Sovereign Citizens - Prelude

There’s a lot to unpack about the sovereign citizens and how that fits in with grift and crank magnetism.  Even excluding this prelude this is likely going to take two full length posts about it.

Since the cranks deliberately misinterpret things part of the planned order of posting the other ideas in the collection of bad ideas we start here with an unsaid point from where I left off with the previous post.

As a non-conspiracy theorist you are allowed to be angry about about the things wrong with the world.  If you’re like me, a dedicated agnostic, you can realize that in the realm of confirmation biased based topics, there are some things that aren’t too bad, at least at times.  Namely religion.  I would much rather have a church member calmly talk to me about God’s Love than someone spouting off material that ends up being the kind of things that get mentally I’ll people fired up to go to a school and start shooting.  I will go to a church as a social function, never trying to convert anyone to my side.  If, however, you start calling Sandy Hook a false flag and make baseless claims about crisis actors, I may counterattack.

What Alex did with Sandy Hook and subsequent shootings was marketing with psychological tricks.  Eliciting an emotional reaction and targeting the audience to with whatever it took to bypass anything resembling critical thinking.  He used two of the most hotly debated topics - the US constitutional rights of self defense and guns plus free speech.

I consider my desire to live in a world where children living in fear of being shot at school an infringement of my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Now, lying on the internet is so normalized, it creeps into all aspects of our lives- the workplace, the schools, interactions with neighbors.  Misinformation on the internet has short circuited peoples ability to see that lots of people, quite simply, lie there asses off.

Fortunately we have a few signs of hope.  Maybe some of these big lawsuits (Jones defamation, Fox News defamation, Trump’s myriad problems) will produce a long overdue wake up call that there are consequences to promoting bad ideas.  And to be clear, in the circles of people I follow they mostly recognize that both sides (liberals as well as conservatives) engage in a lot of activity simply as fundraising instead of actual intelligent policy decisions.  The first rule to remember, social media was never and never will be a good source of factual news coverage.

Whether by accident or design, gematria merged into the grift magnetism cultural as something like “conspiracy theory light”.  A youngster that may finally get fed up with the at times laughably wrong sports predictions has been exposed to some other bad ideas.  And some of them make gematria look like a blessing instead of the waste of time that it is.  That’s where things like sovereign citizens fit in.

The concept has been around forever.  The financial hook is that you don’t have to pay taxes.  Sovereign citizens have a good chance of joining a militia type organization. (Type…not an actual militia that has any intention of defending the country when invaded by a foreign power.)

So that’s enough prologue for now.  Some more specific and historical background to come.

What Flat Earth Brings to the 3D Tabletop

The attempts for science minded people to get through to the crowd that think the Earth is flat are well worn paths.  As with all conspiracy theory debates, the approach to getting through is dead wrong most of the time.  Trying to use math and telescope related type data is an instant turn off, the FE believer will mostly shut down science based arguments.

It’s no surprise that the majority Flat Earth believers identify as spiritual or religious.

https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/82666

Quite simply, the extremely religious people are more prone to close off any attempt to convince them they are wrong about science and social topics.  They have their answer already.  The deity will protect them.  Vaccines?  Don’t need them.  God will protect me.  Wars?  My side is right.  We’re a nation founded on God.  Yours is wrong, mine is right.  Obviously, my political party is right for the same reason my football team is the best.  Because….reasons.

The evolution of grift magnetism incorporated religious thoughts.  The con artists found out that slapping the name of a deity on a product of dubious practical value was great for sales.  Miracle spring water, magic healing crystals, indeed any alternative medicine idea.  All these have a ready made supply of people willing to credit an alternative to what actually helped them.  I prayed to get better, and I got better.  Even though it’s really just that my immune system took hold and fought off the infection.

What the Flat Earth grifters did do for the evolution of the health scams - add bad science to the mix.  Finally, instead of just the golden hammer of, “It’s God’s Will”, throwing around sciency type words (incorrectly) gives you the best of both worlds.

Needless to say, the contradictions abound.  There’s no consensus on the exact model for the flat earth, in part because spiritual and science thoughts don’t mix well together.  Is it a flat disc with “Antarctica” surrounding the habitable land?  Is it an infinite plane? Is it a bit three dimensional with a couple miles of rock underneath the tabletop?  Is the hollow Firmament what’s going on?  These questions are never fully answered when the FE crowds gather to have a fun seminar.

