Speaker 1: Robert Evans here, and I wanted to ask for your help.
Speaker 1: There is a Portland area woman, Ruba to mem She's
Speaker 1: an Arabic interpreter and a Palestinian liberation activist, and she
Speaker 1: is trying to save her home at the moment. She's
Speaker 1: got to go fund me. If you go to save
Speaker 1: Ruba's house, are you be a on go fund Bank?
Speaker 1: You'll find it Save Ruba's house on go fund me.
Speaker 1: If you've got a few bucks, she could really use
Speaker 1: it against save Ruba's house. Are you be a at
Speaker 1: go fund Me? Thanks? What's killing my babies? This is shit?
Speaker 1: That's bad way to start the episode. This is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. Poorly introduced podcast by Robert Evans And as
Speaker 1: you might guess by our celebration of baby killing in
Speaker 1: the introduction, my guest this week Sophie Alejandra. Okay, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: hell yeah, did you make in air horns? Let's do it? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I just really got a call that I've been canceled
Speaker 1: for those sound effects, So really thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: That's a shame. Cancel culture strikes again. First, Dr syce
Speaker 1: than you. I'm being told it's Dr Sis. I don't
Speaker 1: believe it. But I guess I have to move to Texas. Now,
Speaker 1: you have to move to Texas a k a. Cansylvania,
Speaker 1: where the coronavirus runs free as the white tailed deer
Speaker 1: across the prairie. Uh, Sophia. You and I have a
Speaker 1: bit of a history, um, and that history is I
Speaker 1: tell you stories about people who got a lot of
Speaker 1: babies killed. UM. And I value that part of our relationship.
Speaker 1: It's special. You know, there's not just anyone that you
Speaker 1: can sit down and really talk about some dead babies with.
Speaker 1: But you and I have both had a rough year
Speaker 1: um already, as I'm going to guess around three million Americans.
Speaker 1: So I decided to have a little bit lighter fair
Speaker 1: this week, instead of talking about a baby, talking about
Speaker 1: an eiracy theory that in many ways was the genesis
Speaker 1: of the Q and on conspiracy theory, which is a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory that revolves around satanic pedophiles killing babies. Robert,
Speaker 1: you flatter me. Oh my God keeps so much for
Speaker 1: saving this for me. Oh yeah, No, we're gonna, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have a good time. We're gonna we're gonna really
Speaker 1: really get down and and and dirty with it. Um,
Speaker 1: have you heard the second base for us, Robert, this
Speaker 1: is this is this is a this is a real
Speaker 1: step forward for us. Have you heard of the ness
Speaker 1: era conspiracy theory? No? Okay, yeah, well that that is fine.
Speaker 1: It it's it's from the late nineties, early two thousands.
Speaker 1: How do you that? In E. S. E. R. A.
Speaker 1: I'll explain to you what it means of a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: It started in like the late nineties, early two thousand's. Uh.
Speaker 1: It has been absorbed into Q and On, or at
Speaker 1: least segments of the Q and On conspiracy have absorbed this.
Speaker 1: But in a lot of ways, the nessera conspiracy theory,
Speaker 1: which kind of hit its height in the Bush Ears,
Speaker 1: is a prelude to Q and On a lot of that.
Speaker 1: You can see the groundwork being laid for QUA on
Speaker 1: in this conspiracy theory. And that's why I think it's
Speaker 1: very interesting. It's a beautiful amuse bush Yeah, conspiracy nonsense
Speaker 1: to come. I'm very excited. It's very exciting, and it's
Speaker 1: being It kind of faded out at the end of
Speaker 1: the Bush Ears and it's being revived now so we'll
Speaker 1: get to talk about in our next episode. Kind of
Speaker 1: the modern revival of the nessera conspiracy theory. But first,
Speaker 1: let's go back in time to the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: which was I think fair to say, a golden age
Speaker 1: of cartoons trying to sell children things mostly but but
Speaker 1: compared to now, a golden age for sure. Um Now.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen nineties, a Louisiana State University graduate
Speaker 1: in systems philosophy named Harvey Francis Bernard started looking at
Speaker 1: the US onomy and seeing some warning signs up ahead.
Speaker 1: I don't think I need to explain what those warning
Speaker 1: signs were, because we've all lived in a continual period
Speaker 1: of economic collapse and whatnot. Um So, Barnard is looking
Speaker 1: at like the Clinton era economy and the things that
Speaker 1: are getting past and kind of the explosion of neoliberalism,
Speaker 1: and going like this could be a problem, and he
Speaker 1: decides to solve the problem. Um Now. Bernard believed that
Speaker 1: personal debt was the number one factor holding back the
Speaker 1: US economy, and that compound interest was the number one
Speaker 1: cause of debt and just thus the chief moral evil
Speaker 1: facing the US economy. So over the course of several
Speaker 1: years he put together a plan to fix this that
Speaker 1: he called the National Economic Security and Recovery Act or
Speaker 1: NESS Era you know to acronym um. And you're not
Speaker 1: going to get any analysis of how well this plan
Speaker 1: would have actually worked for me, because I don't understand
Speaker 1: the economy. This was his goal. He thought that this
Speaker 1: would fix things. I can't tell if it would have ever,
Speaker 1: wouldn't UM the proposed it was going to be a
Speaker 1: final solution. No, I don't think he was a bad person,
Speaker 1: and I don't think there was any like Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't get that hint because the conspiracy theory bears
Speaker 1: no resemblance to what he started, and he's tried to
Speaker 1: fight against the theory. This is just like a nerd
Speaker 1: who was who came up with what he thought might
Speaker 1: fix things, and nobody did it. Um. So, the proposed
Speaker 1: law would have replaced the income tax with a national
Speaker 1: sales tax, which I think is a bad idea that
Speaker 1: when I will comment on because it's kind of regressive
Speaker 1: against poor people as opposed to progressive. He would abolish
Speaker 1: compound interest on most loans, which seems like a reasonable idea,
Speaker 1: and it would have returned the US to bi metallic currency,
Speaker 1: aka returning to using gold and silver is stores of
Speaker 1: value for our currency, which does seem dumb. Bernard believed
Speaker 1: his plan would lead to zero percent inflation and an
Speaker 1: economy devoid of recessions and depressions. Um So it was
Speaker 1: a nice dream. Again, doesn't seem to me like it
Speaker 1: would have worked. But I don't know anything about the economy.
Speaker 1: Um And, like every young man with a beautiful dream,
Speaker 1: Harvey decided that self publishing was the best way to
Speaker 1: get his message out. In n he produced a book
Speaker 1: Draining the Swamp Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform. You remember
Speaker 1: that title. Yeah, So he sent copies of this book
Speaker 1: to every member of Congress, and of course nobody read them. Right,
Speaker 1: you send a copy of your your homebrewed fiscal policy
Speaker 1: to Congress. Nobody's going to read that. Nobody was ever
Speaker 1: going to read that, um Nessara never went up for
Speaker 1: a vote, it was never even discussed in Congress, and
Speaker 1: Bernard's plan for economic reform remains untested to this day. Frustrated,
Speaker 1: he published his book online under a new name, Draining
Speaker 1: a Swamp the nessa Story Money and Fiscal Policy, and
Speaker 1: for a few years it mostly just existed on the
Speaker 1: internet as a bizarre monument to what might have been
Speaker 1: if the entire national government had decided to implement the
Speaker 1: plan that some dude who had enough spare cash to
Speaker 1: self publish had sent them via the mail. Um nothing
Speaker 1: really happened with it. No elected leaders or influential thinkers
Speaker 1: picked up on the work, but people did start to
Speaker 1: read it. And one of the people who read it
Speaker 1: was Candice Goodwin, a woman from Washington State who was
Speaker 1: a unique mix of gullible and cunning. Now we're not
Speaker 1: going to talk about Candice for a little while yet,
Speaker 1: but remember Candice Goodwin picks this book up, reads it
Speaker 1: in like the late nineties, early two thousands, and while
Speaker 1: she's becoming interested in this, a completely separate thing is happening.
Speaker 1: A scam is being born in Matune, Illinois, to a
Speaker 1: man named Clyde Hood. This is a little bit of
Speaker 1: a wandering story. I just like all of the delightful
Speaker 1: names Matune. Come on, Illinois. That's not a real town name,
Speaker 1: and you fuckers know its fucking Illinois. Um. So, Clyde
Speaker 1: Hood is a retired electrician who lives in Matune, and
Speaker 1: in nine he decided he wanted to make more money
Speaker 1: than tended to be available to small town electricians. He
Speaker 1: started what he called Omega Trust and Trading. So Clyde
Speaker 1: told the people that he approached with his plan that
Speaker 1: he had a background in an investment banking. He'd done
Speaker 1: the job for fifteen or sixteen years. He owned a
Speaker 1: foreign bank, not one that they'd heard of. But trust him.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a big deal. This bank that he
Speaker 1: owns is a big is a Jew. I'm personally offended.
Speaker 1: These are all lits um. So as I owned the banks,
Speaker 1: I control the media. Hello, that is the new conspiracy
Speaker 1: that you're dropping today? Uh? Which is which is that
Speaker 1: that you control the global economy? Not all the Jews,
Speaker 1: just me, just Sophia for the rest of them. Protocols
Speaker 1: of Sophia exactly. I am an elder of Zion. There
Speaker 1: weren't all of us. It was just me. It's always meeting.
Speaker 1: I wrote a whole scroll. I didn't know it was
Speaker 1: going to get popular. Oh boy, the fan art that
Speaker 1: comes out of this is going to be really problematic
Speaker 1: in like five years. So Clyde started telling people again
Speaker 1: who was his only background is as a small town electrician.
Speaker 1: Clyde starts saying, I've got sixteen fifteen years experience as
Speaker 1: investment banker. I own a giant foreign bank. I'm an
Speaker 1: expert in offshore trading um. And he would particularly claim
Speaker 1: to be an expert in European high yield investment programs
Speaker 1: and prime bank notes. Don't know what those are, don't worry.
Speaker 1: Clyde didn't really either. He'd just lie about what they were.
Speaker 1: He would tell his marks that these were the kind
Speaker 1: of investments that are why rich people get richer. So
Speaker 1: they're investments that are guaranteed to have a huge like
Speaker 1: increase in like a return of r O Y or
Speaker 1: whatever return over time UM. And if you invest in them,
Speaker 1: you're automatically going to make more money. There's no chance
Speaker 1: of them failing. And the only reason you can't invest
Speaker 1: in that is that the rich people have set up
Speaker 1: restrictions so that little people like you can't get in
Speaker 1: these investments. And so you can't get rich because you
Speaker 1: don't have enough capital upfront to get in the door
Speaker 1: of these kinds of things. So he would enrich people,
Speaker 1: That's what Clyde would say. And he would get these
Speaker 1: audiences of Midwestern churchgoers mostly, and he would tell them
Speaker 1: there are these investments that are why rich people keep
Speaker 1: getting so rich and they're locking you out of them.
Speaker 1: But because I'm in this system, because I'm a big
Speaker 1: part of this, I know how to get you all
Speaker 1: in the door I do. He would tell people like,
Speaker 1: I do two fifty million dollar deals four times a week.
Speaker 1: You know, It's totally routine for me. I know how
Speaker 1: to make I like I I can I I understand
Speaker 1: this business that they're trying to lock you out of,
Speaker 1: and I've got a way for you to get in
Speaker 1: with it. He would tell his marks things like this quote,
Speaker 1: I'm the only one with control. I'm the only one
Speaker 1: with a collateral account. I'm the one with a fiduciary bank.
