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.
Other than r/conspiracy, the one large sub that maintained its independence from the corporate homogenization of reddit was r/the_donald (T_D). T_D was so effective at maintaining its own echo chamber (which it undoubtedly was), that it exposed the hypocrisy of the rest of reddit by routinely reaching the front page of r/all. T_D demonstrated that there were other opinions about Trump that weren’t “orange man bad,” which at the time was the only one sanctioned by reddit.
To deal with these regular deviations from the narrative, the admins at first throttled, and then ultimately banned, T_D and its community of millions of users. It was becoming too powerful of a force. Many of them abandoned reddit completely. The rest of the “deplorables” were consolidated onto a handful of subs such as r/conservative and r/conspiracy. After all, It’s easier to censor and coordinate the harassment of just a couple forums.
Obviously, many of the “refugees” from the T_D ban found their way onto r/conspiracy, which further contributed to the collective tantrum of TMOR and the other narrative managers that r/conspiracy was subservient to Trump. In reality, we were welcoming them in not because of their political beliefs, but simply because they were silenced. Conspiracy theorists traditionally back those who are being censored. We would’ve extended the same welcome had the politics been completely reversed.
The r/conspiracy mod team was well known to consist of a wide range of political beliefs, and we historically have called out both political parties in the US and abroad. The only thing r/conspiracy was “guilty” of was not getting swept up by officially mandated conspiracy theories like Russiagate. Apparently, the same Mockingbird Media that spent decades denying every “inconvenient” conspiracy imaginable suddenly became experts on what constitutes a conspiracy theory worthy of discussion.
I watched in disturbed fascination as violent rhetoric against Trump and Trump supporters littered the front page of r/all. Whenever I had to clean up blatant rule-breaking content on r/conspiracy from brigades originating from elsewhere on reddit, it almost always was from violent and aggressive anti-Trump posters from subs like r/politics. Whenever we removed these personal attacks (clear violations of our rules), the r/conspiracy mods found ourselves being routinely excoriated as “defending” Trump, when we were just doing our job.
When the Nicholas Sandmann debacle hit, I realized that society had reached an horrific turning point. The brainwashed masses showed their true colors when they collectively called for the head of a minor for no tangible reason other than they were told to do so. I watched multiple calls for Sandmann’s beating and death go unmoderated across reddit. Even worse, I was attacked for removing this reprehensible content on my own forum. The degeneracy I witnessed in the 24 hours or so following that disgusting episode was beyond the pale.
I had spent years investigating credible proof of topics like elite pedophilia. I thought I’d seen it all. But the potentially disastrous repercussions I envisioned from the ease in which the state-sponsored two minutes of hate against Sandmann was implemented was an entirely new beast.
The reddit admins were allowing violent threats against a minor to proliferate, and it was up to the moderators of the conspiracy forum on their website to attempt to undo some of the damage. I had no allegiance to Trump and yet I was deeply sickened by this unhinged spectacle. The conspiratorial delusions were continuing in the mainstream media, and the public kept lapping it up at a prodigious rate.
Concomitant with the widespread condoning of violent rhetoric towards Trump and his supports, I noticed a profound uptick in similarly violent rhetoric towards any semblance of a skeptical conversation on vaccines. Having spent over a decade analyzing many tens of thousands of threads of r/conspiracy, I can say with full confidence that no subject elicits more backlash and more of a coordinated shill response than calling into question the vaccine narrative.
In fact, when I started delving into conspiracy theories in the mid-2000’s, the vaccine issue wasn’t even on my radar. I watched Alex Jones rant about vaccines and responded like most people when exposed to Jones: with baffled amusement. It wasn’t until I started receiving unprecedented backlash from the same coterie of shills that aggressively defended Monsanto and the like that I started to have my interest in vaccines piqued.
After all, I was well-versed at analyzing the reaction to certain themes as a gauge for their validity. Don’t get me wrong, this does not mean every topic that attracts “debunkers” must therefore be true, a contrarian viewpoint that’s logically unsound. But if you carefully review the style and method of the debunkers, it can often give you profound clues as to their motives and the overall veracity of the conspiracy theory in question.
The vaccine issue was the big one, and clearly not much has changed. I just happened to notice it earlier than most because the shills gave it away. In addition to continuing with my regular moderator duties, I spent more time and effort investigating the vaccine issue than any other subject. I produced two considerable mega-threads called the Skeptic’s Guide to Vaccines Parts 1 & 2.