What those gatherings are - a bunch of people who didn’t do well in math and science in school, religious minded dabblers in alternative science, and those that organized the event getting paid an entrance fee and selling you useless shit.

The Gematria clowns used the two pronged attack of pro religion and anti-science in the early years.  Mostly it has evolved following the Alex Jones method of just throwing a ton of shit at the wall, see what gets the most engagement, and throw that type of shit at the wall, leaving the least interesting shit lonely and unadopted at the shit shelter.  This can be seen in a very clear example of their system being rigged to never fail - zero.

The claim is made and even worded, when convenient, that zeros don’t count in gematria.  Currently, 201 is a super important number since THE JESUIT ORDER = 201 and the cult leader said it’s important.  Why this isn’t 21 instead of 201 is never explained.  But hey, gematria and hypocrisy go hand in hand.

These days, the sciency stuff is just an occasional blip on the radar.  There used to be more things like number of protons, neutrons and electrons and the never ending bullshit “Pi rituals”.  I suspect that those table scraps were left to the flat earthers while there’s a strong clique of spiritual gematria activity.  And the flat earthers and gematria crowd really don’t like each other, using it to their mutual advantage by the occasional dogfight trying to lure away their respective bases to turn to their collection of bad ideas.

Just like gematria, if someone is into Flat Earth content they are more than likely hanging out with a set of bad ideas, some that are far worse for society in general.  Just to throw an example out there-

Flat Earth —> gematria—> other bad ideas —> Qanon —> congressional candidate embrace Qanon —> Qandidate defies all rational thinking and gets elected because base isn’t smart enough to know better —>Qandidate posts right wing extremism on social media on a daily basis that makes national MSM news—>other grifters jump in to get a piece of the action —> cycle repeats endlessly.  Qandidate must be right.  They’re a Christian Nationalist - they said so.

5G Is Coming To Get You!…or maybe not

The misinformation related to 5G is firmly rooted in science denialism.  Not being sure which topic of the list of related bad ideas, I’ve settled on this because flat earth nonsense, the reigning champion of science denial, has been beaten to death.  In fact, if you apply the friends test to someone talking about 5G, it’s impossible to not find someone yammering about both of them?

Why is this a problem?  Just like finding antonyms with matching gematria, the science denial is self-contradictory.  Not as blatant as in a single post, but a red flag is that Person A blabbering about 5G radiation killing you, or even causing Covid, person B is that close friend that thinks the earth is flat and hates NASA.  That GPS that let your pizza delivery person find you is getting a signal from satellites orbiting the globe.

These contradictions don’t get attention since the senses are dulled by taking things for granted the convenience of a technological society.  Cell tower radiation isn’t much different from your car radio or microwave.  What it is - a new talking point for grifters.  The flat earth is overused.  5G radiation is more fresh and exciting.

A fun side effect of 5G talking points is an opportunity to use bad statistics that easily fool the unsuspecting.  I give you, the bad map:

What it actually is - a map of cell tower coverage.  But be prepared to find someone claiming it’s any number of health scare topics.  Health issues are a primary source of science denial - with modern medicine being taken for granted.  Finding an unlabeled map is easy.  Altering it to caption it the way you want takes a bit of work.  I could make it say:

COVID CASES JULY 2020-OCTOBER 2020

Or

INCREASE IN LUNG CANCER 2019-2022

Or

CAR ACCIDENT FATALITIES CAUSED BY 5G 2023

Etc…

In some cases these fake talking points aren’t technically wrong.  There probably are more lung cancer cases in the red areas.  Yet, something is missing from the fake maps that is important.  The map is really only related to population density  not population.  A meaningful map would be labeled something like CAR ACCIDENT FATALITIES PER 10,000 ACCIDENTS.

Cell phone companies are <shocker> a business.  It’s only natural that there’s a bigger need for bigger populations.  There’s not going to be a gigantic red spot over Utqiagvik, Alaska for anything related to just population and not density.  Unless it’s vampire related.

The issues of social interaction with family and erstwhile friends over how to approach their addiction to fake news are challenging.  Do you take the stance of abandoning all hope and admitting they are hopelessly close minded and not worth the trouble?  Do you double down on your efforts to try to get through?  The grifters love the chaos and turmoil of the fake news cycle.  As Barnum said, a sucker is born every minute.

