How I Handle Plausible Conspiracy Theories

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. It is the first podcast of 2021.

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Can you believe we are in 2021? I said yesterday on the podcast, 2020 went by so fast and it's just, it's like time is flying by.

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I think my grandfather, who's 98, who was born in 1922, has seen a lot in his lifetime.

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Still alive, still can think, remembers as a kid, people who were elderly that were Confederate soldiers, that were slaves, he lived in Mississippi.

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Remembers World War II, fighting in that, remembers the Great Depression. And think about all the technological change he's seen, all the social regression, all the

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Christianity becoming kind of at the mercy of secularism, secularism displacing

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Christianity in his lifetimes, just all the crazy things, social development, really regression, it's not a development that he's seen.

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It's incredible. And I think I've seen change in my short lifetime. Think about what someone like that has seen. And I hope that you have elderly people in your family, you can ask questions about the past too, because one of the things

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I think progressives love to do is to rewrite history, to leave things out, to conveniently just harp on things to the exclusion of other things, give you an impression that suits their narrative, suits the present political agenda.

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And one of the hedges against that is, what are the people that you know, that you trust in your family, what do they say?

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People who lived through it, what do they remember? And I hope that you have that.

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But anyway, I wanna give you, this is related to what I'm talking about.

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I wanna give you something to think about for 2021. We're gonna talk about kind of an unusual topic, conspiracy theories, we're not gonna cover everything you can say about it, but I think that 2021 is going to have significant change.

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Read what the World Economic Forum is talking about with the fourth industrial revolution, the great reset. If Biden becomes president, especially, you're gonna see some crazy changes that you may not be prepared for.

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You're gonna have to think through questions you haven't thought through. And I'm gonna try my best to bring you experts and to think through some of these things myself to help you along the way.

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But I think in 2021, we're gonna have a lot of things that are changing, and maybe the most significant year of our entire lives as far as change goes.

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And you thought maybe 2020 was, I think 2021 will have more change. So why conspiracy theories?

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Well, one of the things that I noticed last year, 2020, is that many

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Christian leaders, those who are platformed at conferences, et cetera, publications,

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I'm talking about like the Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, Joe Carter, I think Jonathan Lehman, Costi Hinn, these guys all came out strongly against conspiracy theories.

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It's like an anthem, a Christian should never, I guess, be involved in a conspiracy theory, or in the sense of thinking that one might exist.

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It's kind of unclear, it's kind of vague, but the message went out loud and clear that Christians have no business thinking things that are not in line with,

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I guess, the current narrative, the mainstream media narrative. And I think the mainstream media, they promote so many conspiracies, theories that are not rooted in anything, like the

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Russian collusion hoax, like this whole idea that there's systemic racism across the board in this country, in the police, et cetera.

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And we've seen both of those things this year. Even the COVID thing is so overblown that I think you can consider some of the reaction to this conspiracy theory, in a sense, in the way that they use the term.

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And so it's funny to me that this is all of a sudden, it's a bad thing.

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Well, it's a language war. And you need to see this, that whenever that term is rolled out by the mainstream media they're trying to basically claim that someone's a tinfoil hat wearer, they're a liar.

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And it gives them the convenient position of not having to deal with any facts. And I did an episode earlier last year, well,

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I think in the fall, on conspiracy theories. And I gave you some things to think about. I think I talked about QAnon a little bit, and I'm not familiar with that as much.

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I don't follow Q at all, but I just talked about why I think that so many people are turning to explanations when they don't have any faith in the institutions that would normally give them explanations.

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So if you don't have faith in the mainstream media or in your church even perhaps, or in the government, et cetera, if all the institutions have failed and you want the truth, you're gonna try to find other sources.

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And the metric you use to test those sources to see if they are true, or however you go about that, whether it's a gut feeling you have, or you have some kind of a, okay, did they predict something?

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Did it come true? Was their analysis better in this event or not? That kind of, whatever it is, you're engaging.

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If you don't trust the other institutions, you're engaging your truth sensing faculties to try to find something that's going to tell you the truth.

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Because we don't know what's ahead. And you wanna try to plan, you wanna try to figure it out. And we can't ever totally figure it out because the future's in God's hands.

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But we can make wise choices, we can plan. In fact, there's a lot of Proverbs about this.

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Storing up for the future is very important. Now, I wanna give you, the reason

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I'm doing this episode is because I want to take a very simple conspiracy theory.

