Hey guys, this one's a doozy! I thought this story was worthy of being told. I already feel better having written it all out.
But if long-winded diatribes aren't your cup of tea, I won't be offended if you skip this one. ngl though, it's got some juicy bits. I'd love to know how all of this jives with the experiences and observations of many of you out there.
Reddit wasn’t always a vapid repository for propaganda amplification. Once a pioneer of counter-culture and niche interests, reddit has long since devolved into the same cliche caricature of an echo chamber currently engulfing the “mainstream” web under the ruthless dominance of Big Tech. But it wasn’t always like that.
The very first threads on reddit were 9/11 conspiracy theories and challenged the status quo. And yet, 15 years later, the front page of reddit consists of vacuous corporatist and statist propaganda, with the vast majority of unique subreddits having long since been compromised or banned by the “narrative managers” tasked with homogenizing these once vibrant and diverse forums.
I joined reddit in its early days. I enjoyed the anonymity and the ability to create novelty accounts for memes and other silly interests. In 2007, the pro-libertarian bent on reddit introduced me to Ron Paul, and the enthusiasm to “Audit the Fed!” and hold the financial institutions accountable resonated strongly. I grew up marveling at the mindless stupidity of US disasters in Vietnam and elsewhere. I thought similar mistakes wouldn’t be made again. But then I lost friends in Iraq & Afghanistan, and the red-pilling that began on 9/11 proceeded in earnest.
I was the “perfect” age for 9/11. I was old enough to think for myself but not too old that indoctrination prevented the red flags from going off in my skeptical and developing mind. I saw the Bush/Cheney neocons as the heart of the corruption of that era, but soon became wary of the progressive “saviors” in Obama/Biden. This concern played out on reddit in a very dramatic and informative way.
The support I saw for Ron Paul was inspiring and genuine. The “movement” for Obama appeared hollow and manufactured. This was the first time I noticed that much of the activity on reddit, especially politically, was starting to become inorganic. I soon suspected that Obama was being propped up to win, and reddit was being used in the massive effort to re-enforce the two party false dichotomy. This requires constant political ping-ponging of the balance of power to maintain the optics that the public still picks the POTUS.
After the orchestrated financial debacle of 2008, I began focusing my attention on sharing more “conspiratorial” content on reddit. By 2010 I discovered a small subreddit devoted to speculation about conspiracy theories (reddit.com/r/conspiracy). I decided to make an account (u/axolotl_peyotl) devoted exclusively to this type of content.
I began sharing as much fringe and speculative material as I could muster. At one point, I was the third most prolific contributor in the history of r/conspiracy. I even had threads calling out the “banksters” hit the front page of reddit. Amusingly enough, this usually was via the politics subreddit (r/politics), which today is notorious for exclusively broadcasting state-sponsored propaganda.
I didn’t even believe a lot of the conspiracies I was sharing. That’s what made the early iterations of sites like reddit so popular in the first place. We were free to speculate about whatever we wanted without fear of getting mocked or doxxed. I was thoroughly enjoying the stimulating topics and interaction on r/conspiracy. I looked forward to the “debunking” as much as the “high octane” speculation. But the more I posted, the more I began to notice unmistakable patterns in the comment sections of certain threads.
Most wacky conspiracy theories would produce a completely innocuous and frequently constructive response on the forum. For example, you could speculate about aliens and ancient civilizations without being given too much grief. You could also call out events like the JFK assassination and CIA coups without much resistance. In other words, subjects that were both “far out there” and clearly valid and therefore impossible to “debunk” were generally left alone.
Other conspiracies, however, seemed to poke a proverbial digital hornet’s nest. It happened so consistently with these “trigger” topics that it was difficult to miss. This handful of seemingly unrelated issues would consistently bring out reddit accounts that were not frequent r/conspiracy contributors. They also seemed to be almost entirely devoted to spreading FUD and engaging in a wide array of forum sliding tactics and logical fallacies.
While there were undoubtedly others, the following issues would often elicit the most dramatic and artificial reactions: 9/11, Israel, Russia, GMOs/Monsanto, and vaccines. Later, staged shootings like Sandy Hook were added to the fray, while botched cover-ups like the Las Vegas Shooting were generally ignored completely. When the staged event goes awry, they often opt to memory-hole it instead.
