Pod Insights Search Engine The Obituary About this episode Not long after Alex’s wife Whitney dies, he looks at her obituary and discovers something strange. A sect of people online has hijacked her story and turned it into a disturbing conspiracy theory.
Check out the place Whitney worked, Project: Onward, a non-profit studio for artists with disabilities. (They have very cool & reasonably priced art for sale). https://www.projectonward.org/shop-all
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Transcript 9,427 words · 23 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 PJ Vogt? Hello, Search Engine listeners. Quick note before we start. I just wanted to say how excited I am about this new season of episodes we have for you. We just have a bunch of stories, including this one, that are more experimental. There will be some more original investigations, which we think you'll really enjoy. And we've been able to do that because of you. We've had a little more budget to add freelance production and research help. And that's because you all have been listening. You've been sharing the show with your friends. And especially because some of you have even signed up for premium memberships to the show, to our incognito mode feed. And I just wanted to thank you all for that. We are tremendously grateful. We're going to have a bonus episode in the incognito mode feed in the next few days with me and our show's editor, Shruti Pennemaneni.
0:44 PJ Vogt? It was a real treat to have her on mic. You can hear that on incognito mode, which you can sign up for at searchengine.show. Okay, some quick ads and then on with the show.
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1:58 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Gusto. I remember back when we were juggling hiring, tracking benefits and running payroll all by ourselves and frankly, how much we used to dread payday every single month because of how manual and tedious it was. If I could give my past self a piece of advice, it would be to stop wasting precious hours on administrative work that software can automate in minutes. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. They make everything effortless, from automatic payroll, tax filings and direct deposits to 401Ks and workers' comp. You get unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price with zero hidden fees, plus automated offer letters and direct access
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3:24 PJ Vogt? Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. This week's story began with a call from a listener named Alex. He was talking to me from his home in Chicago.
3:35 Speaker 01 Check one, two. Hello. Hey, hey.
3:38 PJ Vogt? Hello, how's it going?
3:39 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm doing well, thanks. How are you PJ?
3:42 PJ Vogt? I'm okay. What are the posters behind you?
3:44 Speaker 01 Oh, so this is my home office/studio where it's just a bunch of random kind of music posters. I've got His Royal Badness right here, Prince, one of my heroes. Mostly music-related stuff. In the closet behind me is kind of where I've got a little sort of makeshift memorial set up for Whitney, my wife, her ashes, as well as, you know, just some photos, some trinkets. Those are some of her clothes hanging up, but most of what's remained is kind of just set up in here with me.
4:22 PJ Vogt? Alex had written me an email about his wife Whitney. She and their unborn son died in October of 2022. Alex's email was about this experience he had online in the wake of Whitney's death, where the story of her life had been hijacked in a very bizarre way. He wanted to tell me that story, which for him meant also explaining a little bit about who Whitney had been back when she was still alive.
4:45 Speaker 01 We're together for nearly 12 years, married for three of them. And when I moved to Chicago, she was already here going to school at the School of the Art Institute. She graduated from there with a degree in fine art and drawing. But when I met her, she was working at Mariano's, which is a chain of supermarkets around here. And I was working in the produce department. She was in the liquor department. And I would kind of go out of my way with my produce cart on the way to the produce section to kind of go through liquor to just sort of flirt with her a little.
5:21 PJ Vogt? And was that obvious? Like, does a man from produce not have much of a reason to find himself in the liquor section?
5:26 Speaker 01 It was definitely a roundabout way to get over there. Yeah, so I think she knew exactly what I was doing.
5:34 PJ Vogt? Alex and Whitney bonded pretty quickly. Whitney was in a car accident early in their courtship. And as she recovered at her parents' home, they'd talk long distance on the telephone. When she came back to the city, they quickly moved in together. The rest, Alex says, was just kind of history. He got to spend over a decade with this person who was, for him, his hero.
5:54 Speaker 01 You know, I certainly am not exaggerating when I say in no uncertain terms that she was just the kindest, most authentic, creative and truly empathetic person I've ever known. She just had the most incredible moral compass that I've ever seen on anyone.
6:11 PJ Vogt? What did that look like?
6:13 Speaker 01 It was just, I really didn't see any sort of gray area with her when it came to like, what was right or wrong. In fact, since she's passed, there's this kind of...