5G and the social interaction instability of rapid communication:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9332237/

5G directly causing COVID because radiation is scary:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8576388/

Neither of those like much of this post are written in easy to understand English.  See how easy it is to believe a nice little mislabeled (purposefully) map?  The summation of all this?  Statistically misleading maps are common enough that all, unless from a clearly trusted source should be viewed skeptically.  The correct answer isn’t written in English.  Do some actual research and find someone to dumb it down to an understandable level, admit the conspiracy theorist has a critical thinking problem and go from there.

Other Bad Ideas

I’m not trying to win friends or make any $ with this blog.  The information within is intended as a resource aimed mostly at the type of person, possibly very new to social media, who stumbles upon something that makes them say, “What the fuck did I actually just read?!?”

When properly viewed as such, life is a competition for resources.  What people do not get about life is that in addition to others trying to manipulate your thinking to get on board with their own agenda, is that your own brain is playing tricks on itself.  Effective humor often requires misdirection where your brain to be mislead until you are nailed with the punchline.  Sleight of hand magic tricks confuse the brain because someone has dedicated a large chunk of time to practice their craft, and the magician’s dexterity makes wondrous things happen.  Optical illusions are more direct - a certain visual pattern is displayed, the brain is not able to process what the eyes see and “fills in the blanks”.

The well practiced gematria guru misdirects your brain into thinking you are making successful sports picks when you aren’t.  The well practiced gematria guru doesn’t tell you it’s just a trick and does whatever it takes to back peddle, confuse and obscure that what he said doesn’t actually qualify as a prediction, or if it did it was wrong and by gosh that was the first time ever it was wrong!  The well practiced gematria guru lets your brain fill in the blanks on your free time, finding synchronicity where it doesn’t exist.  Then pats you on the back for being an important member of the cult, gaining what amounts to free advertisement for the current fundraiser.

In the spectrum of bad ideas, gematria in and of itself is not bad.  But whether by intent or accidentally, in practice it serves as an identifier of someone who has a cognitive bias problem.  Someone who is extremely racist, transphobic, closed minded - doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to navigate the internet without incurring more damage than good.  Social media sites do more pretending to care than actually caring, with responses coming off as more like, “I’m sorry I got caught, now what do I do to get the government off my back without me paying a stiff fine.”

The psychological aspects of conspiracy theories are not widespread knowledge in high school.  Psychology is a murky enough subject by itself, also with its fair share of less than honest people.  Those that understand the psychology of manipulating other people are more than willing to drop in on a gematria conversation to try and suggest that their bad idea is a better bad idea than the other bad ideas.

So it’s time to start talking about some of these other bad ideas over the next few weeks.  Psychologically, a parallel is found in Scientology.  L. Ron didn’t jump right into the absolutely batshit crazy Xenu story right away.  Years of indoctrination and abuse preceded hitting that gem.  Qanon thinking didn’t directly cause a bunch of less than brilliant people to try to overthrow the government.  But along the spectrum of bad ideas it became a springboard for exposure to some of the darker content out there.

Here’s a list of some of these crank magnetism topics I’ll cover.  As usual there’s overlap in crank magnetism.  One of the first things grifters need to do is discredit the experts, so science denial is a given.

1). Sovereign citizens 

2). Violent event denial

3). Flat Earth/Moon landing hoax (science denial)

4). Health and nutrition alternative medicine

5). Anti-Vaxxers

6). 5G 

I anticipate getting bogged down or distracted and end up combining some of those together and adding new ones.

How To Lose Money With Gematria

In addition to some older material here, there is somebody that has dedicated a large chunk of their free time to monitor Zach’s shitty sports picks.  Having received emails with some comments I can tell he’s genuinely not a fan, however it’s difficult to tell if he is against the entire concept of using peoples cognitive biases against them, or if he is simply anti-Zach.

