The Charlie Kirk Assassination Conspiracy Theory Ecosystem feat. Brandy Zadrozny (E383)

No conspiracy… except people literally paved over the crime scene within 24 hours. Until somebody explains that to me, (And why there was no investigation) I’m going to have my suspicions. Also I don’t think it’s unreasonable to doubt the investigations coming out of Ka$h Patels FBI.

Brandy good!

From a long time patreon: This is the best episode from this show I've heard in ages. Less Julien jokes, less Jake GB refs, the vibes are light and fun but everyone has thoughtful ideas and describes them in a way that shows they've truly pondered them. Great show.

This is truly a great ep. Thanks guys

"Heavy hangs the head that last night wore the crown " or something close to this is something i remember from Cry Baby

Disabling autoplay video on every social media platform has been a great help to my mental health. Can't recommend it highly enough. I still haven't seen the Kirk assassination vid, alhamdulillah.

She absolutely lost me when she called the network of Maddow, Morning Joe, and O’Donnell a “progressive network”. Why the fuck would you all have an MSNow journalist as a guest? Pisses me off really.

Long time fan of Brandy! Wish she was on MSNOW more. I need you folks to help me decide what’s worth my anxiety so I don’t go so blueanon.

one of the best episodes in a long time, and that's saying a lot! everyone was so dialed in, engaging, intelligent, well spoken, and entertaining! love brandy she's fantastic

Mr. Hands got me back in the day

the gore conversation is interesting because i find that other white people are quick to portray that thirty/forty years ago people didn't actively seek out intensity through spectacle violence. white people in the US picnicked at lynchings for entertainment. i seem to remember an NSFW/NSFL game played on several reddit pages in the 2010s. white people depend on ignoring reality to support white supremacy and need to express that violent/warped perspective. it's been that way for a long time; why do other white people deny this? i cannot help but think we do this to shirk responsibility. lying that this sensation and desire MUST be new allows us to seek comfort in ignorance. No, No! this is part of our culture! this isn't the America i know and love!!

I used to listen to this silly little podcast talking about right wing fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories. Now you guys are just reporting the news and the podcast hasn’t changed at all. Great work as always. Unfortunately.

great ’sode. thanks for this one

Excellent episode.

The pig quote is something a tall rancher guy would say on one of those cowboy biker crime shows

I am comfortable knowing that QAA are fallible human journalists and I have the responsibility to make my own judgements based on multiple sources…. all thanks to that time they dismissed Hatsune Miku as “AI music”

Would love to hear you guys discussing the harm that these gore websites and desensitisation has caused. Something that’s affected many people but it’s not spoken about a lot because of its taboo subject matter but it’s a huge problem. Thanks for a good episode!

I managed not to see the CK murder, and I don’t watch the ICE murders that have been filmed, or dead children in Gaza, or animal cruelty. Over 50 years ago, in high school, we had to watch newsreel-type videos of the Nazi death camps. I got tunnel vision and could not speak for a couple hours. I just slipped away home, avoided people, didn’t tell anyone what I experienced that day. I did not - and part of me still does not - understand how the world went on, how people went to their next class, or how we kept breathing. I do not need to see footage, or recreations, of horrors to be horrified. I have missed some great history movies and books that recreate war, rape, murder. I find most horror movies boring rather than scary, but films about the real violence that people do I avoid diligently.

Grateful for Julian's concise explanation at 12.47 of how media being tied to capital leads to conspiratorialism bc people can tell all the crises aren't being fully & accurately explained to them. Reminds me of when you try to hide bad shit happening at home from your kids but they pick up on the atmosphere then put random bits of what they do know together, concocting a much wilder and more horrible story about what’s happening in their heads.

I've decided that I want to play too so now I just make up insane reasons for things happening no matter how ridiculous. A homeless guy approached me on the road last month so I outcrazied him. He didn't try to talk to me this time he saw me. I was a little disappointed. I wanted to play some more!

Legitimately one of the best episodes in a while. Julian, Travis and Brandy had a really great conversation. Rarely do you hear podcast host challenge their guests and I really thought they did a great job of doing that while keeping the conversation with someone who they clearly like friendly. I’m as tickled as a pig.