Over time, the energy spent obfuscating these various topics was diverted almost entirely to the subject of defending scientism, Big Pharma, and the vaccine paradigm. Certain keywords in titles would bring out a combination of shills (digital provocateurs) and bots (fake accounts with automated replies) to derail the thread and often attack the OP (original poster). For example, the pro-Monsanto/GMO shill squad on reddit used to be as dedicated as it was pervasive, with some accounts boasting a history of thousands of comments defending these mega corporations.
Before the social justice warrior PC police fully infested social media, reddit was more than happy to allow subs devoted to racism, sexism, and even the use of slurs in the titles of the forums themselves. Eventually, the corporate overlords and the MSM would force reddit to “clean” up its act, but its “unsavory” past is a matter of record.
The subreddit “r/conspiratard” was one such hotbed for the corporatist hacks tasked with correcting the record on reddit. It was largely comprised of useful unpaid idiots as well as actual sponsored actors for these predatory conglomerates and state agencies.
With the blatantly suspicious “suicide” of reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz in early 2013, and long-standing rumors of connections between reddit’s owners and unsavory government agencies, the site was targeted for transformation into a massive narrative-management machine to be integrated into Big Tech’s burgeoning monopoly.
r/conspiratard was one of many subs that existed primarily to orchestrate the manipulation of the votes and comments of threads on r/conspiracy and elsewhere on reddit. This practice is known as “brigading” and almost always is in direct violation of reddit’s user agreement. These brigades would often initiate ruthless targeted harassment towards many accounts that shared information that was deemed “inconvenient.” r/conspiratard was also ground zero for the most prolific Monsanto shills on reddit, as well as the most fervently pro-Israel.
A frequent meme employed on r/conspiratard was a mocking reference to “pancakes” which symbolized the death of Rachel Corrie, an Israeli activist for Palestinian rights who was brutally murdered. The “pancakes” meme often littered the front page of r/conspiratard, a fairly blunt indication of the degree of perversion festering within their ranks.
Whenever a topic on r/conspiracy arose that these shills were tasked with “debunking,” they would quickly swarm the relevant threads, often engaging in substantial and extremely aggressive abuse against specific users. While explicitly in violation of the user agreement, this type of coordinated harassment has historically been condoned and even encouraged by the reddit admins. There are countless cases of the admins outright ignoring extreme threats and other offenses if they originate from these “approved” digital henchmen.
Although they were aggressive, they were sloppy. If you were paying attention, you could find out which narratives were being systematically curated. For example, initially the complaints about Israel were simply not on my radar. It seemed to me that the tired “teh jews did it!” trope was almost always a a myopic misdirection.
But then I shared a thread about the USS Liberty incident, an event that was completely unknown to me at the time. The degree of vitriol and harassment hurled my way for simply posting about the 1967 tragedy that saw three dozen Americans murdered by Israel was beyond excessive and extremely thought-provoking. Not only that, the same accounts that would crucify you for questioning Monsanto seemed to be tasked with making sure no one discussed the USS Liberty and similar staged events. And those same accounts would flood your thread with “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” if you tried to have an honest discussion about 9/11.
Eventually, they gave up on Monsanto when it was blisteringly obvious the “science” they were tasked to defend was actually genocidal. They also largely moved on from protecting Israel when it was no longer as politically expedient. And 9/11 was being memory-holed faster every day, so less effort was spent there. After all, an entire generation had emerged in its wake, and most have no idea just how bad that particular deception truly was.
Where did the shill energy go on reddit? It went almost entirely to prop up the next phase of social engineering. This was primarily centered around unquestioning devotion to Big Pharma and the vaccine industry.
By 2012 it was clear that the neocons were old news, and that neoliberalism was the new weapon du jour for the oligarchical sociopaths. I watched, stunned, as the so-called “leftists” that once denounced the illegal and immoral Iraq and Afghanistan wars did a clown-world-worthy about-face and ignored or even cheered on further US coups and coup attempts in Libya, Syria and elsewhere abroad.
