The Obituary

26:39So, obviously, anyone awake and sentient in America understands that there's a loud anti-vaccine movement afoot. But I'd never heard of a group of anti-vaxxers spending their time trolling regular people's obituaries. For one thing, it did not seem like a good way to persuade anyone to join their side. It was so cruel and obnoxious. But the group who had ended up at Alex's doorstep, whatever they were doing, to me, it felt weirdly organized. What did they want? What were they getting out of this? The first thing I saw was that this was happening to a lot of other people as well. Posts about dead loved ones getting thousands of retweets or hundreds of comments from this army of obituary trolls.

27:21One of the earliest examples I saw was of a woman named Amanda McCulloch in Washington, D.C. In September 2021, Amanda's baby son died. Amanda wrote a post on what was then called Twitter, just a picture of her baby being kissed by his toddler sibling. She wrote, quote, Yesterday my littlest one passed away unexpectedly and suddenly at two and a half months. We don't have answers on how or why, but if you have littles at home, give them an extra squeeze today. We're going to miss baby Z's smiles, giggles, and the joy he brought to our family. Amanda had used somewhat similar phrasing to our listener Alex.

27:55Pretty conventional obituary language for death. Passed away unexpectedly and suddenly. She wasn't someone with a lot of followers, but the obituary trolls found her within a day. A stranger grabbed her memorial post and used it to make a new image, where it was pasted alongside a tweet she'd made the year before about being vaccinated. Somebody called her the dumbest mother ever. Someone else called her a murderer. Amanda wrote a piece about this for the New York Times, where she said her original tweet got over 400 comments. I quickly found many more stories just like these. Many clustered around 2022.

28:30For instance, Maddie Gold, an artist and professor in Philadelphia, she died of a heart attack. She'd also been fighting stage four metastatic cancer. Her wife, who wrote her obituary, also wrote about her death on Twitter, and in both instances used the same phrase, died suddenly, which tripped the same alarm. All these replies from people blaming Maddie for her own death. Somebody says, get the vax, pay the tax. Reading some more of these obituary troll posts, I started to develop a working theory for how these people had gotten deranged. Before the pandemic, of course, I'd known there was a relatively small movement of American vaccine skeptics, mostly parents who believed that vaccines like the measles bumps and rubella vaccine could cause autism in their children.

29:18These parents did not like that in the United States, kids usually need to be vaccinated in order to attend public school. But these activists were a small group. COVID changes everything. In 2021, we started to see vaccine mandates. It was the first time, really, that most adults needed to be vaccinated in order to participate in American life. Many people needed proof of vaccination to go back to work. In 2021, I remember carrying my little folded-up vaccination card with me so I could go into public spaces again. I never minded this. I was grateful for the vaccines. But there were people who felt pissed off, who were never convinced that the vaccines were necessary or necessary for them.

30:00And these people started to find each other online, which created a test for a country that values free speech, but was also singularly focused on preventing COVID from spreading further. What should we do about people who try to persuade other people not to get vaccinated, particularly if those persuaders have large audiences who they are on purpose or by accident misinforming? Back then, looking at the problem, a lot of people decided that it might be worth compromising on some of our ideas about free speech. On Twitter, this is pre-Musk, Twitter started banning prominent accounts that spread vaccine misinformation.

30:37In 2021, writer Alex Berenson, a leading vac skeptic, got a permanent suspension. So did Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, which was a big deal. Arise Today is the only member of Congress that has ever been banned by social media. On January 2nd of 2022, Twitter banned me. Facebook was less willing to do this until the Biden administration started publicly pressuring Mark Zuckerberg. You had Biden's spokesperson at a press conference. We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's office. We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.

31:18We're working with doctors. It sort of flies by, but what she's saying here is unusual. The U.S. government is specifically flagging problematic posts on Facebook for Facebook to take down. The next day, Biden is interviewed next to his very noisy helicopter. I don't know why they always talk near the helicopter. What's your message to platforms like Facebook? The reporter asked him his message to platforms like Facebook. They're killing people. And Biden says they're killing people. The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people.

31:55They're killing people.