I routinely updated r/conspiracy with my observations on the scope of pro-vaccine propaganda that was a daily occurrence for many years on reddit. I explained that this activity wasn’t only inorganic, but it was also increasing at a rate that left essentially all other propaganda efforts in the dust. Here’s one of my many pre-COVID warnings:
“The Pro-Vaccine Propaganda on Reddit Has Reached Unprecedented Levels: Blind, unquestioning subservience to the criminal Medical Cartel is a major aspect of their control grid, and complete trust in vaccines represents one of the pillars of this tyranny.”
It didn’t go unnoticed.
The pandemic narrative is integral to this propaganda effort, as it also amplifies the concerns of the conspiracy theorists themselves. We know they play god with pathogens. We’re aware that monkey “parts” had contaminated the polio vaccines for decades and there was a causal link between this disaster and the current soft tissue cancer epidemic. We know that this same pathogen, SV-40, is a co-carcinogen with asbestos which contaminated J&J baby powder for decades.
We know about the polio vaccine trials in Africa in the 1950’s where the “HIV” epidemic emerged soon after. We know that Bayer and other companies had dumped contaminated blood products resulting in the poisoning of tens of thousands worldwide and the jump-starting of the “AIDS” narrative.
We saw through the pathetic post-9/11 anthrax theater. We’re well-versed on the diseased happenings at Fort Detrick and Plum Island, and their plans for future “dark winters.” After all, the archaic ruling class requires an ever-evolving invisible “enemy” to maintain their ill-gotten hegemony. The phantom “terrorist” was the preferred boogeyman when the neocons were being used while the amorphous “virus” has become the go-to for the neolibs. Either way, they are merely different implementations of the same anti-human tyranny.
The unmatched propaganda effort towards vaccine compliance couldn’t simply be explained away by the machinations of a for-profit pharmaceutical industry, although that undoubtedly was a driving factor. The pro-vaccine propaganda on reddit was unparalleled, and this was on a website that had become a literal tool of propaganda amplification.
You don’t put that much effort into something on that scale to make sure a few Big Pharma conglomerates sell all their measles shots. You do it to condition the public for future events concerning vaccines and pandemics.
This plan started to come into disturbing focus when “ebola” and “zika” were briefly touted in the hysterical MSM news cycle. I had been following Jon Rappoport at the time, an investigative reporter who began his career unraveling the HIV/AIDS deception. Rappoport routinely called out “pandemics” as being attributable to other factors like environmental toxins, pollution, poisonous pharmaceuticals, and medical malpractice.
Because awareness of the great vaccine deception was spreading on r/conspiracy, this issue became the preferred focus of reddit’s narrative managers. As a moderator of r/conspiracy and a vocal vaccine skeptic, it was like I had attached an irresistibly powerful shill magnet to my reddit account. To make matters worse, I was eventually elected as the “head” moderator of r/conspiracy, a story which deserves its own brief diversion.
It’s common for certain “power mods” to be involved with multiple mainstream subreddits. These users are frequently afforded special protection from the admin team, and it’s not uncommon for the admins to censor entire comments and threads that even mention the user name of one of these power mods. One such mod was the creator of r/conspiracy, an account that had remained in the “top” position on the team since its inception. The only real significance of the mod hierarchy on reddit is that a senior mod has the ability to remove anyone else with a lower rank. As a result, the top mod on the list is accountable only to the reddit admins.
As the rest of reddit was purged or homogenized, r/conspiracy was seeming like the last place that stayed true to the vision of pioneers like Aaron Swartz. Control of r/conspiracy was becoming a tangible desire for the narrative managers. Unfortunately for them, the mod team was populated by actual conspiracy theorists. We were r/conspiracy users too. We had done the research, and the time, to show where our allegiance lay.
The r/conspiracy mod team realized that having a potentially rogue power mod at the top of the list, sitting there like a weird digital Sword of Damocles, was not in the best interest of the sub. We unanimously decided to petition the admins to have this mod removed, a practice not uncommon when head mods are inactive for long periods of time. In addition, the r/conspiracy mod team unanimously voted for me to take over as head mod. I would become the “top mind” of the “top minds” of reddit!
But the admins dragged their feet. At first, they ignored our requests. To be frank, I begin suspecting that our “absent” head mod would suddenly “reemerge” and reclaim his position. But that never happened. Instead, I was eventually contacted by the admins and given instructions on how to remove the missing mod using the “subreddit request” feature. After complying, I was shocked to see the entire r/conspiracy mod team had just been removed, including me! I was then re-added as the sole moderator of r/conspiracy. In addition, the counters documenting our time spent as moderators were permanently reset.
Not surprisingly, the optics of the sudden removal of the entire moderator team weren’t great. I invited back the other mods that were recently online and immediately pinned a thread at the top of the forum explaining I hadn’t a clue what was happening and that I was trying to rectify the situation. It was too late. The narrative managers had pounced in blatantly pre-packaged form, claiming that I had attempted a “coup” to install myself as “dictator.” Even though the admins chimed in and apologized for the “glitch,” the damage was done. Planned or not, their lackluster response was extremely telling.