“…to rest in the ambiguity.” This has been my default position on most things, for years. When someone asks what I think about (item), I often say that I don’t have an opinion about it. Why not?!, they cry. Because I don’t know enough. That I am passionate about a thing - and I am! - is insufficient. “I don’t know” is NOT “I don’t care.” Carl Sagan wrote that he had a great tolerance for ambiguity. That’s me. To say, “I don’t know,” gets easier with practice.

One of the lamer episodes I’ve heard

i could have listened to this for hours

Really glad Julien pointed out the fact that there IS a vast tentacled conspiracy; but it’s not thrilling shadowy cabals, it’s just US imperialism. All manner of unfathomable horrors have been and ARE being committed by our country and the people who run it. But those horrors aren’t a sacrifice to moloch; it’s just capitalism doing what it does, and that requires brutally crushing every leftist movement that it can, with as much violence and madness as needed. If you don’t know that, if you don’t understand the actual history of this country, of COURSE you’d fall into conspiracy theories. There IS a vast malevolent conspiracy, but it’s terrifying for its banality not for dark magic or rituals to evil gods. The latter is way easier to stomach.

What a brilliant guest Brandy was! Really, *really* enjoyed this episode.

I saw someone say the other day that there’s a war on what is real…I feel that so hard, I feel like everyone around me is just out of their minds. The work you all do is so important and means so much to so many people. This podcast is like a safe haven of sanity, as silly as that may sound.

"Down the mountain till she comes" 🤣🤣🫠🫠🙃🙃

I mainly just push charlie kirk conspiracy theories to fuck with right wingers. It's fun to watch how they process all the contradictory information.

i don’t think there’s enough talk about how the epstein files have turned into lib pizzagate. obviously there are a ton of actual serious crimes in there but a lot of occupy democrat-type creators have lost the plot

It was an honour and a pleasure to listen in on this conversation. I love listening to smart people dig into something prescient and important. I’m of the soft brained variety, very susceptible, not prone to critical thought. It took a long time to make sense of the brain wash but I got there, your podcast (I found you through Conspirituality pod, I’ve long moved on from them but am still here) was instrumental in helping me understand how one can get captured by the market place of realities®️, how to face that earnestly, and then, how to climb out. Episodes like this one, are perfect for my journey of being a person who knows how to think, hash out ideas with peers, agree and uplift, disagree and also provide a respectful ‘here’s why’ Truly, such a lovely vibe in this ep. And thank you for Brandy! I’m now following on bsky. Learning from smart funny women is my fave. okbye

“what do you mean you don’t wonder?!”

Had to pause when Brandy was casually talking about some right wing freak posting a bunch of content from his shed where he plays with homemade explosives and dead pigs as a stand-in for human bodies. I feel like it’s just legal to do anything as long as you’re a chud about it? “Oh no officer this bucket of loose unregistered heavily modified firearms is only for attacking left wing queermo-sectionals 🫡 “

It's hard for anyone to trust the news anymore when they're like 'Is breakfast really necessary?' 'Groceries: luxury good of millennials' and 'why not owning a house is good for you'

I’m as tickled as a pig!

Let's goooooooo

Doomscroll is how I found this podcast and superstructure. That part you mention Julian where the host was flabbergasted is what drove me to seek both shows out. Also it’s very refreshing to see somebody with an outside perspective nationally speaking, be so absolutely disgusted with this country like I am.

Julian was stellar in this one

Yes, Charlie’s neck stopped a 30-06 round

No conspiracy. His neck just did that

I also love that Julian interrogates the question and I find that I have a similar approach; this is I think one of the strengths of your podcast. No marketing. <3 That you don’t try to manipulate and you do that because you genuinely believe it’s not your place to steer a viewer on a hypothetical path. You are some of my longest running and clearest eyed sources for the past several years. I would be really really interested in hearing y’all’s stance on like, the need to protect sources with anonymity vs transparency in sourcing, and how you guys square that circle? Because I think that would be really useful; you guys talk to folks who do have real safety concerns but also transparency is so integral to what you do, that I think your take would be genuinely helpful to hear. (And, separately, as a trans person online, I’m really interested in how some of your sources keep yourselves approach safety, but that’s a different thing rip. What times we live in.)

