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.
On the Night of the Digital Long Knives, they came for me first. Before Trump was banned and before they Thanosed half of social media, they got me.
In the early hours of January 7, 2021, US Senator Tammy Duckworth emphatically declared in Congress that “reddit conspiracy theories” were in part to blame for the “violent insurrection” alleged to have occurred just hours earlier at the US Capitol.
No further clarification was provided as to which conspiracies from the popular social media site were responsible, nor how this conclusion was reached within hours of such an historically unprecedented and controversial event.
The administrators of reddit acted swiftly. The admins traditionally only “spring” into action when confronted with negative PR. Getting publicly called out in Congress after an alleged “coup” was about as high profile as it gets. Within hours, they removed and permanently banned the head moderator of the “subreddit” devoted to conspiracy theories…yours truly.
While the admins are actual employees of reddit, moderators are unpaid volunteers who focus on specific “sub”-reddits. Moderators are a crucial component of how the site functions. They hold no power outside their respective communities and are beholden to the whims of the admins. A case can be made that the sweeping censorship that reached a fever pitch in January was coordinated between rogue elements of multiple world governments and the Big Tech juggernaut. On reddit, I was one of many targeted in this technological purge.
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.