Speaker 1: There are only seven or eight people in the world
Speaker 1: that can do all this. So basically it sounds like
Speaker 1: a Finn doom, doesn't he a little? Really does? He's like,
Speaker 1: I'm the one that holds the money. I got the
Speaker 1: only one that knows how this works. But he was
Speaker 1: so what he was doing though, This is where it
Speaker 1: gets kind of interesting. So he would he would start
Speaker 1: by pumping himself up as like, this is how how
Speaker 1: big a deal I am. This is the kind of
Speaker 1: money I work with, This is the kind of scale
Speaker 1: I work at and I'm I'm an integral part, one
Speaker 1: of seven or eight people who's a part of running
Speaker 1: these systems that are why the rich get rich, sure
Speaker 1: that you, the poor, are locked out of And then
Speaker 1: he would go into the second part of his spiel,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote from a write up in the
Speaker 1: News Tribute and a local Illinois paper explaining that spiel.
Speaker 1: With a nod to his Christian audience, he said, a
Speaker 1: vision from God came to him during a business trip
Speaker 1: in Hong Kong. It told him to help the little
Speaker 1: people and to do a big trade for humanitarian causes.
Speaker 1: For that, he had formed a company called Omega trust
Speaker 1: In Trading lt D. He was offering hard working people
Speaker 1: a chance to reap their share of the lord's storehouse.
Speaker 1: They could buy Omega units for a hundred dollars apiece
Speaker 1: under Hood's supervision. Each unit would roll for US two
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy five days with a fifty to one return.
Speaker 1: Investors could let it roll again for another two hundred
Speaker 1: seventy five days, again at fifty to one. After that
Speaker 1: they could do one more role. But that was all
Speaker 1: for onlookers. The math wasn't too hard to figure in
Speaker 1: less than three years, a hundred dollars could become twelve
Speaker 1: point five million dollars. So you see what you see
Speaker 1: what the scam is here. I've got acts. I I'm
Speaker 1: big in the system, the system that you're locked out of.
Speaker 1: But God told me to let you in. So individually,
Speaker 1: you each can't be a part of this because you
Speaker 1: don't have enough money. But if you all pull your
Speaker 1: money together, we can get put you in this fifty
Speaker 1: to one investment. And if you just let give your
Speaker 1: money to me for three or four years, it'll be
Speaker 1: millions of dollars that you know. What I like about
Speaker 1: this scamp is that in the beginning he says he's
Speaker 1: part of the problem. He does. I mean, he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm one of the eight people that's the problem. You
Speaker 1: can trust me. It's just such a blatant amount of
Speaker 1: honesty that I received that hustle. He was like, look,
Speaker 1: I am one of eight crooks that control the world.
Speaker 1: Obviously you can't be me, but do you want to
Speaker 1: trust me with all your money? Yeah? And it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where it's a very specific who this
Speaker 1: grift could work on is very specific. Right, this is
Speaker 1: only ever going to function for like, this is only
Speaker 1: ever going to function on a specific kind of conservative
Speaker 1: person right where they you tell them, I am a
Speaker 1: part of this tiny system of wealth and privilege that
Speaker 1: you have no chance of getting access to, that is
Speaker 1: made to profit to lock you out as the little people.
Speaker 1: But you don't hate me for that because you think
Speaker 1: you're you're still bought into that idea that having money
Speaker 1: in infer some sort of moral um high ground, right,
Speaker 1: that you've done something to earn it. So he's not
Speaker 1: he's he's really specifically grifting kind of conservative church going
Speaker 1: Midwesterners by saying, hey, um, I'm a part of this system.
Speaker 1: But I know you don't really hate the system. You
Speaker 1: just hate that you don't have access to it, and
Speaker 1: I I will give you access to it because God
Speaker 1: told me too. It's an interesting, interesting grift. It's kind
Speaker 1: of um, it's not completely different from what happened with
Speaker 1: the Wall Street that's thing, right with some of the
Speaker 1: way that was being framed to people of like these
Speaker 1: kind of investments, normally you can't get in. It's just
Speaker 1: the only hedge funds can do this thing. But we're
Speaker 1: going to crowdsource this thing that only hedge funds do
Speaker 1: and you'll make a bunch of money, and some people did,
Speaker 1: but more people lost money. Um, you know, it's that
Speaker 1: kind of grift um And I mean it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of a nice cocktail, right because you're like, you're bringing
Speaker 1: in like, yes, a few people control the world's finances.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you're mixing in a healthy dash of
Speaker 1: oh God chose me to help, you know, and you're
Speaker 1: mixing in the fear, the underlying fear of uh people
Speaker 1: that the only reason they're not rich is because they
Speaker 1: lack access, but not access in terms of like racism
Speaker 1: or systemic like no access in terms of literally one
Speaker 1: of the eight people being like you're a now, yeah,
Speaker 1: you just need to have the right rich friend and
Speaker 1: then everything will be fine for you, like and then
Speaker 1: then you can get rich. And it is also another
Speaker 1: way in which I guess it does kind of like
Speaker 1: you can see some sort of similarities. Walter bets you
Speaker 1: just have to put in a hundred bucks, right, And
Speaker 1: obviously they're trying to get people to put in more, right,
Speaker 1: because if your hundred dollars can turn into twelve point
Speaker 1: five million, what if you put in a thousand you'll
Speaker 1: be super rich, you know. Anyway, So I just have
Speaker 1: to say that me and my mom got suckered into
Speaker 1: am Way when we first moved here. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: imagine being like a new immigrant and someone is like,
Speaker 1: I know how I can prey on you. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really fucked up. And it's called the American Way, which
Speaker 1: I just think is so that's what am Way was
Speaker 1: designed to do, you know. Um, like people come here
Speaker 1: with a little bit of cash in their pocket and
Speaker 1: this dream of America as a opportunity. That's what was
Speaker 1: not a lot of cash. Yeah. Um. Also, my mom
Speaker 1: has like the worst social skills, so it was just
Speaker 1: really fun to have a woman that doesn't say goodbye
Speaker 1: before she hangs up, Um the phone that sell any
Speaker 1: think to anyone. I'm like, she doesn't know how to
Speaker 1: talk to her daughter. She's gonna befriend an American stranger.
Speaker 1: Amazing classic. So so far, I think this is an
Speaker 1: interesting grift because I'm interested in grifts, but this is
Speaker 1: a pretty run of the mill grift. I think thousands
Speaker 1: of American con artists have made bank off of variations
Speaker 1: of the same idea. Um, there's nothing totally groundbreaking here,
Speaker 1: although again I think it is neat. Clyde Hood did
Speaker 1: differentiate himself a bit with the kind of work that
Speaker 1: he put into his grift and what he did with
Speaker 1: the money. Um. In terms of the money, he used
Speaker 1: it to make his hometown mattoon like. He poured it
Speaker 1: all back into a lot of it back into the community.
Speaker 1: He would buy people houses and businesses um. And he
Speaker 1: did this to like launder the money right, Like, he
Speaker 1: would give people interest free loans and stuff um, which
Speaker 1: is smart because it may meant that everybody who lived
Speaker 1: around him uh supported him in his grift uh. And
Speaker 1: it also meant that he had a way to launder
Speaker 1: money um. Now, he was also a kind of labor
Speaker 1: full guy. He put the effort into making this look
Speaker 1: like official financial ship because again, his clients were low
Speaker 1: income Midwesterners who just if the forms looked right, they
Speaker 1: would assume this was an actual investment. He would send
Speaker 1: his investors official looking legal documents called private party loan agreements,
Speaker 1: which are not a thing um. But the people he
Speaker 1: was scamming didn't know that, and they got receipts that
Speaker 1: seemed very official, so they assumed it was legitimate. Clyde
Speaker 1: was also intelligent enough to portray his scam is not
Speaker 1: just another get rich quick scheme. He wasn't just offering
Speaker 1: people a sure thing investment opportunity. He was a crusader
Speaker 1: who had come from the murky waters of finance with
Speaker 1: special knowledge and a biblical command to free regular people
Speaker 1: from the bonds of debt, slavery, and paycheck to paycheck life.
Speaker 1: Clyde claimed his new goal was to quote keep the
Speaker 1: Lord's warehouse full. So he also told his marks that
Speaker 1: as a rich investment banker, he had access to a
Speaker 1: special investment system that was only available to the wealthy um.
Speaker 1: So again he was like letting you into this thing now.
Speaker 1: For the next few years, Omega spread by word of
Speaker 1: mouth all over North America. Hood and four of his
Speaker 1: friends acted as the ringleaders, connecting a network of roobs
Speaker 1: via direct phone conversations. Omega investors in seventeen area codes
Speaker 1: would regularly receive calls with prerecorded updates from Clyde on
Speaker 1: the status of their investment. Most of these calls focused
Speaker 1: on why the promised payouts were constantly delayed. For example,
Speaker 1: quote Omega has been interrupted due to some unforeseen financial conflicts,
Speaker 1: he said in a June third, nineteen phone message. These
Speaker 1: situations are those situations should be completed on June seventeenth, nineteen,
Speaker 1: and the banks will then continue to process your checks
Speaker 1: and credit cards. So he's just taking like voice like
Speaker 1: it's not even like an actual voicemail. It's like a recording. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a prerecorded voicemail to keep you up to date
Speaker 1: on your investment. And hey, when you love enough to
Speaker 1: do the very least, Yeah, sofa, he's he's a he's
Speaker 1: a solid grifter. Now this worked for a shockingly long time.
Speaker 1: People accepted the delays just as just more evidence that
Speaker 1: Clyde was a real hero. Right. The system is trying
Speaker 1: to stop him from getting us our money, Like, we're
Speaker 1: all in this together. We're fighting the system, and if
Speaker 1: we just keep holding out, um, eventually we'll break into
Speaker 1: the system. Now. The reality, of course, so similar and
Speaker 1: just way too similar to what's happened. I know it's
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's too much. It's very fun. I
Speaker 1: do like to picture him practicing recording those voice messages.
Speaker 1: Imagine being like, oh, no, I should have I got
Speaker 1: to invent a new thing. Let's see, like a hedge fund. Uh,
Speaker 1: hedge fund? Okay, which what should you do, like a
Speaker 1: like high hedge fund VP. Yeah, so the high Hedge
Speaker 1: Fund VP has recently told us about some complications in
Speaker 1: your account. Just pretty fun to imagine it. Yeah, yeah, Robert, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm just I'm just thinking about how this is
Speaker 1: going to keep happening forever, you know, but you know
Speaker 1: what else is going to keep happening forever. And it's
Speaker 1: also fun to imagine. I had to put both products
Speaker 1: and they're together. It was so cohesive, yes, Robert, products
Speaker 1: and services. Okay, well products, that's it. Oh, we're back.
Speaker 1: Well okay. So the reality, of course of this con
Speaker 1: was that Clyde and his collaborators were making bank stealing
Speaker 1: from a bunch of people who didn't have a whole
Speaker 1: lot of money to steal. Uh. He recruited salesman who
Speaker 1: would pitch Omega to new communities, and his most successful
Speaker 1: pitchman brought in sixty two a hundred thousand dollars per week.