31:59Legally, it's very hard for the government to officially hold platforms responsible for the things that their users post. But when the government directly accuses your tech company of killing people, as a CEO, you listen. And Mark Zuckerberg listened. On Facebook, posts were deleted. Some that had spread lies, others that were simply critical of vaccines. The Biden government got what it wanted, and on the respectable parts of the internet, the problem did, for a moment, look solved. Of course, none of those ideas actually disappeared, and none of the people who held them disappeared either. They just found fringier places to congregate, places where no one was challenging their beliefs at all.

32:37Talking to each other, and really only each other, their conspiracies only got more and more elaborate. And then, they broke containment. Well, the big story of the morning. Elon Musk is officially taking control of Twitter, completing his$44 billion takeover of the social media giant. He has promised to restore banned accounts, including former President Trump's. Tonight, what he's now saying about all this. Here's our chief business coordinator. Elon Musk takes over Twitter in 2022, quickly welcomes back many of the permanently banned vaccine skeptics. Marjorie Taylor Greene returns victorious.

33:10A couple years later, Donald Trump will retake the White House. And we know the rest of the story. The tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, who bent somewhat for Biden, will bend all the way over for the new moderator-in-chief. Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. One of the places that anti-vaxxers had been hanging out during their year in the wilderness was a website called Rumble. It's YouTube for right-wingers who get kicked off YouTube. And in November 2022, a big new documentary appears on Rumble, simultaneously posted to Elon Musk's Twitter as well.

33:50It's called Died Suddenly. U.S. life insurance companies have reported an overwhelming and unexplainable increase in all-cause deaths among 18 to 49-year-olds. Along with that, there's also... There'd been a surge of anti-vax documentaries since COVID, but Died Suddenly was the breakout hit. An 18-year-old health worker has developed blood clumps out in controversy. Just days after getting their second COVID-19 vaccine. Died Suddenly opens with this fever dream montage of conspiracy images. Jeffrey Epstein, 9-11, but also Bigfoot, Elvis, a UFO. The montage ends and I expected Died Suddenly to start talking about vaccines.

34:29Instead, the movie starts talking about overpopulation. The theory of the doc is that global elites want to reduce the amount of people on Earth, and they've devised a very evil plan to do that. This evil plan, though, is such a poorly kept secret that you see a very selectively edited clip of Tom Hanks talking about all this publicly in a press tour where he's actually promoting some action movie. I was told the concept that eventually the world will have too many people in it in order to subsist on its own. And that stuck with me for a long time. And that's what Inferno is about. The quantum physics of overpopulation in an instant.

35:07So that, according to Died Suddenly, is proof that the elites want to kill us. And now we learn their plan. Design a lethal bioweapon, an injectable shot that kills people. But tell everybody that actually, it's a vaccine for COVID. What if hundreds of millions of people would willingly, or under the duress of fear, allow themselves to be injected with a bioweapon? What if global mass vaccination could be accomplished in a short period of time by applying relentless coercion tactics and psychological... So we were all tricked into injecting ourselves with poison. And in the logic of the movie, many, many of us died from these vaccines.

35:48And the people who seem to have first noticed this, according to the film, are mainly embalmers and other people who work in funeral homes. I mean, I just buried someone recently who died suddenly. was a sick person in their 60s, but otherwise was not sick. This man is a funeral director. And his evidence for the idea that the rate of people dying suddenly has shot up doesn't come from statistics or charts. It comes from a specific kind of internet search that somebody showed him. Somebody mentioned to go onto Google and then type in died suddenly and find the news articles that would pop up. You see a Google search bar.

36:31You see someone type the words, died suddenly. And then, perhaps not surprisingly, Google News displays many obituaries of people who have died. Young people, old people, athletes. Have just dropped dead without explanation. And it's like it's no big deal. It's like we just don't know. It happens. But no, it's not happened. It's never happened like this until now. This is the movie's evidence. This plus a bunch of gory close-up shots of blood clots that the embalmers say look weird to them. On this evidence base, for over an hour, a tower of increasingly hysterical paranoia is erected. It's my professional medical opinion that this is a bioweapon and that this was a bioweapon unleashed against humanity.

37:25with the intent to depopulate and control the population of the world. Basically, it's achieving its goal. If the goal was to reduce the world's population, it's working. This has been well planned. This is Agenda 2030. This is the Great Reset. Died suddenly contains the kind of worldview that, before the internet, would have been scrawled in marker on a cardboard sign, held up by an unwell person who would have influenced no one. So how did we get to a place where something so paranoid could become so popular? Died Suddenly has been viewed over 20 million times. And for many of those viewers, this is a conversion movie.

