710 - I Believe Mole Children Are Our Future feat. Will Sommer (2/27/23)
We’re joined by friend of the show Will Sommer to discuss his new book “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America”. We discuss the full shape of the conspiracy/movement now 5 years into its run, its effect on those who follow it, and where it might go from here. As well as all the bizarre cultural references, micro-celebrities & criminals that fill out the movement.
Pick up Will’s book here: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/trust-the-plan-will-sommer?variant=40493482541090
And listen to Will’s podcast Fever Dreams here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fever-dreams/id1558716930
Comments (89)
Coming back to this ep because the guy in the thumbnail was in the background of the trump shooting. Surreal moment when I realized
Excuse you, his name is JFK Jr.
I have a distant cousin who is one of those failed actresses who ended up a right wing grifter and Qanon freak. She was also in an emo band, Blood on the Dancefloor, where the lead guy ended up being a real pedo, so she went on Chris Hansen’s YouTube series about predators. She is now Steve Bannon’s photographer or something lmao. I check her Facebook every once in a while to see what weird shit she’s saying. She’s my Qanon tamagotchi.
In high school as a joke we bought my brother a BOTDF t-shirt from Hot Topic for his birthday. It was hilarious when he actually wore it to school the next day, but when he kept wearing it in public like every other day we were begging him to stop. We did not know at the time that bro was a pedophile lmao
Always love the Will Sommer eps
that Utah DA shit he breezes over at the end is actually insane. TrueAnon did a great series on it. Bunch of insane characters, half of them named David. Mormon guys impersonating indigenous people to administer peyote . A rapist swindler on the run pretending to be a Scottish academic. Great stuff
Guest’s laugh is delightful, might read the book largely based on that. It’s so genuine and seems to sound alternately like either Matt or Host William.
Yeah, he is a good riffer but a superb laugher.
I’m off Twitter for Lent (which is silly custom rather than actual Catholic doctrine afaik) so I have to come here to get mad at people whose brains are still broken from moron posters 2017-2021 telling them if they “normalize” anything a “lib” says or does they’re inflicting harm and trauma, and that “shunning libs online” is an effective theory of change.
This show is much better without Felix. Two smart, funny guys with a knowledgeable guest. All you need. No disrespect, but maybe do the drugs AFTER the show. And learn when to shut up and let Matt say something intelligent. Felix gives off vibes of an upper middle class kid slacker who suddenly got rich and plays video games all day, watches extreme crap tv far too much , hangs shit on people for not being in the cool gang and thinks he’s gods gift to women. It’s embarrassing. Could be such a good show.
Go outside david.
Now that it’s out for rent on The Bezos Channel — Infinity Pool is mega-movie-mindset.
Will said he didn't like it on the Adam Friedland show unfortunately.
I really want to meet the Qanon follower who loves Tyler Perry.
unrelated but I am losing my fucking mind over the fact that the Havana Syndrome was just crickets the whole fucking time
Buddy Holly cricket deal all over again lol
At first I thought this was Will Sennett. “Bobby Oppenheimer, is that you?”
Look at my strategist bro, I'm not getting elected!
Felix has been sent to a Terry Lux dryout clinic for gamers
Felix has been compromised to a permanent end for excessive Counterstriking on pod, and will be replaced by a Bing AI that will successfully execute his comedic format. We can only hope that the Felix they canoe’d was a clone he sent out as bait.
Great episode
Perhaps we're attaching qualities to QAnon that aren't really there. There were always dumbass conspiracy theorists, before QAnon they were posting YouTube videos about how celebrities at the golden globes were flashing satanic symbols. "What you got here ain't nothing new, this countries always been hard on folks."
Episode 710; 'There by the grace of God' or 'Bitch dad, Boar dad'
Using a prosthetic penis to cheat drug tests, also known as the 'Tom Sizemore Special"
Too soon (after he molested a child)
Chapotraphouse.
Trapochaphouse
If LSD was a psyop, Q-Anon is 💯 a psyop. 😒
Or at least infiltrated with feds ( i.e. the Proud Boys).
Will Sommer is not cool, he’s not hip, he’s not interesting, he’s literally our enemy
he's been generating the bulk of the original ground reporting on QAnon since almost the beginning of the movement, I don't really understand how you can become so cynical to think that because he doesn't share the exact specific shade of ideology that you think you have, he brings no value. There was another water brain up in the comment section who managed to convince himself that Matt was the real working class connection and Sommer is a snotty condescending liberal when Matt was literally reading Sommer's reporting back to him. Do you think you can just figure out everything worth knowing about anything by reading Das Kapital while sitting on a sofa?
Refreshing lack of clickclacking
its cause there's no Felix
BE SURE TO BUY YOUR COPY OF THE JANUARY ISSUE OF THE CAPITOL HILL CITIZEN. And buy your neighbors one or 5
Worth checking on YouTube is Folding Ideas' flat earth video and how that de/evolved into Qanon
It is wild to me that Qanon is not only still around in 2023, but that they could still be growing.
Missed opportunity for a needledrop of Stan Rogers' "White Squall".
‘Where we go one we go all’ is from a movie about SAILBOATS you say??? Hmmm, what an interesting SHAPE!!! ⛵️⛵️⛵️
I loved this episode but really want to hear you guys talk about Scott Adams getting canceled.