Speaker 1: So they are fleecing a lot of people for a
Speaker 1: lot of money. Clyde avoided pitching two communities too close
Speaker 1: to his hometown in Illinois, because again, you don't want
Speaker 1: to ship where you eat, California and Texas where his
Speaker 1: biggest money making states, which should not surprise anyone. Washington.
Speaker 1: So nice choosing such big fucking states. I mean, like
Speaker 1: you're you don't want to grift in like South Dakota
Speaker 1: get shot four people in town. I've stolen all eight
Speaker 1: dollars in the community. Yeah, that's not even going to
Speaker 1: pay for my bus stake at home. Yeah, Washington State
Speaker 1: was his number three biggest mark, and it was there
Speaker 1: in that Candice Goodwin, who we talked about earlier, big
Speaker 1: fan of Nessa, became an investor. She lived near Yell, Washington,
Speaker 1: which is also where most of Omega's Washington investors lived.
Speaker 1: One resident whose mother's gave dollars declined later told reporters quote,
Speaker 1: it proliferated throughout this entire town. Another resident who donated
Speaker 1: or who invested and lost recalled it was just by
Speaker 1: word of mouth. Some friends of ours told us, and
Speaker 1: then we turned around to talk to other people about it.
Speaker 1: They already knew. And of course, the way that things
Speaker 1: work in these kind of communities, small communities, you convince
Speaker 1: one person you're legit, they'll tell their friends and it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: we all have this opportunity to get super rich. You know,
Speaker 1: fighting the system, let's do it. Let's you know, whatever
Speaker 1: you've got put in as much as you can, right,
Speaker 1: why not, it's a sure thing system. Fighting the system
Speaker 1: always results in a huge fucking cash cow at the end.
Speaker 1: That's the way fighting the system works. That's why activism
Speaker 1: was so lucrative. People fucking union leaders and all the
Speaker 1: people protesting just fucking l and union leaders do sometimes
Speaker 1: when wind up whirling in cash. But that's because of
Speaker 1: the mop Well I don't mean I guess leaders leaders.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of my friends who were yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: not like there's a difference between most unions and like
Speaker 1: Atlantic city unions. So the fact that this kind of
Speaker 1: proliferated through very savvy con artists in the network of
Speaker 1: savvy con artists reaching out to influential people in small
Speaker 1: communities and convincing them that they were the real thing.
Speaker 1: That's probably part of why it took the FEDS so
Speaker 1: long to realize that something was up. Um. The other
Speaker 1: part is that the Internet wasn't really a thing at
Speaker 1: this point in the same way that it is now. Right,
Speaker 1: it existed obviously in the late nineties, but you were
Speaker 1: not going to read small town people for a grift
Speaker 1: via the internet. Omega was sold hand to hand and
Speaker 1: people were strung along over phone calls to their landlines. Right,
Speaker 1: the artisanal grift and artisan grif Yeah, the whole foods
Speaker 1: of grift ing. Yeah, it's it's it's uh hand farmed
Speaker 1: to table grift ing. It's it's you know, grift local.
Speaker 1: I always say, um, support your local grifter. That's merge.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that is merge. Yeah. So the fact that
Speaker 1: like Omega was sold this way allowed also allowed Clyde
Speaker 1: and his fellows to trick very well educated and accomplished people.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about like a Nigerian prince email scam
Speaker 1: here where you shoot out a million emails and you
Speaker 1: hope you just kind of scam a couple of people,
Speaker 1: like right, you shoot out a bunch. This is very targeted,
Speaker 1: very um, there's a lot of effort going into this grift.
Speaker 1: One of the biggest marks that they found was a
Speaker 1: Seattle based tax attorney and a very successful tax attorney
Speaker 1: who gave Omega two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. So
Speaker 1: people who should have known better got caught into this ship. Right,
Speaker 1: you expect a tax attorney would know this is all lies,
Speaker 1: but he didn't. Um. The local New Age movement was
Speaker 1: absolutely critical to allowing Omega to spread through most of
Speaker 1: these little communities in Washington. The vector of infection seems
Speaker 1: to have been jay Z Night, a grew who claimed
Speaker 1: to channel Rampa the soul of a forty thousand year
Speaker 1: old warrior. Many Omega donors had heard about the opportunity
Speaker 1: through jay Z or through Rampha, who again jay Z
Speaker 1: she she channeled Ramtha right uh, and I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from the right up in the news Tribune here.
Speaker 1: Omega was an open secret secret at nights Rampa School
Speaker 1: of Enlightenment. For former students say they asked not to
Speaker 1: be named, citing the fear of legal retaliation from Night,
Speaker 1: who requires students to sign nondisclosure agreements. That's how I
Speaker 1: became involved in it was through the school, one student said,
Speaker 1: I was involved in it, and practically everyone else I
Speaker 1: knew what this school was involved in it. There were
Speaker 1: tons of people involved in this. On just a cash basis.
Speaker 1: People were sending in cash, cash, with no paperwork, no receipt,
Speaker 1: no nothing. People were promised their money was going to
Speaker 1: come in before the next snowfall. The students say Night
Speaker 1: never endorsed a promoted omega. Some are call her telling
Speaker 1: students to cultivate an abundance mentality if the promised fortunes
Speaker 1: ever came, which is again secret. Yeah it is, it is, right,
Speaker 1: And then that's jay Z Knight. We'll do a story
Speaker 1: on her at some point. Is a very skillful grifter, right,
Speaker 1: So she's already got people believing I have otherworldly, worldly
Speaker 1: wisdom that I'm channeling through the spirit of a forty
Speaker 1: year old like dead warrior prints. Right, And if you'll
Speaker 1: believe that, you'll probably be in a in a mindset
Speaker 1: where you might believe, oh hey, God told me to
Speaker 1: let you guys out on this rich people scam so
Speaker 1: that we can break the system. Right, it's not so
Speaker 1: much of a leap if you're already believed rab the exists.
Speaker 1: But also, jay z Knight isn't telling people to get
Speaker 1: involved in this because jay Z Knight, being a good grift,
Speaker 1: knows this is gonna come crashing down at some point. Right,
Speaker 1: So what she tells you is you have to cultivate
Speaker 1: an abundance mentality and then and then wealth will come
Speaker 1: to you. And if she's telling you that, while these
Speaker 1: people she's letting into her community are asking you to
Speaker 1: invest in this thing, you're going to pour all your
Speaker 1: money into it because that's the way people work. It's
Speaker 1: I love the way cross pollination works with grifts. This
Speaker 1: whole story is the story of a bunch of different
Speaker 1: grifts and conspiracy theories, all cross lanating with her within
Speaker 1: like sort of a cultic milieu. To use that term again.
Speaker 1: It's like essentially you're being fucked from two sides and
Speaker 1: you're getting sucking split like a roast turkey, except for
Speaker 1: that sounds rad and this sucks. It's rad. If you
Speaker 1: asked for it, it's all rad. If you thought you
Speaker 1: were coming over for dinner, Yeah, I mean it depends
Speaker 1: on your personality, I guess. But anyway, back to back
Speaker 1: to messera. So Candice Goodwin, also known as Shiny Goodwin
Speaker 1: s H A I n I. Goodwin, had attended classes
Speaker 1: at the Rama School in the late nineteen eighties. The
Speaker 1: school had opened in nineteen eighty eight, so Goodwin would
Speaker 1: have been one of the very first students. She started
Speaker 1: calling herself a channel er in the early nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: and when she got involved with Omega, she decided to
Speaker 1: do more than just invest money and wait for her return.
Speaker 1: Goodwin listened to the prerecorded regular messages Clyde sent out
Speaker 1: and thought, that's a pretty good idea. You can really
Speaker 1: get people strung along on a grip if you send
Speaker 1: the messages this way, if you're in their ear all
Speaker 1: the time. So she started putting out a newsletter called
Speaker 1: the Daily Dove and started calling herself the Dove of Oneness. Now,
Speaker 1: the reports that she sent out in this newsletter were
Speaker 1: initially focused on providing people with information about their Omega investments,
Speaker 1: and she was not directly affiliated with Omega. This is
Speaker 1: like she's like a Remora. She sees the successful grift
Speaker 1: and she attaches herself to it right um, which is
Speaker 1: another thing that starts to happen with the Omega grift
Speaker 1: and with we'll talk. There's a lot going on here. Um.
Speaker 1: So she called herself initially just another Omega investor, waiting
Speaker 1: for her prosperity deliveries like everyone else. She claimed to
Speaker 1: have direct dealings with Clyde and his other partners, but
Speaker 1: again she was not a part of their actual organization.
Speaker 1: She frequently alluded to secret information that she had been
Speaker 1: privy to with making statements like quote. Two new pieces
Speaker 1: of info suggest that important strides forward are being made.
Speaker 1: She wrote on March twenty, two thousand, you are well
Speaker 1: advised to get ready. I have person really been reprogramming
Speaker 1: my old ideas about prosperity so that I am ready
Speaker 1: to wisely steward this great abundance. So I want to
Speaker 1: pause here for a second and make a couple of comparisons.
Speaker 1: Number One, she's saying kind of the same things that
Speaker 1: Romptha saying, And she's a student of Rampa, both in
Speaker 1: terms of her spiritual beliefs and in terms of how
Speaker 1: she grifts people. But what's happening here with Omega is
Speaker 1: a lot like what you see happening with Q and On. Right,
Speaker 1: with Q and On, you have the people who started
Speaker 1: it and who have been keeping it going, who obviously
Speaker 1: have some sort of grift going on right, they benefit
Speaker 1: in some way from this. But then you have all
Speaker 1: these people like Praying medic who have like latched onto
Speaker 1: the grift and made money from it by doing like
Speaker 1: what she's doing. Right, they don't do newsletters so much anymore,
Speaker 1: because that's not the grift, but they have Twitter accounts
Speaker 1: and YouTube channels that they monetize telling people about this,
Speaker 1: basically latching onto this over grift and creating their own
Speaker 1: side grifts out of it. And that's that's I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say that what's happening with Omega right now
Speaker 1: is the first time that this happens, but it's the
Speaker 1: first time that it happens that I'm aware of in
Speaker 1: a way that it really resembles what we see happening
Speaker 1: with Q and on. I don't know if I'm going like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot happening here, so I understand if this
Speaker 1: is kind of confusing. Do you have any questions about like,
Speaker 1: what's going on at this stage? Oh my god, this
Speaker 1: gave me such a school flashback. Do you have any
Speaker 1: questions before we move on? Yeah? I mean, I think
Speaker 1: this is important because this is not always the way
Speaker 1: that grifts have worked in the United States. The fact
Speaker 1: that this is a mix of a you've got this
Speaker 1: financial con right, that's just about getting money from people,
Speaker 1: but the con wraps itself in this God gave me
Speaker 1: this message and we're fighting the system thing and then
Speaker 1: it gets caught up in this. I'm channeling the spirits
Speaker 1: of dead Warriors thing. And you have individuals who are
Speaker 1: not a part of the original grift latch onto it
Speaker 1: and start making money by selling information about the over grift.