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And I think this one is, it's not so complicated and it's fairly new. It may get complicated next year.

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I don't think it will, but it's fairly new. And I wanna show it to you. I want to think through this with me and then just come up with, in general, what would you make of this?

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What do you think about what could have happened, might have happened? What kinds of conclusions can we draw?

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And then I wanna speak to you more broadly about conspiracies in general.

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Is it wrong to believe that there may be a conspiracy somewhere? Or to ask the question.

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When you don't have answers, you ask questions. You point to whatever evidence may suggest something.

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What you're doing is you're trying to come up with a paradigm that matches the evidence that you know about.

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And when the official explanations leave much to be desired, they can't, the paradigm doesn't work because certain facts contradict it or don't fit within the confines of the paradigm, then you look for alternate explanations.

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This is human nature. This is normal. This isn't wrong for a Christian to engage their critical faculties and try to come up with an answer for something when they think they're being lied to.

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In fact, that's just smart. Let me show you this. This is something that you may not have heard of, but I mean,

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I consider it to be important enough that I made a little Twitter thread about it. City Blue Imaging is a printing company in Rochester, New York.

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I wanna show you, this is the day, I believe this video was taken the day after Christmas, but it burned down on Christmas.

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This is what it looks like. Okay, you get the point.

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It burned down to the ground. There's nothing left. It's toast. And I wanted to ask you the question, why do you think it burned down?

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We don't know anything yet, right? So you don't know, right? Why do you think it burned down though on Christmas? Now, maybe an electrical fire, could have been arson.

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I mean, Christmas is a day that employees will not be there. So I think the logical conclusion is if it was arson, if it was someone purposely trying to target this building, they didn't wanna kill anyone because they chose to do it on a day that no one was there.

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No one would see them. There's less accountability. You don't have someone questioning you if you're trying to burn it down.

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But we don't even know if it was arson, but no one's there. So, I mean, is it an electrical fire?

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Could it have been something that was neglected? Someone left the pot on the stove? I mean, we just don't know, but we have questions that we can ask about and they're reasonable questions.

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It's a mystery at this point. Now that happened on Christmas day. Now you probably didn't hear about it because of what was going on in Tennessee.

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Now I thought about talking about that with you, but that's so complicated now that it would be a longer podcast and it would be harder for me to get the points across I wanna get across.

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I think it's better to take a simple issue and then apply that then to more complicated issues in the future.

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So many questions, by the way, about that one. In fact, I know someone who's very close to the one in Nashville.

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And the report that I got was that there were two explosions. There wasn't just one. And a number of people have corroborated that and the only one is being reported.

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But this person who was there said there's two and someone that I don't think would be lying about that and have no reason to lie.

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But there's a lot of things that don't fit the narrative that we're hearing out of that. But you didn't hear about city blue imaging in Rochester because of what was happening in Nashville.

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But there were some people who noticed this. And I think

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I put it, did I put it up? Let me check real quick. I thought I had put up Lin Wood had made a post about this.

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Let me just see real quick. If I put his, I did not put his tweet up there and I should have.

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Anyway, Lin Wood, who was the lawyer working with Sidney Powell in the election corruption case, specifically in Georgia, he made a tweet,

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I think on the 27th, so two days after it burned down and asked the question, were they printing ballots?

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It was a printing company, city blue imaging, were they printing ballots? And if all the information we knew is all we had, then it's not a bad question, but it's kind of, we don't have anything to go on.

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You can't point fingers at anyone, right? But there were some things I saw online. A few other people were asserting, there was a rumor

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I should say going around that they were printing ballots and this was to destroy evidence. That was the suggestion. Now, at this point, we have no reason to think that.

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So I decided, and this is what I wanna share with you guys, this is how I approach this.

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Put on your critical thinking cap and if you have time, not everyone does, but if you have a little bit of time, I think it took me 20 minutes or so, just go to a few social media links, do the research you can, find out if there is anything to this, if there was any, were they printing ballots?

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Is there evidence of that? If they weren't, is there anything that would suggest that they might've been, that kind of thing.

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This is what I found. Now, I edited this middle post.

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You can see it's Ruth Bader Ginsburg, being very crass, obviously a doctored photo, but this was from Mark Cleary.

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Mark Cleary is the owner of Blue City Imaging. And these are just a few.