38:06You don't just watch it. You watch it, and if you buy its theory, you have a bizarre kind of awokening. Afterwards, whenever you look at the internet, you've been given this pattern to search for. And that means that each person in this room viewing this broadcast, replaying this broadcast, each one of you has a purpose. Each one of you has a critical, God-given role. This last internet feature-sounding voice belongs to a stern man who you see speaking from a podium, in a dark suit and a red tie. This is the film's executive producer dropping in for an unannounced cameo. His name is Stu Peters.

38:52I found myself trying to understand Stu Peters because his career on the internet would end up affecting the life of our listener Alex. And I was surprised to learn that when Stu Peters first popped up in front of a camera, holding a mic, he wasn't talking about COVID bioweapons at all. Instead, he was engaged in a different test of the limits of American free speech. Minnesotan rap music.

39:27In this music video from 2012, Stu Peters, wearing a flat-brimmed twins hat out on the Twin City streets, is rapping about his desire to be famous.

39:44It's worth the thin times I went through to make a difference. See his little kids' lives. Stuart Peters' rap career did not take off. So he reinvented himself as a bounty hunter. He would post videos from his job as owner of a company called Twin Cities Apprehension Team. On your face, now! I will hit it again! Hands behind your back! Ah, ah, ah! Okay, okay! In the videos, Peters chases down people who presumably have skipped bail. He's dressed a lot like a cop, badge and all, enough so that eventually one local sheriff got angry enough about this that a law was passed. By the time the bounty hunting business shuttered in 2021, Stuart, now Stu, was already on to his next act.

40:30Monday, November 15th, 2021. Welcome to the Stu Peters Show. My name is Stu Peters. Well, by now, anybody who puts America first. A video podcast. Anybody who embraces the exceptionalism that is America has no doubt heard it all from the wretches and parasites who hate this country. If you embrace the America First ideology, there's no doubt you've been labeled a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist. It's sort of like InfoWars, but angrier, much more laser focused on hating Jewish people. Here, he does stunts like launching a meme coin. But J-proof, the cryptocurrency coin that was created by me and was launched by me, most importantly backed by me, yours truly, Stu Peters, is now - J-proof, you get no points for guessing what the J stands for.

41:20According to his website, can help you break free from the Jewish-run banking cabal. I've heard a lot of reasons given by crypto people for why regular money is bad. I'd never heard this critique against the dollar. It's run on the Jewish money-making scheme that's banned by Jesus Christ. Before the pandemic, Stu Peters existed on the fringes of the fringe. And when he first attempted to make it as an alt-right podcast host, I'm not sure I would have bet on him. It's a hard place to break through. There's a lot of people fighting for the same audience. And Stu Peters, I just do not find him that electric at the thing he's trying to do.

41:58It's a little like watching a cover band. But he pretty quickly found his hook.

42:06Wednesday, November 17th, 2021. Welcome to The Stu Peters Show. My name is Stu Peters. Well, if you watch fake news on TV, they'll tell you that the COVID-19 vaccines are 100 % safe and anything suggesting otherwise is misinformation. Anti-vaxxer paranoia in 2021 finally delivers Stu Peters to a level of internet fame that had previously eluded him. You see, they can disappear YouTube videos. They can delete Facebook posts. They can ban and platform entire Twitter accounts, but they can't get rid of real people. They can't get rid of the tidal wave of individuals, many of them Joe Biden voters, former vaccine supporters who are now telling the world about what's happened to them since getting injected with this bioweapon being falsely presented as a vaccine.

42:55That clip is from November 2021. For the next year, Stu Peters is racking up views, talking about the vaccines. And by the following October, he's begun talking about the exciting new project he's about to release. It's time for today's Died Suddenly story of the day. For several weeks, we've been bringing you a new story every day of somebody who dropped dead shortly after taking a COVID shot. We'll keep doing it until the release of our Died Suddenly documentary in November. And really, maybe we'll keep going after that. For as long as it takes for the public to appreciate what has been done to them by our demonic elites.