Speaker 1: That's all very Q and on. That's very modern, and
Speaker 1: it's starting to happen here for the first time that
Speaker 1: I'm aware of in a really organized way. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean the combo. Yeah, but if you think about how,
Speaker 1: like I mean, God and grifting just go together absolutely,
Speaker 1: like TV spirituality and grifting. Yeah, tell, evangelists have been
Speaker 1: doing this forever, and even before that in person people
Speaker 1: were doing that forever, like come to my tent and
Speaker 1: I'll fucking fleece you for everything you got, and then
Speaker 1: I'm gonna throw in some supernatural stuff, show you how
Speaker 1: I just made someone walk, and like boom bam boom,
Speaker 1: like I've got absolute money. But yeah, combining it with
Speaker 1: all of this other stuff is what's like, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and combining it with this starts the guy who's initially
Speaker 1: grifting is trying to get small town Christian Midwesterners to
Speaker 1: give him money. So it's a very Christian grift. Ramatha
Speaker 1: is not a Christian grift right like that, Once you
Speaker 1: start channeling the spirits of debt and channeling aliens, all
Speaker 1: of this stuff comes into it. You have these two
Speaker 1: different segments intermingling, which is what again you're saying with
Speaker 1: Q and On. There's people who are part of Q
Speaker 1: who like the Q shaman. Right, that guy is not
Speaker 1: a traditional Christian grifter or whatever, like that guy believes
Speaker 1: some all some weird Norse pagan ship. But it all
Speaker 1: gets folded into the same over grift. It all gets
Speaker 1: to coexist within this space of unreality. Um. And that's
Speaker 1: why it's so Number one, it's why people who get
Speaker 1: pulled into that can be convinced of stuff like Nazism,
Speaker 1: because if you already accept all of this weird ship
Speaker 1: QU and on, you have to believe to be a
Speaker 1: part of the Q and On Grift, you're more open
Speaker 1: to that stuff. But it also it means that people
Speaker 1: of all different people who you would normally think would
Speaker 1: be enemies, right this the people who believe in this
Speaker 1: kind of there are aliens and I'm channeling dead spirits
Speaker 1: and like I've got like there's these aspects of Hindu mythology, right,
Speaker 1: you would expect those people wouldn't get along with the
Speaker 1: Pentecostal Christian grifting set, but they all can in this
Speaker 1: kind of cultic milieu, and I think that's really interesting.
Speaker 1: And this is the first time you really start to
Speaker 1: see that spin together in a in a cohesive way,
Speaker 1: and I think that's meaningful. You're totally right, And it
Speaker 1: also makes me think about the fact that like the
Speaker 1: things that it's really easy for people to like coalesce
Speaker 1: behind are like our children are in danger, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, UM, which has been like the thing
Speaker 1: that's been pushing things like or any of like any
Speaker 1: of those shows even that are like the mild version
Speaker 1: of like, we're scaring you about your kids, so you
Speaker 1: watch the show like that's the mildest version of that
Speaker 1: con but like Q and On and the Pizza gate
Speaker 1: Ship is like the high version, but it's all the
Speaker 1: same thing of like you have to be afraid for
Speaker 1: your children. And then the other thing that people really
Speaker 1: can fucking get behind is um money. If someone promises
Speaker 1: you money and how to get rich and become wealthy,
Speaker 1: then a ton of people who don't otherwise like agree
Speaker 1: on much could totally get behind that idea, Like if
Speaker 1: we're all getting money, I'll stand next to a Nazi.
Speaker 1: Fuck it. That's like the mentality, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's it's also I think you're really onto something when
Speaker 1: you talk about these few things that everyone can get behind,
Speaker 1: that makes it easier to get this wide variety to
Speaker 1: funnel people from a variety of sources. And one of
Speaker 1: them is your children are in danger, right um. Another
Speaker 1: of them is the system is fucking you, and I
Speaker 1: have a way to beat it, right um. And it's
Speaker 1: it's I think what the key is that everyone who
Speaker 1: isn't super rich knows the system is fucked, but a
Speaker 1: fairly small number of people are like, the system is fucked,
Speaker 1: and so we shouldn't have a system, right like, so
Speaker 1: so this system shouldn't exist. It's much easier to be like,
Speaker 1: the system is fucked, but hey, I got a way
Speaker 1: that we can we can become winners in it, right Like.
Speaker 1: All we have to do is stop the barriers that
Speaker 1: are stopping people like us from winning in the system.
Speaker 1: The problem isn't the system. The problem is the barrier
Speaker 1: for me winning the system that the Wall Street bet ship. Right,
Speaker 1: It's also communism. It's literally also communism, and it's like
Speaker 1: and it's most cynical a state. But yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: in the least cynical form. It's like, the reason we've
Speaker 1: been getting fucked as workers have no rights. The way
Speaker 1: to fuck the system is if workers all get together
Speaker 1: and the power of the working man will make the
Speaker 1: system fair. So it's like, not that it's always coming
Speaker 1: from like a bat shit fucked up. No, it's not.
Speaker 1: Because that's a fairly reasonable that might be the right
Speaker 1: way to fix society, but that that's hard and requires
Speaker 1: a kind of that requires not being the kind of
Speaker 1: individualists that Americans are. Because if you're telling if you're
Speaker 1: telling these these Midwesterns like, well you, if all of
Speaker 1: us get together and we all agitate for better conditions
Speaker 1: for everybody, um, that's what will actually fix the system.
Speaker 1: That's a lot harder of a cell for Americans. Then, Hey,
Speaker 1: the system is fucked because you're not able to win
Speaker 1: under it. I have a way you can win and
Speaker 1: then you don't have to care about other people so much.
Speaker 1: You know, that's doesn't say good things about us, But
Speaker 1: I think that's what's going on here, right. I think
Speaker 1: that's why it is hard to get Americans on board
Speaker 1: with the system is fucked. So workers need to take
Speaker 1: over the means of production and easy to get them
Speaker 1: to go. The system is fucked. I got a way
Speaker 1: that we can fun people under it, you know anyway? Um,
Speaker 1: So yeah, Shana Goodwin, Um, the Dove of Oneness starts
Speaker 1: side grifting off of this er grift that is the
Speaker 1: Omega investment opportunity thing of the Jake. So Goodwin was
Speaker 1: deeply influenced, as I've said, with a many aspects of
Speaker 1: the kind of cultic milieu that's forming in the United
Speaker 1: States at this time. And I've used that term a
Speaker 1: couple of times this episode. I used it in our
Speaker 1: lesson on the Satanic Panic. In case you haven't listened,
Speaker 1: I want to grab a definition from a right up
Speaker 1: by the American Institute for Economic Research that explains what
Speaker 1: the term cultic milieu means, because it's very important both
Speaker 1: for this and for what we're dealing with, and it
Speaker 1: sounds sexy. It is hot as funk right quote. This
Speaker 1: is a kind of subterranean world or counterculture with the
Speaker 1: whole range of ideas that are strongly opposed to conventional
Speaker 1: beliefs and knowledge. These included highly heterodox and unusual religious
Speaker 1: systems such as neopaganism or theosophy or Satanism, marginalized political
Speaker 1: ideologies such as neo Nazism, conspiracy theories and theories that
Speaker 1: rejected central elements of orthodox science, such as rejection of
Speaker 1: vaccination and modern medicine, or flat and hollow earth ideas,
Speaker 1: and again, everything that makes up a cultic meliu doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be complete bullshit. A lot of people get
Speaker 1: into this because they start learning about real shady conspiracies
Speaker 1: the CIA was involved in, and because those things are
Speaker 1: actually really wild and nuts, they they think anything is possible,
Speaker 1: and they they are able to buy into stuff that
Speaker 1: isn't true right that there isn't documentation of um. And
Speaker 1: it's you know, the failure of the mainstream media has
Speaker 1: a big part for why this is anyway. That's that
Speaker 1: that's a bigger, bigger story than we can talk about today. Um.
Speaker 1: But that's what's That's what SHANEA. Goodwin is kind of
Speaker 1: she's she's bubbling up from you know, the the Omega
Speaker 1: cult starts kind of in this it's just a very
Speaker 1: simple Christian Midwestern grift. She comes into it from more
Speaker 1: of a kookie West Coast. Uh counter quote. I believe
Speaker 1: in aliens, I believe in channeling thing, but at all
Speaker 1: they're they're all able to come together. So Omega had
Speaker 1: started from a position that its founder had some sort
Speaker 1: of hidden knowledge and that the payouts were being halted
Speaker 1: by a shadowy enemy, and this made it able to
Speaker 1: slot in perfectly with all sorts of other Culti American beliefs.
Speaker 1: Goodwin's Daily Dove updates included references to the ascended Masters,
Speaker 1: people who were once human but had cleared their karmaic
Speaker 1: debt and achieved enlightenment, as well as the dreaded Illuminati
Speaker 1: who were stopping people from getting their Omega payouts. Now,
Speaker 1: both of these concepts have been common in New Age
Speaker 1: circles before Omega, but they kind of get wrapped in
Speaker 1: and they also get sold to Christians in a in
Speaker 1: a big way. So the Master was in Buffy Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean again, this in the X Files pulls from
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff. Right, All of this is
Speaker 1: happening before Omega, but Omega is kind of where a
Speaker 1: lot of things start to boil together. So Rampa and
Speaker 1: his teachings obviously had a big impact on Goodwin. And
Speaker 1: when you dig into Rampa a bit it's clear that
Speaker 1: she had a well he, I guess Rampha is a
Speaker 1: hey jay Z Knight is a she. I think, so
Speaker 1: it's messy um. Rampa had a wide ranging impact. One
Speaker 1: nine six article I found in The New York Times
Speaker 1: quoted a former owner of a string of Burger Kings
Speaker 1: who claimed ramphis teachings had convinced him to give up everything,
Speaker 1: moved to northern California and build a pyramid. And I'm
Speaker 1: I'm broadly supportive of that, because it's probably better to
Speaker 1: build a pyramid in the woods than it is to
Speaker 1: own a bunch of Burger Kinks. But it doesn't hurt anyone,
Speaker 1: whereas Bigger King for sure does hurts a lot. Of
Speaker 1: Burger King is much more harmful than Wooden's pyramids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here.
Speaker 1: Among other things, Miss Knight's teachings include these precepts. God
Speaker 1: is not a remote entity, but an integral part of
Speaker 1: everything in the universe. Therefore, and himself is divine, and
Speaker 1: as such is able to create his own reality and
Speaker 1: achieve anything he desires. And in the absence of what
Speaker 1: miss Knight calls a judgmental God, you could never please.
Speaker 1: There is no sin and therefore no reason for human guilty.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. She had me in the beginning, and that
Speaker 1: is how this ship goes in the beginning. You yeah,
Speaker 1: this makes sense. And in the end of the way,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to do bad things. So you should never
Speaker 1: feel guilty for hurting people. Oh I think you might be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Miss Knight contends that cataclysmic events, not nuclear wars, but
Speaker 1: earthquakes and other natural catastrophes are likely to occur soon.