6:23 Speaker 01 Thing that I live by, which is WWW. What would Whitney want? Professionally, you know, she dedicated her life and career to a nonprofit based here in Chicago that provides a studio and gallery space for adult artists with developmental disabilities.
6:40 PJ Vogt? Oh, wow.
6:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's an incredible organization. She was very proud to work there. I've always been very kind of, I don't know, just frustrated professionally. I'm a failed musician, so that's something I've come to terms with. I just turned 40 this year, and that causes a lot of reflection, of course. But the incredible thing was that Whitney was so passionate about her career, and she did so much incredible stuff. And I was just frankly happy to sort of play a supporting role in her life. That was sort of like Whitney's world, and I just lived in it, which I know kind of sounds bad, but it was really a privilege to live in that world.
7:21 PJ Vogt? Alex and Whitney were married in October 2019. Alex wishes he'd proposed sooner. It wasn't that he ever wanted to be with anyone else. It was that he used to think marriage was what you did when you'd figured your life out. But once he proposed, it felt exactly right. And soon after their wedding, they decided to start a family.
7:40 Speaker 01 We knew it was going to be a challenge because she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 12 years old. But it was just, I mean, we just wanted it bad enough that we were willing to kind of risk it, I guess. I mean, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that the consequences would be this dire. But right off the bat, after she got pregnant, it was very, very difficult. She was dealing with a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum, which is essentially just the most brutal, intense morning sickness that you could experience. And it's like, it's every single day, throughout the day. Nothing seemed to help. Nothing relieved it. And we kept seeing the doctors.
8:25 Speaker 01 They assured us that, you know, despite everything, that it wasn't anything to be terribly concerned about. But then 22 weeks into the pregnancy, you know, after we'd already done the ultrasounds, we knew we were having a son. We'd given him a name. I felt him kick.
8:43 Speaker 01 She came home from work because she was incredibly still working through all of this and we watched TV. I rubbed her feet, which was a common occurrence, especially during the pregnancy. We even took our dog to the park, threw the ball around a little bit. It was one of the easier, you know, more relaxed days we'd had since the pregnancy. And we went to bed and she actually had a really pretty nice night. But then the next morning I woke, I woke up and she, she did not, she, she died in her sleep.
9:16 PJ Vogt? Oh God.
9:18 Speaker 01 And I still have that image in my mind. It's burned in there. I'm never gonna, that's another thing that just every time I really stop and think about it, I really does feel like I'm in a, like a horror movie or something. I mean, it was just terrifying. Going from what was to be almost certainly the like best moment of my entire life.
9:42 Speaker 01 I'm sorry.
9:43 PJ Vogt? You want to take a sec?
9:45 Speaker 01 I might just need like a second.
9:49 Speaker 01 To go from, yeah, what was going to be the happiest occasion in both of our lives to having the pendulum swing so hard in the other direction. It felt like the, I had no, I just had no context for it. It was the worst thing that ever happened to anyone that I know. And it happened to me. And it happened to her and it happened to our family. And, and so they, they came, paramedics came, police came. They kind of just, kind of just checked everything out and officially declared her dead. And then this is another thing that, you know, they don't.
10:35 Speaker 01 That you're not really prepared for or even like aware of is like all of the kind of just like bureaucracy and like that comes with like a family member dying and like all of the just kind of like like administrative stuff you need to take care of.
10:52 PJ Vogt? So what does that look like?
10:53 Speaker 01 Well, like right off the bat, I was like, I don't know, I just had this assumption that they would like take her and perform an autopsy or something. I didn't know, but especially because I was, I think even though I probably knew at that point in the back of my mind that it, you know, was related to the pregnancy, that it was some complication. Like I still wanted to know what happened, but they they left her there and it was up to to me to call a funeral home. And I just picked the one that was closest. There's one right around the corner. And thankfully, they actually kind of took their time coming
11:32 Speaker 01 to pick her up. And so I got to spend close to an hour with her. And it was later determined after her family and I did pay for a private autopsy, it was determined that the cause of death was eclampsia.
11:54 PJ Vogt? I want to just explain what eclampsia is because for this story, it's important to know how Whitney actually died. When you're pregnant, your body produces more blood and normally your blood vessels adapt to handle that. But in some mothers, blood vessels don't adapt normally, leading to pre eclampsia. Your blood vessels become tighter and leakier, which is dangerous. This can lead to swelling in your brain, to strokes. If it progresses to seizures, that's called eclampsia. Either stage can be fatal. As a first time mother, as a diabetic, and as someone older than 35, Whitney fit some of the criteria for eclampsia risk, but she just didn't know, which is something Alex still struggles to forgive himself for.