With myself at the helm, r/conspiracy entered a new phase of the information war. The attacks against our community were constant and coordinated. They employed every forum sliding tactic imaginable. They flooded us with nonsensical conspiracies. They harassed and brigaded our genuine contributors. Eventually, the mod team took action.
Our first solution was meant to combat the constant deluge of spam and fake conspiracy theories meant to drown out legitimate content. To do so, we decided to implement a so-called “submission statement” rule requiring anyone sharing a link on r/conspiracy to summarize the content of their post for our community. This summary had to be cogent and use at least a couple of sentences.
If this simple summary wasn’t produced in a comment by OP within several minutes, the thread was automatically removed. This did wonders to cut down on spam. I’ll admit my own contributions to the sub were somewhat curtailed as I found myself spending more time summarizing and discussing the article instead of posting multiple links at a time. This change increased the quality of discussion, and despite being somewhat inconvenient, it significantly cut down on spam and other diversions from bad actors.
It can’t be stressed enough that we were very careful not to include in this rule a requirement for the thread to be a universally-acknowledged “conspiracy” despite this seeming contradiction. One of the most common, and painfully obvious, tactics of the shills is to flood every thread with the comment “where’s the conspiracy?” After all, shouldn’t a forum called “conspiracy” require every thread be a “conspiracy?” This is yet another semantic trap.
Amusingly, the same narrative managers that routinely harass the r/conspiracy mod team for being “tyrants” would in the same breath demand that the mods should be the arbiters of what constitutes a “conspiracy.” Mandating a “conspiracy” requirement for our forum would essentially give the moderators the final word on what is, or is not, a “conspiracy.” r/conspiracy has always been dedicated to freedom of expression and does not grant a handful of moderators unilateral power based on mere semantics.
When you’ve been censored by the entirety of reddit, r/conspiracy is the last place you can still speak your mind. Sometimes people just want to have their voice heard. Requiring them to phrase their feelings as a “conspiracy” would be counter to the very ethos of our forum. That’s why the “where’s the conspiracy?” forum slide was so pernicious and transparent. It was meant to force OP to justify being on r/conspiracy instead of spending time and effort unraveling the subject at hand.
This observation led to the next major rule change on our sub: the relegating of this type of rhetoric to only one specific comment chain per thread. It would’ve been excessive to outright ban “where’s the conspiracy?” meta commentary, but the deluge of comments spouting some iteration of “r/conspiracy sucks” that flooded our forum had to be addressed and managed. Every thread was suffocating with this banality.
As a solution, we automated a pinned comment to be placed at the top of every thread on r/conspiracy. This comment is highly visible (it’s at the top!) and is specifically meant for meta observations that reference OP and the broader conspiracy community. Any other meta references in the rest of the thread and not replying to the pinned meta comment were in violation of our sub’s rules.
Repeated offenders of this rule, like with any other rule, could expect to be banned. Suffice to say, this ruffled all the feathers. The ability to viciously slander our community throughout the comment section was an essential tool of the narrative managers, and this single change dealt them a considerable blow.
Meanwhile, my “ascension” as head mod made me public enemy #1 for the shill squad. For years, on any give day I would be personally featured on a solid majority of threads on the front page of TMOR. To say their obsession over me was pathological would be a gross understatement. It was certainly deliberate.
Thousands of times I watched my content get organic support on r/conspiracy, only to have this momentum completely reversed the moment the comment or thread would be linked by TMOR. They enjoyed boasting that they could flaunt the rules of reddit that forbids precisely such activity. Here’s extensive proof:
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Reddit admins have even been spotted posting on TMOR using their official admin accounts. They’re on record saying they would be “watching” the r/conspiracy mod team, encouraging TMOR to follow suit. Shortly before my ban I noted, “r/conspiracy, you are a targeted community under assault. The reddit admins are complicit in the worst kinds of abuse and harassment, and they explicitly condone this behavior.”
Such blatant coordination is to be expected from an admin team that employs bona fide warmongering government agents like Jessica Ashooh. They actually suspended multiple users for even mentioning Ashooh’s name on r/conspiracy. They also had the audacity to try and ban us from even discussing her.
They also tried to ban us from mentioning a certain Salt Lake City daycare suspected of child trafficking.
And here’s when they tried to stop us from saying the name of a pedophile from a wealthy family. They later capitulated.
Oh, and the admins would really like you to forget all about “Antique Jetpack” and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s connection with NSA/CIA propaganda firm Stratfor.