Speaker 1: As Ramtha. She warns that people should find a safe
Speaker 1: place to live, stockpile a two year food supply, and
Speaker 1: become self sufficient by planting their own gardens. Among the
Speaker 1: safest areas, he asserts, is the Northwest. Because her followers
Speaker 1: do not live in a single community and seldom have
Speaker 1: met one another. No one has determined how many people
Speaker 1: have moved west at her behest, but real estate agents
Speaker 1: and others who have observed the migration estimated number at
Speaker 1: five hundred and fifteen hundred people, many of them middle
Speaker 1: aged women. So that's interesting to me. And obviously cars
Speaker 1: on the table here. I moved to the Northwest because
Speaker 1: I'm afraid of a societal collapse, and for other reasons,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna move there just so I can funk all
Speaker 1: those cougars. Yeah, well past sugar time. I'm just saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. Um, Mama's gone eat tonight. Uh. I
Speaker 1: think what they're saying about the fact that Rampa is
Speaker 1: getting a bunch of these people to move to the
Speaker 1: Northwest because it's the safest place in the event of
Speaker 1: an apocalypse. This reinforces some of the things I'm saying
Speaker 1: about a cultic milieu, because Rampa's teachings about this, there's disaster,
Speaker 1: there's an apocalypse coming, this is the safe place, so
Speaker 1: you have to move here. In stockpile, that can easily
Speaker 1: lead people towards Nazis, because in this same period, the
Speaker 1: late eighties early nineties, a lot of Nazis who don't
Speaker 1: have wildly divergent cultic beliefs. Sometimes they're also saying, you
Speaker 1: need to move to the Northwest because it's the whitest
Speaker 1: part of the country and because the nuclear war is
Speaker 1: coming and if we're all together, we can create a
Speaker 1: white ethno state afterwards. Right. Um. And I'm not just
Speaker 1: like making this up because I'm always scared of Nazis.
Speaker 1: There's some evidence that jay Z Knight and thus the
Speaker 1: Rampha clet have some kind of Nazi adjacent beliefs. In
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen, video surface of jay Z Knight saying
Speaker 1: this quote, fuck God's chosen people. I think they have
Speaker 1: earned enough cash to have paid their way out of
Speaker 1: the goddamn gas chambers by now. So, okay, I am
Speaker 1: gonna leave her cult. Okay. I did not come here
Speaker 1: to be disrespected. Yeah, I said, good day, Please send
Speaker 1: me my check. You don't get checks from RAMA. The
Speaker 1: checks flow one way in the Ramphal Wait. But but
Speaker 1: is she white? Jesus, I don't even know. I didn't
Speaker 1: even check because I in my head, I just pictured
Speaker 1: jay Z every time you see her, that would be Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's white as hell. Yeah. Absolutely. She looks exactly like
Speaker 1: you'd expect. She looks like a side character on One
Speaker 1: Life to Live. I think a weird reference, Robert. My mom,
Speaker 1: My mom was there was always so whenever I'd be
Speaker 1: sick at home, soaps would be on. Google jay Z
Speaker 1: Night and tell me she does not look like a
Speaker 1: One Life to Live sidey. Hey, Robert, are these the
Speaker 1: days of our lives? I don't know it was. We
Speaker 1: were a one life to live family. You have allegiances,
Speaker 1: you are a soaped. But seriously, google here, tell me
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. I'm googling her right now, and it's j
Speaker 1: Z the two letters, not not how it's actually she
Speaker 1: came right up. She comes up as American teacher. That
Speaker 1: seems eating. That seems misleading. She does look like she
Speaker 1: doesn't look like what I expected. She looks like Paula Abdul,
Speaker 1: a lot of like Paula Abdul, one of those housewives
Speaker 1: from one of the house yes merged together. She's got
Speaker 1: major housewife face, got the housewife lip plump and fuck
Speaker 1: you bangs. Now, this doesn't directly tie into what we're
Speaker 1: talking about today, but I should note for context that
Speaker 1: also in two thousand and fourteen, whistleblowers revealed that jay
Speaker 1: Z Knight had spent years urging her most devoted followers
Speaker 1: to drink lie Oh my god, make money off of
Speaker 1: them after they're dead, dummy. You gotta mix it with
Speaker 1: ship then they don't quite die. It's like the bleach.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. I'm going to quote a right up
Speaker 1: by Q thirteen Fox here, which is a local fox affiliate.
Speaker 1: Alluding to the teachings at RAMPA, Former follower Virginda Coverdale said,
Speaker 1: we're more powerful than we realize. Our brain can do
Speaker 1: all sorts of things, quantum theory. These things are what
Speaker 1: excited me and a lot of other people that got involved.
Speaker 1: Coverdale said her family started Following Night more than three
Speaker 1: decades ago. She said members were encouraged to drink a
Speaker 1: concoction of dead seawater mixed with red devil lie to
Speaker 1: enlighten themselves. She said her mother and brother were among
Speaker 1: of those who drank the like incoction. This wasn't just
Speaker 1: a one time thing, Coverdale said. They We're taking it
Speaker 1: for five years, and Rampa at one point told them
Speaker 1: to chug it because it's not just a teaspoon in
Speaker 1: the morning. In the evening, people were losing their hair.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's so funny if I joined your
Speaker 1: cult and then I went bald. Yeah, because of the
Speaker 1: poison you made me drinking piste. See, this is why
Speaker 1: in my cult, all we make you chug is Highlands,
Speaker 1: all natural baby killing pills. The only kill I made
Speaker 1: my followers, but chug them. That's how I know they
Speaker 1: really loved me. See, you when I say it. It's
Speaker 1: funny when you say she doesn't like it, though. It's
Speaker 1: funny when you say it because Robert's face goes well, Oh,
Speaker 1: I missed making Robert blush in person. It was a
Speaker 1: delightful experience. It's such a sweet baby. Look at him.
Speaker 1: Uh shucks, he's blushed again. We we veered off track
Speaker 1: in a couple of ways here, um, and I hope
Speaker 1: this all hasn't been too confusing, because there's a lot
Speaker 1: to get out and like late nineties, early two thousands,
Speaker 1: conspiracy culture is one of the things that I love
Speaker 1: talking about the most, um. But it's it's it's messy.
Speaker 1: It's important though, because it is now mainstream Republican politics, um,
Speaker 1: and probably increasingly mainstream democratic politics too, unfortunately. So I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people are wondering, right now, what
Speaker 1: does this all have to do with NESSA what we
Speaker 1: started talking about at the top of the episode, right,
Speaker 1: we kind of lost that thread. We're getting there now.
Speaker 1: By nine, it was obvious to Clyde and his fellows
Speaker 1: who had started Omega, that the law was closing. In
Speaker 1: his prerecorded messages to his followers started filling with warnings
Speaker 1: of government interference from numerous individuals and entities who wanted
Speaker 1: to ensure his investments failed to pay out. When his
Speaker 1: marks would complain online about the fact that years had
Speaker 1: gone by without a promise payment, he would accuse them
Speaker 1: of being part of the conspiracy against Omega, or threatened
Speaker 1: them that by doubting him, they were hurting their chances
Speaker 1: of receiving their payout. Most Omega investors stayed on board.
Speaker 1: They kept putting in money right up to the end.
Speaker 1: Many of them mailed it wrapped in aluminum foil to
Speaker 1: prevent their shadowy enemies from seeing it. I know, that's
Speaker 1: that's some good ship, right, that's the ship we all love. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the millennium turned and the year two thousand came
Speaker 1: and for the last speake off, I wrap my vagina
Speaker 1: in foil um. I will never get raped because my
Speaker 1: vagina will be invisible. Uh, well, you won't get raped
Speaker 1: by the globalists. That doesn't seem worth it them, won
Speaker 1: Alex Jones. There's only about six thousand and of them.
Speaker 1: So yeah, no, that's not not really comprehensive protections. Do
Speaker 1: better with a thirty eight. Will put your vagina in
Speaker 1: a microwave? Self? No, but don't worry. Even without it,
Speaker 1: this ship's gonna blow up. I'm sorry, I'm not at hilarious.
Speaker 1: So by the year two thousand, Clyde Hood and his
Speaker 1: lieutenants had spent about six years grifting millions of dollars
Speaker 1: from you know, credulous people and putting it into their
Speaker 1: own bank accounts and into the small town of Mattune,
Speaker 1: which was doing quite well as a result of this grift.
Speaker 1: By two thousand, they'd taken at least twelve point five
Speaker 1: million dollars. This is the point at which federal law
Speaker 1: enforcement finally caught up with them and arrested Clyde, as
Speaker 1: well as ten other people in Matune, including the deputy sheriff,
Speaker 1: a former police officer, a minister, and a lawyer. Eight
Speaker 1: people who lived outside of the town were also arrested.
Speaker 1: The trial almost immediately went off the rails when prosecutors
Speaker 1: asked Clyde what fortune companies he'd worked for, because he
Speaker 1: had told people he'd worked for several Hood answered that
Speaker 1: he could not remember the names of the companies that
Speaker 1: he'd worked for, but stated that they were in the
Speaker 1: New York area or the Florida area, probably, which is
Speaker 1: an amazing response under oath, So you told investors you
Speaker 1: worked for multiple Fortune five hundred companies. Which were they, Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Probably they were in New York, maybe Florida.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. The New York Times chronicles just how bizarre
Speaker 1: the whole affair became. Quote in an especially odd aspect
Speaker 1: of the case, Mr Hood and two of the other
Speaker 1: defendants have apparently tried to assert that the United States
Speaker 1: government does not exist as a grand jury was convened.
Speaker 1: They mailed papers to prosecutors, court clerks, mattun police officers,
Speaker 1: the county sheriff, and the United States Supreme Courts stating
Speaker 1: that any judicial preceding determination, ruling, order, decree, entry, penalty, fine,
Speaker 1: or arrest warrants which issues from these courts is nolan void.
Speaker 1: Investigators also found identity cards with pictures and signatures of
Speaker 1: Mr Hood and another defendant, Lean Faust Diamond, a sixty
Speaker 1: three year old real estate and insurance agent from Los
Speaker 1: Angeles who solicited investments for Omega. The cards identified Mr
Speaker 1: Hood and Ms Diamond as Ambassador and Minister of Justice
Speaker 1: for the Free State of Eden. Prosecutors said Ms Diamond
Speaker 1: tried to use her card to claim a kind of
Speaker 1: diplomatic community and get out of submitting handwritten and fingerprint
Speaker 1: samples to the grand jury. Mr Hood testified in court
Speaker 1: on Thursday that he signed the card as a joke,
Speaker 1: since how about the irony of not acknowledging the United
Speaker 1: States and then sending paperwork to the United States Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: It is funny, right, I acknowledge that you're trying to
Speaker 1: get me to do something, but I also don't acknowledge
Speaker 1: you even though I'm sending you paperwork. I mean, And
Speaker 1: it's the same in the same way that like, sovereign
Speaker 1: citizenship wasn't part of Q and On at first, but
Speaker 1: got absorbed into it, and now a bunch of Q
Speaker 1: people will talk sovereign citizenship, just like a bunch of
Speaker 1: Black Israelites will talk sovereign citizenship. Right, it all, all
Speaker 1: of these things are infectious, no matter even though the
Speaker 1: original sovereign citizens were a lot of them were super
Speaker 1: racist and like not at all, like very big at
Speaker 1: it against black people. Also groups of like like like
Speaker 1: like black Israelites. Right that this like fringe cult that
Speaker 1: believes that like black people are the real Jewish people,
Speaker 1: and actual Jewish people are like it's some sort of
Speaker 1: like historic scam. There was a shooting based around this
Speaker 1: a year or two ago. Um and I think New
Speaker 1: Jersey a lot of those people get into sovereign citizen
Speaker 1: stuff because it doesn't matter how it started. It matters
Speaker 1: that once you're in that kind of like cult it
Speaker 1: conspiratorial mind state, you'll just suck all of this stuff in.
Speaker 1: It all seems more credible to you, because nothing that's
Speaker 1: credible is credible. It's a it's very frustrating. It's a
Speaker 1: big problem that we have as a civilization that we're
Speaker 1: not going to solve totally. And it's also like the
Speaker 1: same ship as the as every shitty politician who's like
Speaker 1: I am against big government while you're running for office
Speaker 1: against government. Okay, well why are you trying to get
Speaker 1: a government position then, you know, or like, oh I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get in, I'm gonna change it from the inside.