Did he get canceled because of the Dilbert story arc where Dilbert goes to HR and finds out Catbert is sucking the adrenochrome out of children and turning them into the Accounting trolls?
I totally wanna see the Q crowd going after Ron DeSantis. (None of them will care about Nikki Haley. And Tim Scott is running for VP.) This will be like the 2016 primaries, only funnier.
When you squint, he does look kinda like JFK a little bit
Maybe it's just cus I can't see the back of his head
Lib: I wrote a book about these stupid rubes. Matt: Allow me to reframe your contempt in materialist terms that offers the possibility of recognizing and restoring dignity in the human condition. Lib: You have a point there, now back to laughing at the morons.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Sommer’s impression of Q people, though he is wrong about other things.
Everybody please watch Connor O’malley’s YouTube video called DemAnon, it’s hilarious satire and totally relates to this pod!!
In "When Prophecy Fails," a book which I actually read long ago before it was cool, the failure of prophecy does result in a loss of most believers, but certain factors predict which believers will not fall off & how (&why) they will reformulate their beliefs into something capable of enduring. It's the second draft that may or may not survive & re-recruit, & if it does may surpass the original a generation later. If this is the model, we're watching for what the Qanon remanant comes up with next in order to find out what kind of neighbors we're lumbered with long term.
yeah and I haven't read the book just heard it discussed a lot but iirc the Prophecy Failure results in a smaller and harder core usually, not in a syncretic reformulation of the belief that opens it to a larger casual base? Anyways as I was saying didn't read, but always interesting to bring up
Who is the picture of?
jfk jr
"White Squall" feels appropriate for Q, not just because they're obsessed with protecting white people but also because white squalls are so quick nobody's really got any meteorological data on them, just hypotheses.
"im not pizza" has to be the funniest protest slogan ever
Timothy Treadwill would have been so Q-pilled.
I was doing squats when Matt laughed at Patriot Street Fighter towing his motorcycle and I nearly died
Respect to Will S. for doing the lords work and seemingly remaining sane. The hours he logged with these people - yikes.
Not gonna lie, I bet a good chunk of them are really fun to hang out with
I remember the first real person I knew that fell for the Q stuff. She was an otherwise seemingly smart person that suddenly started posting about Safeway and adrenochrome and I seriously thought she was parodying fear and loathing because I hadn't heard of Q yet. She also was apolitical before that. No idea what happened to her.
yeah i fucked her
We are putting (American) children back into the workforce.
I’m a gay streamer?
Great ep. anyone know the song at the end?
Also trying to find this out, it sounded good as hell
oh, thoughts from the future being sent into the past? I think John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness would lay a claim to that!
Will Sommer top 5 all time chapo guest. Buy his book kids, its very good
Downloading this episode for work tomorrow, but let me say right now FUCK YEAK WILL SOMMER EPISODE! Wooooooooo!!!!!
The adrenochrome thing goes back way further than Hunter Thompson – it's present in both the movie (1971) and novel (1962, I think) versions of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and it all stems from midcentury psychiatric studies, when every quack doctor on Earth was competing to "explain" and "cure" schizophrenia. There were 20-odd years of research into adrenochrome, which is just a natural metabolite of adrenaline, as the root cause of schizophrenia; all of that came to nothing, but if you don't have any historical context for it, you can very easily find bullshit research papers from 1966 about "Adrenochrome Surplus and the Schizophrenic Brain," etc. And, to be fair, any psychiatric subject receiving that much research money in the 30 years after World War II would very, very likely have bumped up against MKUltra more than once; any credentialed Ivy League monster who was dosing grad students with LSD on behalf of the CIA would absolutely have whipped some adrenochrome their way, given the funding available and the chance to be the world's new most famous psychiatrist.
yeah this guest cant do basic research on his definitive claims
Excuse me, it’s the *Klumps*. Put some respect on the profs name
Is Matt recording from four dollar gas station earbuds or what
Wait do you think earbuds record sound?
I’m at the Drunken Clam
I'm at the combination pizza hut and oyster bar
Amazing episode but I was distracted by the sound of Matt playing hoop & stick.
I’m banned from twitter from stopping all the guys who are vocal about their foot fetish from being rapists because I’m a feminist but also a republican 🤓
DeSantis out there cruising high school parties when he was a teacher. That is completely on brand for that shifty fucking midget.
The m-word is a bit of a slur. I am usually not that guy, but you never hear obnoxious woke takes from little people so I feel that someone needs to say this. This has been a public service announcement regarding slurs and dwarfism.
Very funny that they kept talking about White Squall for like 4 minutes before finally naming it lol
I’m literally 100 years old
Good evening! Arsenal is going to win the league. COYG!!
gooner
Guest: "Jeffery Epsteins death was suspicious" ... "no cabal of politicians is sexually trafficking children" bruh I get it that this is your career but I listened to every TruAnon. Go to hell.
👁
Will Sommer is always a great guest
Oh sweet
One podcast per man, and one woman per podcast, as god has ordained
Amber calls Virgil the C slur in this one
Funniest Chapo Patreon commenter
Second
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