And it’s not remotely significant that former reddit CEO Ellen Pao admitted she was partying with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011 and knew Maxwell was trafficking children.
And the first user to get 1,000,000 “karma” points on reddit, the infamous power mod u/maxwellhill…? Yeah that’s totally not Ghislaine Maxwell herself, even though the account went dark immediately after her arrest and hasn’t posted since, despite years of the account obsessing over reddit with a history of discussing age of consent laws.
And reddit hiring Aimee Challenor and banning anyone, including moderators, who talked about it? Yeah they definitely were in the dark about Aimee continuing to work with her father who was actually torturing and raping children. The admins were super, super sorry about that one and said the new recruit hadn’t been “properly vetted.”
In all seriousness, it’s hard to imagine still using reddit today with a clean conscience. But I did what I could, when I could. The only other “large” subreddit I moderated was r/UFOs, though my activity there was decidedly less, as it was a smaller forum that required less moderation.
Last year, it was brought to my attention that certain terms and topics were routinely being censored on r/UFOs. This censorship was apparently originating from the mod team itself, of which I was a part. When the full picture became clear, I removed the offending mods and restored the sub to its pre-censorship days. My efforts in undoing this damage even resulted in positive reports from the mainstream, such as this VICE article.
The disconnect of being publicly commended by VICE (of all outlets) while being cast as public enemy #1 on reddit didn’t escape me. I had proven again and again that I was a champion for free speech. All of the users that we banned had a chance to appeal, and if they pledged to follow the rules, we would be more than happy to offer to unban them.
A tyrant, I wasn’t. And yet, at several points in time I could make the claim to be the most harassed, threatened and brigaded account on reddit, a dubious honor for which I felt no pride. While I was proud of my original research, I had been thrust into a role I didn’t really want anymore. But I didn’t see anyone else I trusted who was willing and able to replace me.
Instead of spending time researching ancient civilizations, exotic technology and the machinations of Big Pharma, I was combating trolls and shills on a conspiracy forum. They demanded too much time and effort. The new rules were effective, but they were tougher to implement, and they soon became an extra burden on the frequently over-tasked moderator team. One mod in particular had been doing the lion’s share of the busy work, while I relegated myself to addressing the routine shill brigades and spam accounts that would artificially push their stolen content to the front page.
Not surprisingly, with every bad actor we banned new accounts would soon take their place like a shill hydra. In their hypocritical stupor, they raged that the r/conspiracy mod team was giving preferential treatment to conspiracy theorists. Shocking, I know. This narrative is particularly weak. The entirety of reddit had been purged of wrongthink, and they still had the audacity to complain that the r/conspiracy mod team offered more leniency towards conspiracy theorists! In addition to having no shame, they have no tact.
For example, the mod team would likely remove a comment (not found in the pinned “meta” chain) that says something like “this is why r/conspiracy sucks.” This statement violates the “no-meta” rule by addressing the sub as a whole (a painfully common forum sliding tactic). Other examples include the infamous “r/conspiracy is T_D (the_donald) 2.0” as well as “r/conspiracy should bring back bigfoots and aliens.” Various permutations of the “bigfoot” comment in particular are perhaps the most glowing example of this activity.
On the other hand, if a comment evokes the meta in a positive light, the sentiment might be treated differently. For example, “stuff like this is what keeps me coming back to r/conspiracy” is a positive and constructive statement. Such an observation would typically not be removed. One would hope it’s self-evident why removing positive affirmations to the community is bad form and counter to the fostering of a healthy community.
Every time they perceived an “injustice” was perpetrated by the r/conspiracy mod team, you would think we had committed all manners of atrocities. They made sure these perceived injustices routinely echoed across reddit. Why wasn’t r/conspiracy banned like T_D and so many others? Was there someone still on the admin team actually advocating for us? Or is the reason more sinister?
It’s frequently speculated that it’s useful for the narrative managers to keep us all in one place. If they scatter us, we can digitally regroup and hit back from multiple angles. The rest of reddit is now fully controlled, and this leverage is used against the r/conspiracy community. Without their army of bots and useful idiots that comprise the vast majority of reddit, r/conspiracy would finally be able to reach its full potential. This is the same potential that the early version of reddit (and the internet in general!) was meant to reach before being co-opted.
Thanks for taking the time to write you story.
I really enjoyed reading it all.
And God bless you
awesome, yw!! much love to you and yours.
I remember this in college. I never considered the government could use memes as propaganda and back then I was too young to think otherwise. Hindsight is 20/20 though. I always appreciated your work on r/conspiracy, it's what really got me down the rabbit hole, although now I'm over at the greatawakening.win alot more.