Speaker 1: I'm different. Yeah, you could even draw a line between
Speaker 1: what Clyde is doing. Right, I'm inside this big system,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to break it for you, the little people,
Speaker 1: to like what Trump was doing, where I'm going to
Speaker 1: run this big system to break it for you. You know,
Speaker 1: it god, I people come on. So Clyde eventually in
Speaker 1: court confessed to Omega being an elaborate con. He was
Speaker 1: asked by a federal prosecutor in two thousand one, did
Speaker 1: you get a vision, an actual vision from the Lord?
Speaker 1: And he said in court no, I did not um
Speaker 1: he he was. He was asked, did you ever work
Speaker 1: for a fortune company as a trader? He answered no,
Speaker 1: And he was asked what is Omega? And he said,
Speaker 1: it is a scam, so you had. Finally, in the
Speaker 1: end of this court case, Clyde hood admit that the
Speaker 1: whole thing was a con the entire time. Uh. He
Speaker 1: admitted to being a liar in court was sentenced to
Speaker 1: fourteen years in prison. The Feds confiscated money from him
Speaker 1: and property from him that he and his co defendants
Speaker 1: had accumulated, and they did attempt to redistribute it to
Speaker 1: his victims. Now, a number of people tried, like filed
Speaker 1: to receive restitutions, stated what they donated, try to get
Speaker 1: some money back from the Feds, but more. But the
Speaker 1: more people the Feds reached out to that Clyde had conned,
Speaker 1: the more they ran into a peculiar situation. Many, if
Speaker 1: not no they didn't want their money back, not because
Speaker 1: they were embarrassed. And this is where Shaney Goodwin, the
Speaker 1: dove of oneness, re re enters the story. See. The
Speaker 1: arrest of everyone involved in Omega didn't stop her from
Speaker 1: sending out her newsletter, and it didn't destroy her faith
Speaker 1: in Omega either. On the day of the arrests, she
Speaker 1: sent this out to her followers. Tonight, we were told
Speaker 1: by a very high intelligence agency source that this whole
Speaker 1: thing in Illinois has been staged to try to stop funding. However,
Speaker 1: this case in Illinois totally lacks in any ability to
Speaker 1: stop funding. It is almost a comedy because the whole
Speaker 1: case will disappear instantly, very soon. In all caps, she
Speaker 1: continued to assure people that their promised financial returns were
Speaker 1: still coming. Clydes arrest was yet another attempted by the
Speaker 1: evil people in power to stop thousands of real Americans
Speaker 1: from getting rich. The Feds who were reaching out to
Speaker 1: pay them back the money that they had lost were
Speaker 1: part of the conspiracy, and if they accepted the repayment
Speaker 1: of their investment, they would never get the millions of
Speaker 1: dollars that they were actually owed. Oh boy, people are
Speaker 1: giving you a chance to not be stupid idiot. Just
Speaker 1: take the goddamn chance. No, of course not. This is
Speaker 1: the FEDS trying to trick me, but giving me back
Speaker 1: my money. I'm not gonna fall for it. Isn't that
Speaker 1: so good? People only trick you to take your money.
Speaker 1: No one ever tricks you to give you money. That's
Speaker 1: literally leaving money in the FBI's hands, which just so fun.
Speaker 1: It's so amazing. So the news Tribunes summarizes the dove
Speaker 1: of oneness is message messages immediately before and after the
Speaker 1: bus quote as dove, She cited information from unnamed sources
Speaker 1: and described secret struggles among the world's financial elites, beginning
Speaker 1: sentences with I have been told, She said, a major
Speaker 1: European bank had come to Omega's rescue, but a major
Speaker 1: US bank was fighting the program with every trick and
Speaker 1: delay possible. U s Supreme Court justices were on Omega's side.
Speaker 1: An important judge from the East Coast was fighting on
Speaker 1: their behalf. A group she called the White Knights was
Speaker 1: waging war against powerful enemies she began to call the
Speaker 1: Dark Agenda. Between such ominous reports, she called for group
Speaker 1: prayers and positive thinking. She were linked the instructions that
Speaker 1: explained how to handle large sums of money when they arrived.
Speaker 1: She talked about how she would spend her own money
Speaker 1: when she received it. She would give large gifts to
Speaker 1: humanitarian causes. So you see what's happening here, right, this
Speaker 1: is this is cue and on ship there's the white Knights,
Speaker 1: these good people inside the intelligence agencies, inside the banks.
Speaker 1: They're trying to get your money to you. They're fighting this,
Speaker 1: but there's the dark Agenda is trying to fight them.
Speaker 1: There's this epic battle occurring on your behalf at levels
Speaker 1: you don't know. But I have secret insight too, and
Speaker 1: that's why you need to subscribe to my newsletter and
Speaker 1: give me money. It's cute. Why the knight's got to
Speaker 1: be white though? Yeah, I mean I don't think she
Speaker 1: anticipated what internet culture would do to the term white knight,
Speaker 1: but so uh, it's about that time again. You know
Speaker 1: who are white knights secretly fighting from within the immoral
Speaker 1: system on your backs? That's right, that's right, the ultimate
Speaker 1: white Knights. I don't like this phrasing at all. I
Speaker 1: love phrasing. I love products and services. They love you too, Robert.
Speaker 1: They don't kisses for ads ah, and we're back. We're back,
Speaker 1: and we're all just having a grand time. I love
Speaker 1: to be bamboozled. I I love it too. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the FEDS were aware of the dove of oneness, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: They were also aware that a lot of people with
Speaker 1: no affiliation with Omega had started selling investment opportunities using
Speaker 1: Omega's materials, and this continued in some extent after a
Speaker 1: bunch of Omega people went to prison. Jay z Night
Speaker 1: Slash Ramtha was very likely one of those people, but
Speaker 1: we don't really know if she or her cult profited
Speaker 1: directly by getting their members to invest, and the FEDS
Speaker 1: opted not to even investigate this. One prosecutor said, we
Speaker 1: knew that there were more people associated with her that
Speaker 1: apparently had invested in Omega, but that was not an
Speaker 1: angle we wanted to pursue because apparently it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to pursue that angle, which doesn't really mean anything other
Speaker 1: than you were scared that it was going to create
Speaker 1: too much of a backlash to go after all these
Speaker 1: weird culti organizations, and so you let this thing fester um,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, pretty on brand. We're seeing it
Speaker 1: now with the capital so when everyone at Omega went
Speaker 1: to prison, the Dove of Oneness was still out there,
Speaker 1: speaking to a growing audience of people who wanted to
Speaker 1: believe that vast riches were headed their way really any
Speaker 1: day now. Uh. And those people wanted to believe in this,
Speaker 1: wanted to believe that a day was coming when they
Speaker 1: would be rich more than they actually wanted the money
Speaker 1: they'd invested back, because that amount of money wouldn't make
Speaker 1: them rich, you know, they wanted the hope. That's really
Speaker 1: what the once Omega, the actual grift collapses, the people
Speaker 1: like the Dove of Oneness who are latching onto it.
Speaker 1: That's what they keep selling these people is the idea
Speaker 1: that no, no, no, you're still going to get rich.
Speaker 1: You just have to be patient, trust the plan and
Speaker 1: stay calm and you'll get your money. So at this point,
Speaker 1: get fucking fisted. Not really a good plan. I nah,
Speaker 1: it's a shame. So, now that they were untethered from Clyde,
Speaker 1: the Dove of Oneness took a scam that had already
Speaker 1: always relied on religious imagery and started building it into
Speaker 1: a holy war. So she starts off as like again
Speaker 1: like a Remora parasite, leaching off of this scam, but
Speaker 1: once the core scam collapses, she spins her side scam
Speaker 1: into a whole new thing. Um and this is kind
Speaker 1: of where Nessa comes back into the story. On July seventeenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand, she wrote this in one of her newsletter updates.
Speaker 1: I know that I am receiving information because the divine
Speaker 1: power behind getting Omega to us all once the group
Speaker 1: prayers to continue. So I have been given a message
Speaker 1: of passing on as much information as I can without
Speaker 1: jeopardizing the safety of the processes for our benefit. She
Speaker 1: continued to share her growing following that the payouts were imminent.
Speaker 1: She told people that the prosperity deliveries were coming any day, um.
Speaker 1: Over and over. She told Omega investors that prosperity deliveries
Speaker 1: would arrive any day. She and others sometimes referred to
Speaker 1: Omega in a kind of typewritten code, mixing numbers and numerals,
Speaker 1: calling it OH or the Big OH. On July ever
Speaker 1: made anyone come in that in that group. On July
Speaker 1: two thousand, she said members of the Big Program with
Speaker 1: the the O and program with a zero could expect
Speaker 1: deliveries by July thirty one. On August four, she said
Speaker 1: deliveries were imminent. On August seven, she said deliveries were
Speaker 1: scheduled for the end of the week. And then in
Speaker 1: two thousand one, the best thing ever happened. Do you
Speaker 1: know what that was, Sophia nine eleven? It was nine eleven.
Speaker 1: You're right, that was the best thing ever for for
Speaker 1: the Deaf of Oneness and her cult. I mean, I
Speaker 1: feel like you're setting me up for a trap there,
Speaker 1: because now there's literally record of me saying that the
Speaker 1: best thing ever in two thousand one was eleven. But
Speaker 1: just that audio, I know, But really it's that it's you, Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I too, m m m, A cultic manipulator. Sony eleven
Speaker 1: was a bad day for most people, but if you
Speaker 1: were all Quita, a whale or a new age conspiracy grifter,
Speaker 1: it was money. Christmas, the Dove of Oneness immediately knew
Speaker 1: how to profit off of this tragedy, and she lost
Speaker 1: no time in blasting out a post nine eleven newsletter.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote now from a wonderful write up
Speaker 1: in Logically, which discusses the history of nessra and heavily
Speaker 1: sights Sean Robinson's two thousand four article for The News Tribute,
Speaker 1: which we've used earlier as a source quote. On September eleven, two,
Speaker 1: one mere hours after the World Trade Center in Pentagon attacks,
Speaker 1: Dove posted the message that made her a star. The
Speaker 1: three targets today we're all connected to ness Era and
Speaker 1: the banking changes. I learned just learned that at nine
Speaker 1: am in New York this morning, there was an important
Speaker 1: banking activities set to be activated in the I m
Speaker 1: F Nation International Banking Computer Center in the World Trade Center.
Speaker 1: This was obviously why the World Trade Center was attacked
Speaker 1: today at just before and after nine am. The orders
Speaker 1: for those plate attacks came from US citizens who are
Speaker 1: trying to stop our deliveries slash the funding of ness Era.
Speaker 1: So what Goodwin does. She She comes becomes aware of
Speaker 1: nessar in the late nineties, and while it had originally
Speaker 1: just been this one guy's plan for how to fix
Speaker 1: the economy, she turns it into she she ties it
Speaker 1: to Omega and says that like ness Era is, this
Speaker 1: is this plan to fix the economy for the little
Speaker 1: people that's tied in with Omega, and it was about
Speaker 1: to be instituted on September eleven, and then the government
Speaker 1: flew planes into those towers to stop you people from
Speaker 1: getting your money. And of course, as Robinson noted, Goodwin's
Speaker 1: legion of followers bought into her story and Moss prompted
Speaker 1: by Goodwin, they would go on to send letters, postcards,
Speaker 1: and emails to the U. S. Supreme Court, the Pentagon Congress,
Speaker 1: to international justice organizations. They would stand at protests, wave banners,
Speaker 1: pass out flyers, and hold demonstrations on three continents demanding
Speaker 1: the announcement of a secret law that did not exist.