While the Ron Paul movement was still present in 2012, I realized Obama would be chosen again. The sheer amount of pro-Obama propaganda littering the front page of reddit made it even more obvious. The effort to sway public opinion was relentless. It had begun to consume the digital landscape.
By the “re-election” of Obama, I was largely disinterested in politics. Instead, I was fully submerged in the most “fringe” conspiracies I could find. I preferred reading about high ancient civilizations and exotic technology like anti-gravity. I didn’t necessarily believe in all of this speculation but I sure loved talking about it. After all, the discussions they generated could be as informative as the linked information itself.
In December 2012, I composed a thread on r/conspiracy discussing the “occult” numerology used on 9/11 and how it could be used to predict the next major staged or “false flag” event. I had just read a book that focused on manipulated school shootings as false flags, with the author arguing that Christmastime of 2012 was a strong possibility for the next major staged event in the US.
Using what I was learning about numerology, I considered that the number “11” might be relevant to a potential 9/11 “ritual” and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect another false flag 11 years after 9/11, in 2012. I realize this might sound utterly fantastical to the vast majority of the population, but that’s just the kind of stuff we loved to speculate about on r/conspiracy.
Following the Christmas angle, I specifically chose December 14 as the day to write my warning. Within hours, the news of Sandy Hook broke, prompting me to proclaim, “I find it extremely unnerving that a sacrificial attack was carried out today in Connecticut, 11 days before this hypothetical Black Christmas.”
Just a coincidence? Probably. But one thing is clear: Sandy Hook was not orchestrated to “get our guns.” Sandy Hook was extreme state-sponsored terrorism and emotional manipulation, and a weaponized assault on the conspiracy theory and alternative research community. The saga of Alex Jones with respect to Sandy Hook speaks volumes. For many years all conspiracy theorists were equated with “Sandy Hook deniers” and the shill army on reddit responded accordingly.
Sandy Hook wasn’t my only “prediction.” I learned from r/occult that mid-April to May was an ancient pagan season of sacrifice by fire and that many false flags and other staged tragedies occur during this time. I used my developing pattern-recognition tactics on reddit to determine that a major event was being planned in April, 2013. As a result, I warned that a “fiery” false flag may be imminent. Two days later, the Boston Bombing occurred.
Years later, when I realized this season begins in earnest on April 15, I gave this warning on April 14, predicting an occult sacrifice by fire. The following day saw the near destruction of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the single most occult symbolism-ridden buildings ever constructed.
Early on, I noticed my account started to attract considerably more attention. Although I got a great deal of positive encouragement from r/conspiracy, I also began routinely receiving threats in my private messages, and the brigades against my account picked up in earnest. They started ranting and raving that we were even daring to mention topics like “numerology” and the occult...and on a conspiracy forum of all places!
Why not just let us be? Why not just let us talk about silly things like numbers on a fringe forum? Why did our wide-eyed speculation even matter to them? Ironically, if they’d just left us alone I might never have discovered their “sore” subjects, so to speak.
By 2013 I had established a well-earned reputation as one of the most prolific contributors of original content on r/conspiracy. I was optimistic, ambitious, and felt like the community I’d found was a true light in the otherwise dimming mainstream reddit rigamarole. As r/conspiracy steadily grew, so did the need for more mods.
I should briefly mention that the r/conspiracy mod team has understandably attracted a wide variety of colorful characters over the years. Many have come and gone as curious oddities, while others have been significant movers and shakers over the course of the forum’s history. Their story is for another time, and shouldn’t come from me. I can only share my own experience.
When it came time for nominations, I was delighted to receive enthusiastic and broad support as a strong favorite, and I was soon added to the team. Despite the reputation I would eventually develop, I feel like I was always viewed as a positive and constructive force on the sub, and I continued spending hours devoted to original content for r/conspiracy even after attaining moderator status.
I pledged not to let my new position interfere with my love of posting “high octane” speculation on the forum. Unfortunately, this was overly optimistic. The moment I became a mod, everything I said was used by the narrative managers as an “official” statement of r/conspiracy, despite the forum demonstrably consisting of a fantastically diverse range of opinions and ideas.