‘There is an octopus controlling the world and its us… we don’t wanna face that’. This. As a foreigner with an American partner and American family (now), this is what I see more generally in your society. I’m a historian by trade and it is staggering just how prevalent the romanticism is around US history in the US. We have some very good friends who are liberals and even some of their assumptions, they just don’t know. And it’s not even exceptionally American, I grew up in Scotland, well in the shadow of the former British Empire - the media and establishment still largely skirt or ignore Britain’s imperial past because it is inconvenient to an Anglo-centric sense of Britishness. But conservative exceptionalism sort of almost infects the political water table around history. I see the same, albeit it less so, tendency in young Scots and Irish. The ‘it wisnae us’ or ‘we were always colonised’. Scotland was both at the forefront of popular abolition and benefitted immensely economically and engaged wholeheartedly in the British Empire. Ireland was militarily occupied and oppressed but it also had the highest recruitment rates for soldiers of the East India Company and entrepreneurs engaged in European powers slave trades into the 1810s. It’s hard to acknowledge the negative parts of your country’s past but I always felt it was necessary to do so to build a better country, an equitable future based on historical transparency. Some young men seem deeply challenged by an rebuke to a chauvinistic extraordinary sense of patriotism, my country is the best and always was - historians are wrong. It’s a strand of anti-intellectualism occurring more broadly. History rarely conforms to our sensibilities and it is just as complex, messy and nuanced as our present - in different ways. By and large, I’m hopeful, the students I taught (from glittering private school highways of prestigious gilded universities to further education colleges and unis with more working class kids) most young people were invigorated to engage with the complexities of the past, particularly around imperialism and race. In my country now, young angry men are being mobilised in a manner modelled on US alt-right movements. It’s that same sinking feeling of where previously this was a weird thing I knew a lot about (know thy enemy) to ‘oh now I’m explaining all this to my Da’ because its on our front door step and marching down the street, battering the neighbours. It’s terrifying to see, like a slow motion train wreck. Coincidentally, a great history of US imperialism is the book ‘How to Hide an Empire’ by Daniel Immerwahr.

And of course it doesn't really help liberals and leftists feel LESS conspiratorial of Charlie Kirk's death possibly being a Reichstag Fire-type false flag that many right-wing influencers were ACTIVELY PUSHING to MAKE IT THEIR REICHSTAG FIRE. And are now lamenting the fact it didn't come to pass. I don't believe they killed Charlie Kirk but they were more than ready to do the second part.

I love hearing Travis backing up Julian’s point 😭

Wrestling pigs … you just get dirty and the pig likes it! I don’t know where Jake got tickling from.

Best episode in soooooo long!! I’d love if every ep was this. I don’t want it to end!

Another journofriend self succ episode

AWESOME episode... (Note to Jake: Will share via tidbits via #ThisNeedsAHashtagNews when I can...)

Charlie Kirk's tent is not so different to Jesus' cross

Damn this was a high level conversation

Well you've finally done it to me. It was the autocue that's broken the camel's back in my brain. We're in a new age. We're tickling the pigs in the gutter, we're breaking the backs of hypothetical camels, we're boiling the frogs slowly until they jump out of the pot to safety. Nothing means anything anymore. Language as a human technology for communication has failed and we need to start over. I'm throwing all my electronics in the ocean and I'm going to go live in the woods with the superior intellects on this planet (deer, foxes, squirrels, etc.)

The Free Marketplace of Realities. Travis should be more proud of coining that phrase, it's only grown more real as time bumbles headfirst towards our self-induced Lovecraftian madness as we fail to comprehend the full extent of our own writhing slow-motion self-induced 6th mass extinction horror - all forces pushing everywhere except unity of the working and under-classes, in fact specifically pushed away from unity by any means. Thus, bubbling chaos and confusion beneath the glossy surface of our own personal brands(TM) and side hustles just to claw back a few days more of survival. As we fall helplessly into the void, we can at least choose what realities we see. And buy. Would you like to buy the reality I'm selling?

Always great Jus gotta say tho I miss time traveling General Flynn

Feels true man 🤦

It's facinating how Candace totally de railed the usual lock step the right usually has around a narrative. I think we are seeing the fracturing of maga into various sub factions

Hell yeah