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I saw a number of things suggesting, this guy is on the left, totally on the left. This is from his

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Facebook. Here's just a few just to show you. The THC party, September 21st, he posts, this is all from 2020, by the way,

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg doing something inappropriate. And then you have on November 1st, revolt.

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He makes that his cover photo right before the election, revolt. Okay, so this guy clearly on the left, all right?

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And a number of his other posts make that clear as well. So okay, well, this guy's, okay, he's on the left.

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That doesn't tell me anything about why this burned down, but if they were printing ballots or something, it would, or working with a political party, it would be the

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Democrats. This isn't the kind of guy that looks like he would work with a Republican, okay? So I can at least deduce that that is likely, given his personal social media.

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I mean, for an owner of a business to be posting this stuff on his personal social media account for everyone to see publicly, I mean, that's, you know, he believes in it.

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He believes in this stuff. So that doesn't give me a lot of information, but it does give me, it gives me a fact that could be corroborated with other facts and may, in fact, it may help me in the future.

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So I'm gonna keep that. I'm gonna keep that in the back of my mind as I do more research.

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And you can see his profile picture, by the way, is a gnome with a marijuana leaf. Well, then we find,

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I find this, and I edited the first one here again, because it looks like it's a picture of him from the back without clothes.

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And, you know, he's advertising. This is the kind of thing they can print, I guess. He's got some things, and I did not, there were a number of things

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I could have posted here, but they're just so inappropriate. But women caught in her underwear forces plane to divert from Texas to Alabama.

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That's the headline. And he says, I gotta start flying more. All right, that's a minor example, but there are many examples of this where I just say, okay, this guy clearly posts questionable content.

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Now, does that mean he's a guy of low morals? Well, in some areas it looks like, yeah. I mean, he's, you know, is this the kind of guy that would be engaged in something nefarious or below board?

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Looks like he might be. Looks like this is the kind of guy that may be a guy of low character, that may be.

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I don't know yet, but it certainly, it certainly, you know, if he was a stellar guy, you know, family guy, no inappropriate posts if, especially if he was a

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Republican, I mean, I wouldn't need to do any more research probably. I'd be like, okay, this is probably just some stupid conspiracy theory.

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But so far what I found doesn't counteract the narrative.

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It's, it may actually reinforce it a little bit. Doesn't say it's true, but it reinforces it a little bit.

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All right, keep going. Well, then I found this. This is on City Blue Imaging and it's on their

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Instagram page. Monroe County Democratic Committee. Monroe County Democratic Committee, Rochester, New York.

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City Blue Imaging did work for the County Democrats. And this is on November 3rd, they posted this.

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Hashtag election 2020, last minute printing, step and repeat, City Blue Imaging. They're doing work for the

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Democrat Party on election, for the election on, well, it's, when was the date?

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November 3rd, okay, yes. So this is, you know, clearly last minute, right around the time of the election.

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And they're engaged in this. Now, we don't know what they were printing. We, they're not printing ballots, obviously, in this post here.

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So we don't, we still don't know that this theory is accurate. But does this, does this support?

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Or does this, does this reinforce the narrative at all? Or does it counteract the narrative?

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Does it throw a wrench in the whole idea that they might've involved? No, it actually doesn't.

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Now, that conspiracy is starting to look like, well, maybe that could be the case.

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It's getting stronger. Again, not, you can't prove it 100%, but it's getting stronger.

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Now, this is the final thing that I found. It's from a news report, spectrumlocalnews .com.

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I put the link there. An employee commented, quote, we are just baffled. We can't find one piece of equipment that was in there.

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There should be stuff there and there's not. So my question, where did all the equipment go?

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There's no equipment in there, none. And if you look at some of the things the owner was putting, he's surprised by this.

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There's no, the local community is gonna pitch in to help. It wasn't planned in his mind. At least he's portraying it that way.

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Okay, now look again at the video of the wreck.

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You can see bricks, you can see wood, you can see all sorts of things were burned.

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And I mean, it's hard to see from this, but there's no, the kinds of things you'd normally see in a place that does printing, they don't seem to be there.

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So very possible, I mean, and this worker who's on the ground who's saying this, I mean, that would make sense. He's saying, where's all like the metal stuff?

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Where's the stuff that should be here? Why isn't it here? Where did it go, right?

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So now we're coming upon questions that should easily have answers. If there's no conspiracy, if this is just a fluke fire, there should be answers for that.

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Oh yeah, we moved it out beforehand because of X, Y, or Z. But we don't have that.