In one dramatic example, I created a “mega-thread” for r/conspiracy to discuss the bizarre MH370 disappearance in 2014. In addition to citing MSM sources (who, if you recall, had their own bizarre conspiracy theories about the incident), I also included, as an afterthought, some of the numerological patterns concerning the event, particularly the number 37.
I attributed no significance to these observations. Rather, I was including them in the megathread because it was yet another conspiratorial angle to the MH370 disappearance, and therefore was qualified to be included in the discussion. To my legitimate surprise, my words were first quoted by Time.com and CNN, and then broadcast on an episode of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. I was mocked as a crazy “reddit conspiracy theorist” who apparently believed the numbers were “cosmically” chosen. Oh, really now? I don’t recall them ever asking.
I couldn’t help but feel bemused that Stephen Colbert had joked about me on national television for engaging in harmless speculation on a silly internet forum. Little did I know the event would foreshadow being called out in Congress in a much graver setting.
At this point, r/conspiracy was becoming large enough to warrant inviting guests for the well-known “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) Q&A sessions that are popular on mainstream reddit. I thought it would be fantastic to host AMAs specifically geared towards those with a conspiratorial bent. The opportunity would soon present itself after I shared some research I was conducting on the American inventor Thomas Townsend Brown, who had discovered and documented an unusual anti-gravitic force using electricity and magnets starting in the 1920’s.
The mystery of Brown’s work for the US Government and his travels around the world culminated in the 1950’s when the then publicly-touted anti-gravity experiments being run by multiple corporations and government agencies went irrevocably black, and to this day have yet to emerge.
A biographer of T. T. Brown, known for his previous work on the equally enigmatic inventor of television, Philo Farnsworth, had abandoned his manuscript and years of work in a dramatic and sudden way. Linda Brown, the only surviving daughter of T. T., believes her father’s biographer was “coerced” into giving up the project after so much time and energy had been invested.
Incredibly, Linda found the research I shared with r/conspiracy about her father. She reached out and we soon developed a budding friendship. It occurred to me that Linda would be the perfect candidate for an AMA, and she agreed. She also asked if I was interested in completing her father’s biography. Flattered, I respectfully declined, as my hands were full with reddit and life. Perhaps I’ll revisit T. T. Brown someday! Here’s Linda’s AMA.
After the success of our first official AMA, I realized the potential for r/conspiracy to give a voice to the marginalized. While the rest of reddit was degenerating into rehashed memes and propaganda, we fiercely maintained our independence and dedication to preserving our space as an open forum. Because our community remained committed to this cause, we were targeted by the rest of reddit, which refused to grant us our independence and insisted we join their obnoxiously redundant conformity.
It began to dawn on me that r/conspiracy’s greatest defense is semantic. It’s well known that there exists a decades-long effort to linguistically discredit uncomfortable truths and deviations from sanctioned narratives as being “conspiracy theories.” This effort is often traced back to the JFK assassination, and this indoctrination has been so effective that it literally warped the definition of the word “conspiracy” itself in the public consciousness. Now merely the word “conspiracy” evokes fanciful nonsense despite the glaring absence of the “theory” modifier to complete the phrase.
This is a type of “spell” (spelling) that’s been cast with language for ages. But over time even the most pernicious semantic spell starts to weaken. So too is the term “conspiracy” quickly reaching that point of semantic satiation. We live in a time when the “conspiracies” are practically writing themselves, and the continued monotonous attempts to dismiss all conspiracies as nonsense is becoming as comical as it is cacophonous.
That being said, throughout the 2010’s, r/conspiracy was consistently the only place on reddit were any theory could be discussed without too much concern of censorship or ridicule. Although we were increasingly ostracized by the rest of reddit, the admins tended to keep a decidedly hands-off approach when it came to managing content on our forum, and initially they rarely would intervene. It was as if the very stigma surrounding the word “conspiracy” gave us more freedom. They would simply dismiss everything we talked about as mere “conspiracy,” an attempt at slander that instead became almost beneficial.