43:27The online behavior that had caused Alex, our listener, so much pain, strangers picking over obituaries, thrusting grieving families into the spotlight, it seems to have been supercharged here as, of all things, a social media publicity campaign for a movie. The ex-account for Died Suddenly, which is also called Died Suddenly, generated buzz by finding a steady stream of Died Suddenly obituaries to share with its followers, which certainly drummed up attention for the film. When Died Suddenly, the documentary was released. It was an instant hit. Over 5 million views just in the first three days.

44:03The Died Suddenly hashtag took off with the film, with the movie's X account continuing to highlight allegedly suspicious obituaries, and fans also just doing it on their own. It was happening widely enough that mainstream reporters started to notice what was going on, and the BBC asked to interview Stu Peters about his project. What the BBC did not fully understand when booking this interview was that Sue Peters had a plan of his own. He showed up with his own crew and later posted the uncut version directly to X with the title, BBC Doesn't Want You to See This.

44:38So you made a film called Giant Suddenly. I'm just curious, what were you, what was your aim with that film? What were you trying to do or create? Oh, we were trying to save as many lives as possible. I mean, it's very well known, very common knowledge now that a bioweapon has been released on humanity and that it's just been relentlessly pushed as this safe and effective vaccine. It's a complete lie. It's a total lie. Stu Peters, he's dressed in the MAGA uniform, red tie, tight blue blazer. He's got a sort of business fash haircut. The side's cropped, the top gelled into a ski jump. And so they believe that people are presenting news and telling the truth because they've been propagandized and lied to for virtually their entire lives.

45:17The Raw interview goes on like this for a while. Eventually, the BBC reporter asks Stu Peters about obituary trolls. Or she tries to. Stu Peters just starts talking over her. That's great. That's awesome to hear. I'm super happy to hear that. Because as that begins to trend and as that continues to grow, all we're doing is saving more lives. I think that's awesome, and I'm happy to hear you report that. Thank you. The reporter presses on. She tells Stu Peters that she's spoken to a woman whose husband died of a congenital illness. The whole planet is full of great distress right now. She was harassed.

45:53Do you feel okay about the fact she was harassed? Nobody should be harassed at all. Like the people that are constantly harassed and berated for fighting against the PSYOP of this fake bioweapon vaccine, that have been fired, that have lost everything, that have been persecuted, even jailed. People were chased down in Austria and forced vaccinated. I mean, children were pinned to the ground and needles shoved into them. So do you feel okay about that? I mean, you're talking about somebody getting their feelings hurt. I'm talking about people being murdered, kids being murdered. You're worried about if somebody got their feelings hurt.

46:30Is that really the conversation that we're having right now? You want to know if I care that somebody got their feelings hurt? No, I don't give a damn that somebody got their feelings hurt. Real kids are out here dying every single day. Stu Peters, to my eye, seems unwell. If you take him at his word, he says he's so certain that vaccines are government-created, kid-killing bioweapons, that the real feelings of actual grieving people are immaterial to him. We sent Stu Peters a list of questions over email about the story. He didn't answer them, but he or his representative did say that he's not affiliated with the Died Suddenly X account.

47:10Which I think is true. He's in a legal battle with the other Died Suddenly filmmakers, each side fighting over who should own the copyright and trademark of the film. But in the meantime, the Died Suddenly account continues to do what it's always done. It looks for obituaries of ordinary Americans who have died ordinary deaths and holds them up as evidence of the COVID vaccine bioweapon. In December 2022, the Died Suddenly ex-account posted a wedding photo of a very happy-looking couple. They're holding up their hands in the Star Trek salute. They're young. They're proud to finally be wed. The bride has a big bouquet of flowers and an enormous smile.

47:48The groom has his head nuzzled against hers. Our listener, Alex, his wife, Whitney. Somebody had dug into Whitney's Facebook account and cropped into the corner some post where she just shared information about some free vaccination event back in April 2021. The caption of the Died Suddenly post is brief. Quote, This 36-year-old woman had hashtag died suddenly in her sleep. She was 22 weeks pregnant with her unborn son. Nothing in the caption itself is untrue. Whitney was 36. Whitney did die suddenly. She was 22 weeks pregnant with her unborn son, Felix. The facts are true. It's just they've escaped their context and been misplaced into this new one in which Whitney is now a character in a story she does not belong to.

