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.
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.
The calls to have me removed from my position soon reached a fever pitch. To the deluded drones at TMOR, I was an existential threat to humanity. After all, they were sure I was a Russian and vaccine disinfo agent. With the amount of times I had seen TMOR users claim to have sent impassioned pleas to the reddit admins to have me banned, I was honestly surprised I wasn’t removed just to shut them up.
Ultimately, that seemed to be their goal, and it worked. Despite discussing some controversial topics, I followed the rules of reddit. In almost 10 years, I hadn’t had a single comment or thread removed by the admins. My record on reddit was pristine. They couldn’t get me on rule violations, and they couldn’t harass and threaten me until I quit. Instead, they opted to turn public sentiment against me.
By this time, many of the veteran r/conspiracy mods started to grow distant from reddit. It left the remaining few of us to do the majority of the work. There were times when I felt like I was essentially running the forum almost on my own, with maybe one or two other mods. I continued arranging AMAs, which can be found here.
I revitalized a “featured documentary” tradition and regularly updated the archives with the chosen films.
I spearheaded a new “Round Table” discussion feature that generated some of the most interesting threads in the history of r/conspiracy.
In my final year as mod, I also publicly documented the content the admins themselves were removing on r/conspiracy, metrics that only are accessible by the moderators of any given subreddit. For a year I extensively recorded these increasingly spurious removals in monthly “transparency threads.” I doubt the admins were pleased as I publicly documented their slamming shut of the Overton window.
These transparency reports received far less attention than they should have, as they were extremely informative. They showed that r/conspiracy was being deliberately sabotaged.
I spent much of my mod efforts on the comment sections, the true front line of r/conspiracy. I aggressively moderated the forum sliding trolls. As we became more and more inundated with this rule-breaking activity, I was forced to respond accordingly by often banning repeat offenders on sight if their history contained multiple previous rule infractions on our sub.
Sometimes entire threads would be swarmed with these artificial accounts, flooding the conversation with these violations. I did recognize the irony in “censoring” these comments to preserve the “freedom” of speech on our forum. The alternative was to allow this blatant manipulation to suffocate the conversation completely.
Because of our commitment to transparency, we publicly released the logs of our moderation actions, something unheard of for any other large sub on reddit. As a result, the narrative managers highlighted my actions in banning the numerous shills in an effort to portray me as a conspiracy “tyrant.”
While I fended off a veritable army of digital trolls, I remained committed to calling out the increasingly unhinged pro-vaccine support on reddit. The brigades during this time against anyone calling out vaccine propaganda were unprecedented in their severity.
By the end of 2019, I was ready for the big one. When videos started making their rounds allegedly showing Chinese people falling down in the street due to some “unknown” illness, their significance became immediately apparent. This was classic propaganda. This was the same pandemic theater we’d been calling out for years.
Keep in mind, after a decade of observing patterns on r/conspiracy, my ability in that respect was ferociously fine-tuned. It was immediately apparent that the users and threads promoting FUD regarding this “new” virus were extremely inorganic. Even more disturbing, I noticed the same pattern across the vast majority of alternative media outlets in the early stages of “coronavirus.” While the MSM and world authorities were downplaying the event, alternate media sites were abuzz with conspiracies, and the Wuhan lab origin was at the top of the list.
I saw the false dichotomy narrative being put in play. A story was being crafted for the mainstream, namely the virus had emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan. And a story was being crafted for the conspiracy theorists (a red herring) that the virus had instead been manipulated and emerged from a lab in Wuhan. They use the same playbook every time. Stay tuned, they may used it again if they try to stage an “alien” hoax to cover for when our own exotic technology is eventually disclosed.
In January I issued the most sincere warning of my entire history on r/conspiracy. I specifically noted that coronavirus fear porn was not organic and was targeted at both the narrative consumer and the conspiracy theorists. My warning was specifically directed at the conspiracy theorists not to be swept up with fear by the coming event. Here’s the thread, which I consider to be a crowning achievement of my digital legacy.
I felt compelled to shout this out back in January, 2020: “The staging of viral pandemics has the frightening ability to fool the brainwashed and the conspiracy researchers, if we aren't careful.” How did I know? I’d been documenting it on reddit for years and years. Here’s a list of many of these observations and warnings going back almost a decade.
r/conspiracy was still a force to be reckoned with at the time, and my coronavirus warning thread received a great deal of support. It resonated. Although some threads were pushing fear porn, these were almost entirely artificially boosted, as the genuine r/conspiracy community smelled a rat. Over the next few months I went in hard pushing back against coronavirus fear porn. I even revived some of my numerological speculation concerning COVID, a subject I had largely neglected over recent years.
If the global media and multiple world governments tell all of humanity that a virus may kill you if you step outside, what percentage of the population would automatically get so worked up in abject terror that they would literally cause themselves to be hospitalized with manifested symptoms, especially when they’re already being poisoned by Big Pharma? Spoiler: a lot.
Note: pathogens are absolutely being manipulated and released on accident and through biowarfare. Mother Nature does not tolerate these “frankenviruses” and quickly mutates them beyond recognition. Anything “artificial” released from Wuhan or elsewhere in 2019 is no longer a threat today. This is another reason why the “lab leak” theory initially was so fervently denied to the point of rabid deplatforming and censorship.
A “lab leak” origin may sound just as spooky as a naturally-evolved pathogen, but in reality it just means the “COVID’s here forever!” narrative falls flat on its face. Sadly, that won’t stop various rogue governments and news agencies from getting a little more fear porn mileage from the COVID gravy train.
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.