However, coordinated attacks and harassment campaigns from outside r/conspiracy began to steadily increase. Veteran and “controversial” contributors on our forum were given the most negative attention. The harassment was so severe that it would ultimately cause many of our quality members to leave the site completely. The admins did nothing to prevent this documented, coordinated abuse, and they almost assuredly were contributing to it themselves.
Conversely, a new “abrasive” conspiracy theorist was born, and this one was usually aggressively fixated on a small handful of topics, which more often than not were red herrings. They would only appear to proselytize whenever their pet conspiracy was being discussed. For example, I noticed this behavior from a pattern of suspicious accounts concerning the “thermite” theory of 9/11, namely that industrial grade thermite was used to bring down the towers.
As with any disinfo operation, many well-meaning conspiracy theorists will undoubtedly get swept up in the fray, so not every account arguing for the thermite hypothesis was inorganic, but most were. When I discovered that the main proponent of thermite, Steven Jones, was instrumental in the cold fusion cover-up a decade earlier, my suspicions were confirmed.
Instead of exclusively debunking, the shills were increasingly pushing certain explanations for valid conspiracies that were either partially or completely untrue. In addition, if you didn’t agree with their interpretation of the narrative, you weren’t a “real” conspiracy theorist. We saw this phenomenon explode on a global scale with Russiagate. Before Russiagate, I was documenting the shill behavior and used my observations of their chatter and activity to predict events like Sandy Hook and the Boston Bombing. When I became a r/conspiracy mod, I then had access to many more metrics than regular users, and I used that to my advantage when scanning for patterns to predict future events.
Shortly after the success of our first AMA with Linda Brown, and right around when I was noticing that the thermite theory for 9/11 was largely inorganic, r/conspiracy hosted a notorious second AMA with Richard Gage, an engineer who embraces the thermite theory. When the perhaps unexpectedly educated and erudite members of r/conspiracy began holding Gage’s feet to the fire about the improbability of his theory, he abruptly abandoned the Q&A session. Gage would later claim the account was an “impostor” all along, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
It stands to reason that if the thermite theory was an “officially” sanctioned misdirection, then r/conspiracy would be used to amplify the disinfo to confuse genuine conspiracy theorists and researchers. The Gage debacle also attempted to derail our nascent AMA program, but we continued undeterred and proceeded to be more discerning with our guests.
By 2016 there was a dramatic shift and uptick in shill activity. This was directly correlated with the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory surrounding the Podesta emails that leaked in March of that year. This shift was mostly with respect to any discussion of elite pedophilia and global child trafficking rings. Before pizzagate, these threads were generally left unperturbed by the narrative managers. It was still too unbelievable in the public’s eye for our discussions to be considered worthy of derailment. In truth, they were considered “fringe” even by most conspiracy theorists.
But with pizzagate breaking into the mainstream, the shill army descended. One arm attacked any user who dared post about pizzagate, and the other inorganically pushed every insane interpretation of pizzagate imaginable to discredit the very valid discussion of global pedophilia and human trafficking rings.
By the end of 2016, the activity I was observing led me to prepare for a Trump upset, but even I was surprised to see it actually materialize. I had initially considered Trump to be a “fall guy” to ensure a Hillary Clinton victory, but the immediate and categorical descent into madness I witnessed as a result of his election was stunning to behold.
The world was flipped on its head when Trump became POTUS. The conspiracy theorists became the true skeptics, while the narrative consumers and the MSM became wide-eyed conspiracy theorists. As of 2021, these roles have yet to revert back. Every single conspiracy theorist began to be lambasted as “Russian agents.” This schizophrenic episode descended practically overnight in a stunningly coordinated fashion.
The traditional conspiracy theorists were being expected to believe the Steele Dossier and similar delusions verbatim. After all, we were conspiracy theorists, right? Aren’t we supposed to believe in all conspiracy theories? Hundreds of thousands of users on our forum were immediately cast as Trump supporters and/or Putin puppets for merely expressing skepticism that the historically corrupt MSM just might be unanimously propagating the same propaganda as before.
And yet, Trump bombed Syria over a literal false flag and the same cancerous MSM lauded him as “presidential” in a surreal moment of rare transparency. I repeatedly criticized Trump for playing the buffoon. While the media erupted in masturbatory ecstasy at the revenue and relevancy generated by his crass irregularities, the criminal US military and corporate juggernaut appeared to churn on, largely unabated.