12:39 Speaker 01 Now that the dust has sort of settled to a degree and and I really think about it, I'm just like, what were we, what were we thinking? This was such a terrible idea. I've beat myself up so much over it.
12:52 Speaker 01 But everyone reminds me of how stubborn Whitney was and how badly she wanted to be a mom. And I'm not sure, even if we did have a better sense of just how risky it was, I don't know if that would have been enough to convince her otherwise. And she went to bed that night, happy and pregnant, and she loved being pregnant despite all the complications. And she was so excited to be a mom. And I just like to think that as awful as the next morning was, that at least, I don't know, I think everything probably felt right in her life at that moment.
13:41 PJ Vogt? Grief is very complicated. There are losses we move on from and others we don't want to. These losses, our minds just orbit for years. The memory of our loved one feels closer sometimes, further at others, but never really out of sight. Whatever that force is that binds us, that combination of love and grief and memory, Alex, three years from Whitney's death, is gripped by it. And making sense of what to do with its pull is one of his life's real questions. But in the weeks that followed Whitney's death, something else happened, something on the internet, which is something that he has very uncomplicated feelings about. Rage, despair, hurt. And that event would
14:26 PJ Vogt? begin with Whitney's obituary, which Alex worked very hard on.
14:30 Speaker 01 I insisted on writing it myself. And I wanted to try to capture as much as I could in a few paragraphs of just like how important she was to people and how much good she did and how creative she was and how much she loved her family. And, you know, I didn't expect her hometown newspaper obituary to be that widely circulated. Unfortunately, it did end up being seen by Many more people than I anticipated. And I am pretty certain that it's due to like a key phrase that I used in the obituary.
15:10 PJ Vogt? And what was the phrase?
15:12 Speaker 01 Died suddenly.
15:14 PJ Vogt? Died suddenly?
15:16 Speaker 01 Which is accurate. It accurately describes the way she died. And it felt like such an innocuous phrase to me. I didn't think twice about including it in there. It was just two words out of, you know, many more descriptive and personal and emotional words that I used to describe her and the experience. But shortly after that, I discovered on the obituary that had been published on the paper's website and on her social media accounts, Facebook, Instagram, these comments started to show up. Initially, the comments were all from friends and family, of course, just like
16:01 Speaker 01 offering their condolences. But then I started to see people that had no connection whatsoever to her or myself or her family. And they were just saying the most heinous, hurtful, and just wrong things about the ways that she died and about her.
16:25 PJ Vogt? And what were they saying about how she died and what were they saying about her?
16:28 Speaker 01 They ranged from celebrating her death as another kind of lib casualty of the jab, the vaccine that is for COVID-19. Many were just very, very cruel and accused her of just being selfish and foolish and reckless for getting the vaccine, like she somehow intentionally killed herself and our baby.
17:00 Speaker 01 Some of them were actually kind of sympathetic and, you know, made a point to mention how sad it is that she and our baby both died, but still insisting that the vaccine is what caused it.
17:19 PJ Vogt? So these are, the obituary wrote for your wife had been found by people online who believe that vaccines are somewhere between extremely dangerous to a government plot to actively kill Americans. And so their reaction to her death was that it was evidence in an argument they were already having, and either they were like expressing sympathy, but in a completely deranged way, expressing judgment in a deranged way, or expressing happiness because the idea is that she was a liberal, liberals take vaccines, liberals get what they deserve. That was the range?
18:01 Speaker 01 That, that pretty much sums it up. Yeah. And I mean, yes, we both have been vaccinated, as has most everyone we know. And even assuming for a moment, the entertaining this ridiculous conspiracy theory that the vaccines did somehow contribute to it. The fact that they would still just so cruelly ridicule her and mock her just was mind blowing. I couldn't believe it. It was just, it was just horrifying.