48:36We haven't figured out in 2025 what to do about bad actors who behave like this, people who make their delusions memetic, whose conspiracy theories consent harassing mobs after innocent people. What we do know is that the internet we've built trains Sue Peters and the Died Suddenly crew, and it rewards them the way it trains and rewards anybody who posts on it. But what do we do about that internet? Most of the ways we've tried to silence conspiracy theorists, shaming, censoring, kicking them off platforms, have failed. In many cases, trying to shut them down has made them more paranoid, more determined.

49:13We do still have the courts. We do still have defamation laws. And those can work. When Alex Jones was claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, calling the parents of dead children actors, those parents sued him. They won. He lost over a billion dollars. We found a way to raise the price of delusion. And when Alex, our listener, asked a lawyer friend to email Bitchute, one of the websites that had photos of him and Whitney on it, the webmaster complied, deleted the images. So our laws still work at the edges. But there's still this larger problem. How our country, built on the idea that anybody should be able to say what they want, starts to sputter once you invent social media.

49:56A talent show to see who can say the craziest thing to earn followers. When Alex first wrote to us, he wanted to warn the world. If someone you love dies suddenly, don't use those words publicly. Don't summon the hordes of lunatics. The thing is, I don't think there's some language modification you can make that keeps you safe from the delusions of other people online. The obituary trolls found lots of obituaries that never even used those specific words. And once you're a part of their story, it's hard to get out. Lies are inherently viral. They can be whatever their audience wants them to be.

50:35The truth is solid but stubborn. It often refuses to travel as far. But it's all we have. If we know it's true, we have to keep insisting on it.

50:57Hi, my name is Blaine Oliver. I was Whitney's father. And I'm Jan Oliver, her mom. I was Whitney's best friend. Whitney's former roommate. Whitney's younger brother. We were like sisters to each other. This is Alex Oliver, Whitney Oliver's husband.

51:18So I guess the first thing we should start with is the beginning, which was in Tallahassee, Florida in 1986. So that was when we met her. Whitney and I first met at a summer camp for kids with diabetes. When I first met Whitney, we would drive around listening to music, getting stoned. My main memories with her, I think, were kind of riding in the car, hearing her sing, sing along with her favorite stuff. We'd sing Modest Mouse or Built to Spill or, you know, whatever. When she was a child, she was a big Spice Girls fan. And she would say girl power the way that the Spice Girls did. She was the loudest singer I had ever heard.

52:08And the first time I heard her sing in the car, I thought, wow, this girl is a lot. The thing I miss most about Whitney is talking with her. She had a slight Southern lilt to her voice. You could usually hear her talking above everyone else. I just miss Whitney's joy. I feel like she could inject a lot of positive energy into a situation. There are so many things that we miss, but I can hear her laugh today. She didn't laugh, she would cackle. I'm sure a lot of people will mention this, but had a great big laugh that would fill up a room. She had her own fashion style. Her favorite haircut was to do like a bangs that had like a widow's peak.

52:55You know, something that felt very almost Star Trek. She taught me so many things. She taught me the value of family. She taught me literally everything I know about art. I'd somehow never seen Point Break, Die Hard, Moonstruck, or Spice World until I met Whitney. But she remedied all of that. She was proud of her work. She was proud of her family. her friends, her husband.

53:26If I could say anything to her now, I think I'd want to let her know that we're all doing okay. We're all still together. We're all doing our best to carry on her legacy and not use her death as an excuse to be cynical or angry. I'd also tell her that I'm just sorry. I'm so sorry that I couldn't prevent this or protect her. I wish we'd gotten married sooner. I wish we tried to have a baby sooner. And I hope that she knows that. I know that wherever she is, whatever plane of existence she's on, she knows what's in my heart. And it's so hard. I can never say enough about how much I love her and miss her.

54:53Thank you.

55:24Thank you.

55:49Thank you.

56:45We'll be right back. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

57:14EpGliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EpGliss. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EpGliss. Before starting EpGliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

57:42When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com.

58:15Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamanani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Kim Kupal, who also fact-checked this week's episode. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. And thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schaub. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support work like this and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some occasional bonus interviews, we actually have one coming at you later this week or early next, consider signing up for Incognito Mode.

58:57You can learn more at searchengine.show. Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

59:27The Limo Emu

59:43It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.