4chan Sleuths, Michael Ruppert's Death, and Chomsky on Internet Conspiracies

• 16:27The elite supposedly need to manufacture events to outsmart people, but it's actually 4chan users and Reddit detectives who are the real American heroes.
• 17:00Tim considers retiring from conspiracy discussion because the landscape has become so absurd he and his co-host joked about pivoting to covering Ariana Grande instead.
• 17:11The show itself has become controlled opposition — they're now trapped in the same conspiracy ecosystem they're trying to analyze.
• 18:04Michael Ruppert, who did the actual investigative work on conspiracies, was destroyed by it — he ended up wailing in the desert, eventually shooting himself in the head.
• 19:01Steven Greer's Netflix alien documentary Unacknowledged exists in the same category of conspiracy content as everything else being discussed.
• 19:22Ruppert was an ex-cop who exposed the CIA's involvement in the drug trade and wrote Across the Rubicon about 9/11.
• 19:45Chomsky has spent 50 years talking about conspiracy and power structures, making him genuinely deep on the subject.
• 20:07Chomsky argues that while Russian conspiracies might have something to them, the internet and Reddit phenomenon has made conspiracy theories into loose, sexy soundbites and tweets.
• 20:30Online conspiracies need a clickable angle — Taylor Swift being a monarch cult, for example — because people need something sensational to engage with the material.
• 20:48Tim has been reading this material for a long time and considers himself genuinely deep on conspiracy theory, unlike the casual internet consumers.

Michael RupertFranklin scandalNoam ChomskyAcross the RubiconSteven GreerTaylor SwiftAriana GrandeRuss Baker