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We don't have explanations for any of this. And so you put all that together, and you can see that there probably would be nothing to prevent a guy like this from printing ballots.

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You can see that he's already on the left. He wants to revolt before the election. You can see that he's done work for the

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Democratic Party on right, around the time of the election, like last minute, he's doing work for the

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Democratic Party. And then you can, and they're posting about this. They're being open about this.

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None of this is secret. This is just what they're showing you, and they're proud to show you that. It's posting on their social media. And then you find question that is very curious.

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Where did all this stuff go? And if they were trying to destroy evidence, maybe that stuff would have been moved somewhere else.

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They didn't wanna destroy all of it. Maybe there was evidence that they needed to move out somewhere else and make it look like it got destroyed.

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We don't know. We don't know. But when you start digging into some of these things, you start finding out, wow, you had more questions.

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And maybe it is a possibility. Maybe this isn't just a theory. Maybe this actually happened. Now here, the bottom line is we don't actually know.

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Based on that information, we don't know. But we at least have enough to say some serious questions need to be asked.

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And we need to find out where that equipment go. We need to find out why it's not there, what the relationship was with the

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Democrat Party. Probably be a good thing to find out. And they could easily, by just telling the truth and being probably more transparent, hey, here's where our equipment went.

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This is all we printed for the Democratic Party. This is what it is. Opening the books, that kind of thing. They could probably dissuade a lot of the accusations coming their way, but that's not what's happening.

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And so what happens is in a situation like this, this festers and people are gonna remember it and more things might come out in the future or people will just remember that time that something fishy happened and they don't know what it was.

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And so this is on a very small scale. And what I'm not saying is to draw a conclusion that this definitely happened.

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I think that would be wrong to draw that conclusion. But this is how I approach things. This is how I wanna do the research.

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I wanna see it myself. I wanna try to test the theory to see if it holds any water.

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And sometimes you can falsify a theory right away. Oh, the guy's a Republican and he printed for the Republican Party.

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It doesn't look like this is the guy printing stuff for the Democrats, right? And you probably wouldn't even look after that.

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But once you come up with things and you start seeing all these connections, then you start wondering if it could be the case.

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And you're not crazy for that. And that's really the point I'm making. You're not crazy for just connecting dots. Why isn't the media doing this?

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Why aren't some of these dots being connected by media? Why aren't there investigative journalists going out there and asking these questions and reporting on it?

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And I think you know the answer to that. Doesn't fit the narrative. And that's why people on social media are starting to try to do investigative journalism themselves, people that aren't journalists that maybe even don't know how to do investigative journalism or how to do research in general.

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Not academic, but they know they're being lied to and they wanna know the truth. And so rather than pointing fingers at people like that who are trying to uncover things and saying, well, you just buy into conspiracy theories and you need to shut up.

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How about understanding why those people are doing what they're doing? Helping and giving them the tools they need to do it better.

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Hey, look, this is what I'd say to someone who says, they were printing, they were doing this, pointing fingers, say, look, you don't have that information yet.

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I understand why you might think that that could be the case. But why don't we only talk about what we know instead of what we don't know and ask questions about what we don't know.

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And we can be aggressive about it. What are you trying to hide? Why don't you wanna answer the question? That kind of thing. But help people along is really what

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I would be more concerned with. Help people do good research. Help people write better. Help people do this kind of investigative journalism that's not being done.

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And then oppose those who would cover this up, who would not wanna ask questions, who would just mock and ridicule and say that there's nothing to it.

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Well, there is clearly something here. We don't know what though. And it could be that, hey, it was a fluke thing, it burned down.

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There's explanations for all this. But at this point, it would be nice to have the explanations. So I wanted to just kind of bring you through my process.

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This is how I think about these things. I'm very careful with, I don't wanna make claims that I can't substantiate.

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I wanna have the sources there. Or at least I wanna be able to deduce that something is the case because of the impossibility of the contrary or something like that.

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Now, this brings us to something else. And there's many passages

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I could have brought you to. But I challenge you, do a search in your Bible for conspiracies. Or it's not gonna have the term conspiracy theory.

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But look in your Bible for conspiracies. Here's one. Jesus enters the synagogue. He heals a man.

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And then you go to Mark 3, chapter three, verse six.

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The Pharisees went out and immediately began conspiring with the Herodians against him as to how they might put him to death.