For context, there are a couple of parts of the back story that don’t quit make sense.  Ostensibly a troll that camps out on Zach’s sports Patreon, who constantly downloads videos from the protected “pay to play” area, edits them to isolate the more direct comments that indicate something resembling a actual prediction and documents all the other shenanigans that go on.  (Harassment, death threats, cover up excuses, etc….). So all you students out there looking for source material about how conspiracy theories degrade society there is a ready source of not doctored actual footage.

https://m.youtube.com/@SportsGematria

Before applauding him and declaring him the best thing to happen for the Zach haters, it’s worthwhile to mention that he’s not totally in the clear.  As for being a mole, this would require a sock puppet Patreon membership since Patreon creators can block anyone they want.  And sometimes the comments come from people in Zach’s crowd that create content that’s just as bad.  Still, it really can’t be all bad since instead of old deleted videos that Zach has a firm history of covering up, there is an up to date compilation of current futility.  Since the process involves an endless cycle of focusing on the nearest sports championship that’s upcoming, newbies have a resource for finding clear, objective evidence of what went wrong in the most recent shitty picks.

And boy did Zach strike out big time on March Madness. He somehow managed to get every game that yielded the final four wrong.  In addition to the more normal worthless advice just like somebody with average sports knowledge would use filling out their bracket making normal picks.  Like…making picks without gematria.

You can go through all of Sportsgematria’s videos and find similar documented futility.  And the comments include lots of venting from people that have gotten conned.  Just take them with a grain of salt since you can never know who simply wants Zach off their street corner that they are working, and who is a diehard anti-Zachist.

The comments section of every video is loaded with trolling like this.

Grift Magnetism

There is a lot of psychological projection in the conspiracy theory world.  Saying, “a lot” is an understatement.  It’s fucking relentless.  Even having the audacity to call themselves a community is some kind of bad joke that doesn't get enough attention from the, "How could people be dumb enough to believe that??!?" type of critic.

There is a term thrown around a lot that may not have the impact it should - Getting lost down the rabbit hole. Sure there's a lot to be said for honoring the famous Alice in Wonderland source, but it is the 21st century. Now that it's Malice in Blunderland we should be getting an update to magpies or raccoon trash bandits or something similar.

There is one thing the so called community gets right. There's a lot of shit wrong with the world. And people love to complain about the shit that bothers them. And grifters love to find people that complain, because for the psychologically astute they represent a handy supply of marks to exploit. Because the marks universally think they ate right about everything.

At a truth community level we are already at a point where it starts to not make sense. Getting lost down the raccoon can, the potential marks are presented with a dizzying area of misinformation. Since they often have serious problems dealing with reality the background noise includes a lot of contradictory misinformation. Grift Magnetism rears its ugly head.

When one grifter who has been running his three card monte scam finds out that some of his business being pulled away by the guy who opens a side of his trenchcoat and is displaying his huuuge....selection of fake Rolex watches that don't even work, he gets a bit unhappy that someone is muscling in on his turf. This is why flat earthers and gematria clowns tend to not get along. There's gematria content about GPS coordinates. And flat earthers seem to think the world is, well, flat. It can't be both. There's even gematria and flat earth content running simultaneously since the spiritual gematria clique merges The Firmament/hollow earth/there's a lot of shit wrong with the workd Jesus is coming because the Antichrist is here with numbers.

Getting lost down the raccoon trash can involves anti-scientific mental gymnastics. The scientific approach, when applied correctly, will show they are both wrong. The mental defense mechanism is to filter out the background noise and make an arbitrary decision on a case by case basis.

And boy do the Grift Magnetists love that. Hey, your gematria cult leader told you the Scamdemic is a hoax? I've hit you with viruses don't exist? How about you stop by our "Vaccine shedding needs to be detoxed by drinking your own urine group" for a visit?

I've been observing the truth community social media for a long time now. And if your social media truther friend is not directly posting contradictory grift magnetism content, you need look no further than the friends of that friend. This can be a starting point for deprogramming. You just need to be mindful of the closed minded defensive posture that will be immediately taken. Not surprisingly, gullible people don't like to admit that they have been conned.

Sadly, for the gematria community, the background noise is exhibited every day. Every decode has wrong numbers. With loads of ciphers, ridiculous variations of a non-existent rule book available, picking both teams to win a game since at a community level someone else found other numbers - every single match is countered by thousands of mismatches.

You want to waste your time on it for the fuzzy warm feeling the partial reinforcement makes you pick a sports game right 50% of the time? Knock yourself out. But there's a lot of shit wrong in the world you really don't want to be wrong about.

Like a con man leaving you holding the bag since you got convinced that a free and fair democratic election was stolen and you should take a gun to the capital and try to overthrow the government. The mark is always disposable after the grifting.