Speaker 1: See the deaf of one that started telling people that
Speaker 1: not only like NESSRA was not just some guys planned
Speaker 1: for how to fix the economy, it was a law
Speaker 1: that Congress had secretly voted to approve, and that the
Speaker 1: nine eleven attacks had been carried out in order to
Speaker 1: stop from being instituted. And it's all very frustrating. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: uh So, during my research into this, I came across
Speaker 1: a very interesting two thousand five documentary called Waiting for
Speaker 1: ness Era. It covers a chunk of this and it
Speaker 1: mostly focuses around a small group of NESSRA believers in
Speaker 1: Salt Lake City, Utah. The documentary is technically kind of rough.
Speaker 1: The audio is particularly crewed by modern standards, but I
Speaker 1: think it's a pretty priceless documentation of a lot of
Speaker 1: the problems currently tearing this nation apart when they were
Speaker 1: still in an embryonic stage. Interviews with these Utah believers
Speaker 1: give insight into how most of the people influenced by
Speaker 1: the Dove of Oneness interpreted her newsletters. By the time
Speaker 1: this was filmed, something like three and fifteen thousand people
Speaker 1: received her weekly newsletter updates talking about Nessra and Omega
Speaker 1: and the shadowy fight of the White Knights to save
Speaker 1: you know, the little people and get them their money
Speaker 1: and stuff. Just needed to get into Harry Potter or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, these were probably people who thought Harry Potter
Speaker 1: was demonic. Um. So. One of the guys they interview
Speaker 1: in this documentary is a former Republican fringe congressional candidates,
Speaker 1: and he states his belief that the Dove of Oneness
Speaker 1: is a former intelligence agency employee and has deep connections
Speaker 1: to the intelligence apparatus and is trying to like one
Speaker 1: of Again, this is a good person in the intelligence
Speaker 1: system that's trying to bring us the truth. Now, the
Speaker 1: White Hats are interpreted by most believers in the documentary
Speaker 1: as being members of the military and the government fighting
Speaker 1: to save America from the evil conspiracy that has overtaken it. Again,
Speaker 1: it's all Q and On ship like you. Many Nessa
Speaker 1: believers felt that it was part of a divine plan.
Speaker 1: Most of the Utah believers felt the whole Omega plan
Speaker 1: had been initially cooked up by St. Germain, who was
Speaker 1: like a Catholic saint who had died two fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: So this gets added to it that like the money
Speaker 1: that is going to come to you because started from
Speaker 1: an investment fund that this Catholic state saint started two
Speaker 1: and fifty years ago, and that's going to make everyone
Speaker 1: in the world rich. But the powers that be don't
Speaker 1: want you to know about it. And that's why nine
Speaker 1: eleven happened, right, It all mutates and gets Oh my god,
Speaker 1: that was the most complicated sentence. I know. I know,
Speaker 1: there's so much going It's like with Q and On stuff.
Speaker 1: When you actually try to unravel all this, like everything
Speaker 1: gets so intermingled and just wild, and all I keep
Speaker 1: thinking is that these people just like needed a hobby.
Speaker 1: They needed that. That's that's really where conspiracy starts. It's
Speaker 1: a mix of people needing a hobby, having the free
Speaker 1: time for a hobby, and also having the understanding that
Speaker 1: everyone does that something is wrong, right, and they're not
Speaker 1: going to try to like fix their community by doing like,
Speaker 1: you know, acts of service and I don't know, volunteering somewhere. No,
Speaker 1: that would be like an actual way you can literally
Speaker 1: improve the world around you well, and doing that, you're
Speaker 1: not going to be the special hero, right if you're
Speaker 1: part of a huge group of people trying to agitate
Speaker 1: in the streets, uh for for societal change, if you're
Speaker 1: like actually doing the hard work of activism, it's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are all willing to like work
Speaker 1: as part of a collective to try to improve the world.
Speaker 1: And there's not really a lot of heroes in that,
Speaker 1: you know, like not a lot of like it's heroic
Speaker 1: to do that, But it's not the same as feeling
Speaker 1: like I am one of a small number of people
Speaker 1: who have special knowledge and that makes me better than
Speaker 1: everyone who doesn't have that special knowledge. Right. It's again
Speaker 1: this this kind of cult of individualism, Like that's why
Speaker 1: this is so much more appealing to so many more
Speaker 1: people than actually advocating for positive change. What we really
Speaker 1: need is like some sort of a fake club, you know,
Speaker 1: like commensa for these people where we can like just
Speaker 1: send them like trophies and certificates every month and just
Speaker 1: being like, oh, my fucking god, you just broke a
Speaker 1: new record for being alive, tim or whatever. Tell them that,
Speaker 1: like they'll get millions of dollars for donating to this
Speaker 1: or for investing, but actually they're just funding a mutual
Speaker 1: aid soup kitchen. They're gonna get grifted either way. They
Speaker 1: might as well bite food for poor people exactly, like
Speaker 1: like tell them the money's for something else, and like
Speaker 1: they're only being asked for it because they're like part
Speaker 1: of an elite group of people and they just keep
Speaker 1: sending them different awards and trophies. And it's like I
Speaker 1: think if they each had a room full of awards
Speaker 1: and trophies like that might really keep them off the streets.
Speaker 1: That might really keep them off the streets. Yeah, we do,
Speaker 1: like the Time magazine thing. We send them each a
Speaker 1: magazine with their face on it when they donate, you know,
Speaker 1: the first thousand dollars to a soup kitchen or something that. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: Time magazine covers. Maybe we can like have them like
Speaker 1: cut ribbons with giant scissors at places that have already
Speaker 1: been open, but like they don't know. Just get to
Speaker 1: a park early, you know, in the morning, and be like,
Speaker 1: you're opening this park. This parks you because of all
Speaker 1: of the money you invested, You're going to be a
Speaker 1: rich in ten years. Don't worry. You really have something here.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've always known we were going to be
Speaker 1: called leaders. This could be how we do it. This
Speaker 1: could be how we do it. So one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I find this Waiting for Necessary documentary interesting is
Speaker 1: that it shows that like Q and On, Nessara was
Speaker 1: capable of drawing in people from across the political spectrum.
Speaker 1: That former Republican president or congressional candidate who described himself
Speaker 1: as far right but also celebrated that Nesser was going
Speaker 1: to force President George Bush out of office, stop the
Speaker 1: war in Iraq, and make Clinton the president again, which
Speaker 1: is also kind of evidence of how different politics were
Speaker 1: in those times. Um I didn't see hatred against the
Speaker 1: left or Democrats or Republicans really. Instead, it seemed to
Speaker 1: be filled but fueled by a gut feeling that the
Speaker 1: system was rigged and regular people deserved something like Nessaret
Speaker 1: to save them from a fundamentally unjust system. I know
Speaker 1: regular people are getting screwed because I'm one of them.
Speaker 1: I want to believe that me and the other people
Speaker 1: like me are all going to get rich and not,
Speaker 1: you know, think that maybe the whole system is fundamentally
Speaker 1: flawed in a number of ways. So uh yeah. For
Speaker 1: about two years or so, Nessar was a big deal
Speaker 1: in the wackadoo world of New Age nonsense. It got
Speaker 1: big enough that the actual mind behind the real Nassara,
Speaker 1: Harvey Barnard, found out about it, and he did his
Speaker 1: best to push back against this tide of disinformation, publishing
Speaker 1: a note to the nessar a website that said, if
Speaker 1: you believe any of that, you might want to start
Speaker 1: looking for ocean front property in Nebraska. Now. The fact
Speaker 1: that the guy who had actually come up with Nassara
Speaker 1: was telling people, no, it's not it's not what you
Speaker 1: think it is. It's like an economic reform policy. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to make everybody rich. Um. The fact that
Speaker 1: he was specifically saying they had it wrong meant nothing.
Speaker 1: In fact, remained significant up through two thousand four, when
Speaker 1: dozens of followers were spotted at an anti Iraq war
Speaker 1: protest waving sign nds with NESSA written on them. It
Speaker 1: started to fall out of vogue out after the invasion
Speaker 1: because in part a lot of the like. One of
Speaker 1: the ways that the necessary conspiracy evolved is that the
Speaker 1: Iraq invasion is never going to happen. The white hats
Speaker 1: are going to stop it. Bush is going to be
Speaker 1: forced out of office, The truth about nine eleven is
Speaker 1: going to be revealed, and the real America is going
Speaker 1: to be saved by the monsters who ran things. And then,
Speaker 1: of course we invade Iraq, and interest in NESSA falls
Speaker 1: off after that. But NESSARA limped along and it never
Speaker 1: quite died out entirely. In two thousand eleven, someone started
Speaker 1: a We the People petition becking President Obama to institute NESSA.
Speaker 1: Here's what the petition claimed it would do. Number one
Speaker 1: zero's out all credit card, mortgage and other bank debt.
Speaker 1: Number two abolishes the income tax. Number three creates a
Speaker 1: fourteen percent flat rate non essential new items only sales
Speaker 1: tax revenue for the government. Uh Number four increases benefits
Speaker 1: to senior citizens. Number five returns constitutional law to all courts.
Speaker 1: Number six monitors elections and prevents the legal election activities
Speaker 1: of special interest groups, and number seven creates a new
Speaker 1: US Treasury currency backed by gold, silver, and platinum precious metals.
Speaker 1: The petition got six thousand, six twenty three signatures, while
Speaker 1: above the five thousand signature threshold necessary to earn a
Speaker 1: White House response. A very polite white Hose White House
Speaker 1: Aid wrote, thank you for signing this petition. We appreciate
Speaker 1: your participation in the We the People platform on white
Speaker 1: House dot gov. The proposals in the National Economic Security
Speaker 1: and Reformation Act have not been introduced in Congress, and
Speaker 1: the Obama administration cannot implement a law that has not
Speaker 1: been passed because again, the whole part of the conspiracy
Speaker 1: is that the law was passed secretly and they can't
Speaker 1: tell you that, and nine eleven was carried out to
Speaker 1: stop it from being enacted. Anyway. I just love how
Speaker 1: gentle that White House Aid was. Um they were like yeah,
Speaker 1: they were just so gently, like, um hey, it was
Speaker 1: like explaining something to a child. It's like, hey, um, laws, Okay.