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Well, that's a conspiracy, right? People didn't know that they were doing this. If you weren't a Pharisee, if you weren't in the room, how would you know?

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But their actions, if you would have been publicly watching Jesus's ministry, their actions could have clued you into some things.

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You may have been able to ask questions like, wait, are you planning to try to take Jesus down somehow? Because I hear the questions you're asking.

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I see who you have showing up to some of his teachings. I see what you're saying to others.

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I see the discontent you're trying to spread, how you question those he heals. You can start planning for a potential situation based on some of those clues, even though you're not in the room, right?

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And that's not wrong to do that, to say there might be a conspiracy. There's many other examples of this in scripture.

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The word conspiracy is used, translated in the Old Testament as conspiracy for the

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Jewish leaders worshiping other gods, or some of the prophets were conspired against.

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We find that Paul was conspired against by the same crowd that conspired against Jesus. And again, we're given the information in scripture, but if you were living in that time, you wouldn't have known that some of these conversations were taking place.

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And if you wanna prepare for them, if you wanna have good risk assessment, you're gonna start looking at those signs and you're gonna make decisions based on them.

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You're not going to just say, well, there's no danger because I can't prove that 100 % these people are planning something nefarious.

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So it would actually be the responsible thing to do, I think. I wanted to show you, to analyze in that way.

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Now, I wanna show you, this is the Webster's Dictionary, 1828. The word conspiracy, this is what it used to mean.

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And I want you to look at the example given. It's from Acts 23 .13. Yes, in the dictionary, the word conspiracy is attributed to Acts 23 .13.

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More than 40 had made this conspiracy. Here's the definition. Number one, a combination of men for an evil purpose, an agreement between two or more persons to commit some crime in concert, particularly a combination to commit treason or excite sedition or insurrection against the government of a state, a plot as a conspiracy against the life of a king, a conspiracy against the government.

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Now, do you think we're living through that right now? In some states, foreign interference in the election now has been proven.

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At least there was access in Phoenix or in Arizona. There has been some interesting developments with the plane that came in with some ballots.

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I mean, this can go on and on and on. The examples of the conspiring people in our country and outside the country to rig the election.

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We have number two, in law, an agreement between two or more persons falsely and maliciously to indict or procure to be indicted an innocent person or a felony.

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Number three, a concurrence, a general tendency of two or more causes to one event. So conspiracy is not a bad thing.

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In all of these examples, it's not bad to think a conspiracy could be taking place.

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It's rational. It's something that is the case sometimes. A theory about a conspiracy is just, you have some dots that are connected and the paradigm of a conspiracy seems to fit.

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That's all it is. It's a theory. Not saying that it's a fact 100%, you're just saying this is a theory.

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And here I'll show you, because I meant to show you as I was reading that to you. Here's Webster's 1828, you can read all that yourself.

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So there's nothing wrong with, technically, there's nothing wrong with thinking something could be a conspiracy, having a theory about it, but it's become a pejorative.

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It's become anyone who thinks that is crazy. And I don't like butchering the

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English language. I prefer to think that crazy people are crazy people and say that person thinks something that's crazy.

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That person is positing something that's just is impossible or there's no reason to posit it or it's because they're paranoid and they're speaking from their paranoia.

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They don't actually have facts to back up what they're saying. I mean, these are the kinds of things that are problems.

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Actually having some facts, actually having some hard questions that need answers, nothing wrong with that.

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And don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's shameful that this is happening in Christianity, that people are being shamed for thinking that something might be a conspiracy when they have good reason to potentially think that.

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And then you can also ask, hey, what's your paradigm? What do you think this means? Let's go back to the example of Blue City Imaging.

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What do you think caused this to burn down? And if they don't have an answer, they don't know, then why is the suggestion

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I have that it could be because they're hiding something, why is that wrong? I mean, why not?

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Could be, we don't know, but it could be. And so that's, I just wanna take you through that because I think 2021 is gonna have a lot of conspiracy theories.

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And some of them are gonna be out there and they're gonna be crazy and you're gonna have to test the truth. You're gonna have to test it against scripture, what we know, we're gonna have to test it against reality.

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And the facts that we have available to us. And do your own research. Don't trust me just because I said something either.

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Check it out yourself. I encourage you to do that. If it was good enough for Paul to suggest that to the Bereans, that they did the right thing in testing what he said against scripture and he was an apostle, then certainly we are not more authoritative than Paul.