it's profoundly weird to see Christians claiming that God is going to punish anyone who mildly inconveniences them. There's also nothing in scripture that says "thou shalt not mildly inconvenience a Christian." That suggests there's nothing religious about this at all. It's about Poor Oppressed Christians demanding rights for themselves, and getting all upset when nobody recognizes their special status. It's silly.

I'm glad to see nobody in government took this nonsense seriously. We can't be replacing measures that have been shown to be effective in reducing the spread of COVID-19 with what amounts to faith healing. It just doesn't work.