Despite my regular vocal condemnation of Trump for playing the fool while he continued to drone strike innocent human beings, I started to notice that the narrative managers were at it again: “the r/conspiracy forum has been commandeered by Trump/Putin spies!” The same accounts that had engaged in sustained abuse of our community for years began claiming that we posed a legitimate existential threat. Go figure.
Since the neocons had largely been abandoned for the neolibs as the preferred mechanism of control, they needed to appeal to this woke new breed of malleable minds. The “conspiratard” forum at this point had rebranded itself as “topmindsofreddit” (TMOR), a reference to the “top men” tasked to investigate the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones lore.
Despite having a comparably low number of subscribers, r/topmindsofreddit was routinely featured on the front page of r/all (the most publicly visible and coveted spot on reddit). The vast majority of content featured on TMOR was specifically from the r/conspiracy sub, but they also targeted any forum that didn’t espouse an anti-Trump or far-left political paradigm.
Because reddit was quickly devolving into a self-congratulatory echo chamber, communities like TMOR really took off. They target any user, comment or thread they deem unsavory. They also directly link this “offending” content to their sub, and the same circle jerk cycle churns on with malevolent regularity. Although reddit has traditionally discouraged and disallowed communities from actively linking and participating in threads on other subs, when directed at r/conspiracy and other “inconvenient” spaces this behavior is encouraged and rewarded by the hivemind.
Although I started receiving threats before even becoming a r/conspiracy mod back when I was butting heads with the Monsanto bullies, the volume and severity of this rhetoric that I received in the aftermath of “Russiagate” was simply off the charts. At the height of the Russiagate furor it wasn’t uncommon for me to be sent up to a dozen threats per day, if not more. These came in the form of private messages, custom reports on my threads, and calls for doxxing and violence directed at me on other subreddits like TMOR.
I reported much of this filth to the admins, especially the death threats, but action was rarely taken against the offending accounts. It wasn’t uncommon for the users I reported to receive a brief 3-day suspension, only for them to get right back at it when they returned. It was more common for no action to be taken at all. Threads from many of these narrative management subs that linked to my content would even occasionally reach the front page of reddit. Each time this happened, it would result in more of this behavior. The admins repeatedly allowed this cycle to perpetuate.
The admins couldn’t ban us. The only thing we were doing “wrong” was doubting insane MSM conspiracy theories like Russiagate. So they opted to harass us until we quit. Needless to say, I continued sharing conspiracies and moderating the forum with even more zeal. After all, I had taught myself how to spot disinfo campaigns by observing the patterns on r/conspiracy.
Russiagate was as blatant a psyop as I had yet seen. As with most effective psyops, “Russiagate” undoubtedly contained kernels of truth. The Russian government is not a benevolent actor by any stretch of the imagination. But the vast majority of this phobia was pure nonsense, and the trained conspiracy theorist recognized this immediately. I started spending so much time trying to explain that questioning Russiagate didn’t make you a Trump supporter that I began to think making us waste our breath on this fallacy was part of the plan.
The effect made by pizzagate was somewhat analogous. Although conspiracy theorists had been attempting to shed light on elite pedophilia for years, all of the sudden we became those silly “pizzagaters” for discussing valid topics like the Dutroux Affair, Jimmy Savile and Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein and his “Lolita Express” in particular were hot topics on r/conspiracy for years before the story blew up internationally.
With Russiagate, the conspiracy was aimed at the mainstream instead, while the conspiracy theorists were gaslit to the max with the same tired divisive political false dichotomy. It was baffling how firmly the propaganda had rooted itself. I lost track of the times I was told I was a Trump supporter only to have the conversation abandoned when I requested proof. The “proof” often given was that r/conspiracy was creating a “safe space” for Trump. In actuality, reddit had begun its systematic purge of anything remotely right of center.
Very interesting. I read up on your thread and the other disasters that have happened in April.
The days don't line up exactly but the worst coal mining disaster in history happened 26 April 1942 (in China). Coal mines either burn or go boom.