Speaker 1: The way laws were is they have to be past. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have to exist first. And it's sweet that they
Speaker 1: didn't like talk down to them, which is like, you know,
Speaker 1: they could have been like, if you have any understanding
Speaker 1: of the government whatsoever, you would know that this is
Speaker 1: fucking bullshit. But they were like, no, sweetheart, it was
Speaker 1: very sweet, honey, I'm sorry. Is something that gets past
Speaker 1: and it was just not condescending. And I really if
Speaker 1: he included a link to the Schoolhouse Rock video on
Speaker 1: how a bill comes last, just like amen, Amen, meant
Speaker 1: to be. But the sad thing about this is this
Speaker 1: beautiful white House Aid is clearly a person who still
Speaker 1: falsely believes that the actual nature of reality matters at all,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't. It just doesn't anymore. We all should
Speaker 1: accept that now, right, reality does not matter. What matters
Speaker 1: is what you can convince people to believe. As long
Speaker 1: as they have weapons, All that matters is what the
Speaker 1: most people with weapons believe. That's the way it is,
Speaker 1: That's the way it's always worked. This sweet, sweet, beautiful
Speaker 1: idiot thought that truth mattered, and I'm sorry, I mean
Speaker 1: it did for a couple more years after that, but
Speaker 1: even then, by two thousand and ten, it was it
Speaker 1: was terminal. The truth cancer was was had metastasized. So
Speaker 1: for a while, that petition seemed like the last gasp
Speaker 1: of a dying conspiracy theory. But conspiracies never quite die
Speaker 1: all the way. They just get folded into other conspiracies.
Speaker 1: Nessa laid dormant until the Trump era, when a conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorist president and the burgeoning qan On cult provided it
Speaker 1: with an opportunity to feed and grow again. And now
Speaker 1: the Nessary conspiracy, which started out as a remora on
Speaker 1: the Omega grift and then turned into its own conspiracy,
Speaker 1: started attaching itself romor alike to the q and On conspiracy.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible ecosystem when you understand it. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Uh from logically quote. Every few years, Nessara rears its
Speaker 1: ugly head, often coinciding with times of economic hardship and
Speaker 1: often accompanied by its global counterpart, the JESSEA Global Economic
Speaker 1: Security and Recovery Act. Has managed to merge with other
Speaker 1: current conspiracy theories that revolve around the baseless and pro
Speaker 1: Trump q and On, where supporters have co opted the
Speaker 1: global reset narrative to announce that a new era of
Speaker 1: debt forgiveness and monetary reform well cash would be replaced
Speaker 1: with a gold back cryptocurrency would be imminently ushered in
Speaker 1: by none other than Trump. The fact that Barnard's book
Speaker 1: has the same name as Trump's electron mantra Drain the Swamp,
Speaker 1: maybe a coincidence. But the Q and on supporters it
Speaker 1: reads like evidence o God, just because it's one of
Speaker 1: the most trite political phrases used and overused for like decades. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like if I, like, if I was like WHOA,
Speaker 1: someone wrote a song about love, and so did I.
Speaker 1: This means we're cosmically connected. It's like all the songs
Speaker 1: are about love, so probably not all every songs about love.
Speaker 1: It's the only thing is people write songs about our
Speaker 1: love and whatever Holy divers about so no I know.
Speaker 1: And then there's that one about the data on a set,
Speaker 1: the sad one about the dad and his son. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the sad sad one about the dad and his son. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of about or whatever. The criddle and the
Speaker 1: seal of Schoon Son will be together Scott really really fast, guys.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah. Logically went to the trouble of analyzing
Speaker 1: the popularity the change in popularity of Nessa and Jessa
Speaker 1: over the course of uh their analysis of posts using
Speaker 1: both terms on Facebook over the last twelve months of
Speaker 1: that year showed a significant bump in the number of
Speaker 1: interactions he can get eighty five thousand point two interactions
Speaker 1: by the end of May. Of early posts were from
Speaker 1: a curious mix of New Age mysticism, pro Trump and
Speaker 1: nesse groups and upology pages pages that are now finding
Speaker 1: unlikely common ground under the q and on banner. Posts
Speaker 1: listed as having the most interactions from the last few
Speaker 1: months showed just that Q and on groups, right wing
Speaker 1: Christian ministries talking about Trump decreeing a move to a
Speaker 1: gold backed currency, and a general air of q and
Speaker 1: on theories permeating the aforementioned group. What is astonishing is
Speaker 1: the global reach of the theory. Posts in English, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Greek,
Speaker 1: and Malay are all present in the top fifty most
Speaker 1: influential Facebook posts on the topic. Many of these posts
Speaker 1: have been shared thousands of times. Analysis on Twitter told
Speaker 1: a similar story. From mid June this year, Nessra and
Speaker 1: Jessa was the top of three hundred and thirty four thousand,
Speaker 1: nine hundred twelve tweets, coming from a pick and mix
Speaker 1: of star Seeds, cryptocurrency gurus, and a Smorgess board of
Speaker 1: q and On accounts at various levels of dedication, all
Speaker 1: tweeting with excitement about the inevitable global reset and a
Speaker 1: variety of languages. The standard Q and On fair of
Speaker 1: reading into anything from the background of Trump suppress releases
Speaker 1: is uses proof that debt forgiveness is on its way.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of where we are now, Sylvia. We
Speaker 1: can't even get a fucking these motherfucker's talking forgive. It's
Speaker 1: amazing that they think that Congress is secretly passing all
Speaker 1: these laws to fix everything, and that's some shadowy cabal
Speaker 1: is hiding it from you, but also the actual shady
Speaker 1: bastards who were in charge of the country can't even
Speaker 1: get you four hundred dollars y'all done by fuck. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 1: it's so good. It's it's very fun. So I am
Speaker 1: optimistic about the future. How are you feeling? I feel
Speaker 1: like it makes me feel like I'm a piece of
Speaker 1: ship because then I'm like, I feel like I can
Speaker 1: be a better cult leader, and you can have better
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories and these other people, and then I'm like, Sophia,
Speaker 1: why do you want to get in this game? Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's just like when you see really shitty people doing
Speaker 1: stand up, Like I've been doing stand up for ten years,
Speaker 1: and occasionally when I think of quitting, I just think
Speaker 1: about all the shitty people I know who still do it.
Speaker 1: And I was like, Sophia, you can't quit when these fucking,
Speaker 1: terribly unfunny people are still doing it. And that's how
Speaker 1: I feel. Uh yeah, So I don't need to get
Speaker 1: involved in the conspiracy theory game. But every time I
Speaker 1: hear you talk about how dumb this is, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I need to do it better. Yeah. I mean we could, Sophia,
Speaker 1: we could be we could be heroes and heroes, we
Speaker 1: could steal a lot of money from dumb people. I mean,
Speaker 1: if we could just control what kind of dumb people,
Speaker 1: then maybe I would do it. Yeah. That's the problem is,
Speaker 1: no matter what, you're going to wind up destroying the
Speaker 1: lives and livelihoods of people who are basically nice, just
Speaker 1: the sweet people. Well, and it's just the problem is that,
Speaker 1: you know, I get angry at the people who buy
Speaker 1: into this stuff. I want to I want to mock
Speaker 1: them and insult them. There's even a part of me
Speaker 1: that wants to like people are doing some liberals are
Speaker 1: doing with Texas right now that wants to be like, you,
Speaker 1: motherfucker's brought this on yourself by not just buying into
Speaker 1: this bullshit but being like so arrogant about it and
Speaker 1: and and mocking anyone who told you that it was
Speaker 1: obviously a grift meant to take advantage of you. But also, like,
Speaker 1: the the level of unreality that permeates our society is
Speaker 1: so comprehensive. It is such a thick and deadly fog.
Speaker 1: I can't blame people who get caught in it. Really,
Speaker 1: I could be frustrated, Like it's just so powerful to
Speaker 1: you expect them to do to bring it back to
Speaker 1: the beginning. Yeah, like my mom and I fell for
Speaker 1: am Wi. You know, I'm saying, like, you can't blame
Speaker 1: anybody has a grift that they that they're vulnerable to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't blame people for uh. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: blame them if they do reprehensible things that fuck it
Speaker 1: hurt other people. You should blame the cult leaders, the
Speaker 1: people like the Dove of Oneness who are who are
Speaker 1: profiting off of these grifts for sure. Um, And it's
Speaker 1: just like I don't think we could have imagined that there.
Speaker 1: I mean, I couldn't have a at what a huge
Speaker 1: problem there is now between people telling the difference between
Speaker 1: truth and reality and real news and quote unquote fake news.
Speaker 1: If we had known it was going to be like this,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think. I don't think we could
Speaker 1: have prepared for it either way. But it just seems
Speaker 1: insane because at the very least there used to be
Speaker 1: an idea of, oh, this is obviously bullshit and this isn't.
Speaker 1: And now it's like, especially older people who get really
Speaker 1: isolated in their communities, I mean, TV and ship just
Speaker 1: praise on them and YouTube and like we've already I
Speaker 1: was shopping network anyway, Well, do you have any plugable stuff?
Speaker 1: It looks sad, Robert, I am let me boop that
Speaker 1: little nose boom. Uh yeah, I'm sorry. Just to remember
Speaker 1: that you're going to get a tattoo. I am going
Speaker 1: to get a tattoo today. I am going to get
Speaker 1: a tattoo. And I think I'm gonna buy another big
Speaker 1: stupid gun. I think I'm gonna get a fifty cow.
Speaker 1: Why not? Yes, that's that's the that's the math that
Speaker 1: helps cheer you up. Do you need another gun. It's
Speaker 1: has been a year since I've needed another gun. I
Speaker 1: don't know the gun maybe don't do for right now.
Speaker 1: I need a bigger one. I don't have one that big. Mmmm.
Speaker 1: That's true. God, you're really just setting Sophia up for
Speaker 1: so many jokes right now, Like it's about the explosion
Speaker 1: of conspiratorial thinking and weaponized unreality makes me think that
Speaker 1: I might actually wind up needing bigger guns than I
Speaker 1: presently have at some point. You know again enough, it's
Speaker 1: really hard to do this when I can't give you
Speaker 1: a hug because you need a hug. That is what
Speaker 1: I'm reading. I'm going to take drugs and drink more
Speaker 1: doctors via How Me Again podcast Daddy Well Sophia. After this,
Speaker 1: we're going to get into a book. We're doing another
Speaker 1: book episode uh for the Thursday episode this week because uh,
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, not a spoiler. Really, my mom has cancer
Speaker 1: and I have been in Texas helping the family with that,
Speaker 1: and I don't have time to write a two parter
Speaker 1: every week, So we're just going to dig into a
Speaker 1: book that came out very recently UM called Ness Era
Speaker 1: and the Mark of the Beast, which looks like it
Speaker 1: will be a hoot. Isn't Super Long came out in September,
Speaker 1: and I think we'll get us up to date on
Speaker 1: how the necessary conspiracy theory has adopted to the world
Speaker 1: of Q and on cool Weird Time to plug my things,
Speaker 1: but the way plug it up. You can find me
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Instagram at the Sophia s O f I.
Speaker 1: A and I have a podcast about love and sex
Speaker 1: around the world called Private Parts Unknown. You can follow
Speaker 1: that and another podcast about ninety de fiance with Miles
Speaker 1: Great called for Fiance, so check that. And if you
Speaker 1: haven't bought her comedy album what the funk Are You Doing?
Speaker 1: It's yeah, by the what are you doing? It's Father's Today,
Speaker 1: Fucking assholes. God damn it. It comes on in the
Speaker 1: car when I'm on shuffle, and every time, no matter
Speaker 1: what food I when it comes on, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: every time, it's so enjoyable. It's like, well, here's some
Speaker 1: really sad bitch song I'm listening to, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, it's like you being like, hey, it's great,
Speaker 1: really recommend I'm excited to listen to it. On my
Speaker 1: long drive back from Texas through of America, lightful. It
Speaker 1: will make you feel delighted, Robert so yeah, delight yourself,
Speaker 1: you fucking rat bastards. Anyway, thank you for listening to
Speaker 1: our podcast. I love you all, dear you rat bastards. M.