18:35 PJ Vogt? When Alex plugged Whitney's name into Google to try to figure out where this was coming from, he landed on a website called BitChute. BitChute is a video hosting service that caters to the far right. Lots of racial slurs, lots of stuff about the Jews. And among it all, he found video montages that included Whitney and him, photos from their wedding, photos from her social media, comment after comment about how she died from the vaccine, how he'd let it happen. He and his wife had been cast as characters in some dark fantasy made by lunatics on a website he'd never heard of. And it had spread to Twitter, too, with this tweet about Whitney from an account actually called Died Suddenly. That tweet had been retweeted nearly 2,000 times.
19:18 Speaker 01 I didn't know what to do about it. I was so overwhelmed and so upset. My first thought was, like, God, I just, I, the thought of like, her family, her parents stumbling across this as easily as I did, on their own, it just, it terrified me. It just broke my heart. And I knew I had to try to do something. And I didn't want to tell anybody about this because I didn't want anyone to see it and kind of experience these sensations that I was experiencing. So my first thought was to register my own BitChute account, infiltrate
19:58 Speaker 01 this community, and like, hunt all of these people down and confront them in person somehow, even though I suspect most of them never leave their house. Obviously, you know, I'm not Liam Neeson. I'm not going to dispense vigilante justice. So my cooler head prevailed. But I did reach out to a friend who happens to be an attorney, who kindly helped me draft a cease and desist letter that I then sent to BitChute. And after a bit of back and forth, they did agree to take down two of the videos that I had highlighted. Not the channels, but just those videos that were, you know, related to Whitney.
20:37 PJ Vogt? And so BitChute was willing to take down the video with a lawyer's threat?
20:43 Speaker 01 Right. You know, I kind of came at it from an angle of like, this is like slander or libel. I'm not a lawyer, but my friend is, thankfully. So I think that whether they thought there was any real legal threat to them, I think that they probably just, it was enough for them to just take it down so that I wouldn't bother them anymore. But since then, I haven't been able to bring myself to go look to see if it's still out there. I'm sure there are other pages that I missed. Again, they had been like, commented and shared thousands of times. And I just don't want to see it. I just can't. I can't, I really can't handle it, PJ. I honestly can't.
21:28 PJ Vogt? Alex had written to me on what would have been Whitney's 39th birthday. He didn't have a question he wanted us to answer, but he thought that the language he'd used in the obituary might have helped these people find his wife. And he wanted to talk about it in public so that other people who lost their loved ones would know to be careful when they wrote their obituaries.
21:46 Speaker 01 I don't know. I mean, the reason I reached out to Search Engine is because nearly three years after she died, it still makes me so angry. And I just, I hate to think that other people have to deal with this during what is already like the most difficult time in their life. And I think people need to know, I think that funeral homes and newspapers and anyone else that might be publishing obituaries should know enough to warn people that certain words and phrases could potentially lead to this. And having written the obituary, I can't help but blame myself for that. I wish, I wish someone had told me.
22:33 PJ Vogt? Of the many things Alex was blaming himself for, this, this notion that he was responsible for a bunch of online loonies, that he should have known better than to use the phrase "died suddenly," I was pretty sure he was wrong. I just didn't think this was his fault. But I wanted to learn more. I wanted to know why this had actually happened to him. We all know the internet right now is pretty broken, but if most things online are a game where people compete for attention, why were people being rewarded here for smearing Whitney? And why weren't they afraid of being punished for it? After the break, we enter the world of the obituary trolls.
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26:04 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show.
26:10 PJ Vogt? So 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.
26:52 PJ Vogt? One of the earliest examples I saw was of a woman named Amanda McAuliffe in Washington, DC. 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 gonna miss baby Z's smiles, giggles, and the joy he brought to our family." Amanda had used somewhat similar phrasing to our listener Alex. Pretty 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.
27:37 PJ Vogt? 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. For instance, Maddie Gold, an artist and professor in Philadelphia, she died of a heart attack. She'd also been fighting stage IV 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.
28:20 PJ Vogt? All these replies from people blaming Maddie for her own death. Somebody says, "Get the vax, pay the tax."
28:28 PJ Vogt? 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. These 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.
29:02 PJ Vogt? 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.
29:12 PJ Vogt? 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. And 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.
29:55 PJ Vogt? 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. In 2021, writer Alex Berenson, a leading vac skeptic, got a permanent suspension. So did Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, which was a big deal.
30:18 Speaker 02 I rise today as the only member of Congress that has ever been banned by social media. On January 2nd of 2022, Twitter banned me.
30:31 PJ Vogt? 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.
30:40 Speaker 03 We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General's office. We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors.
30:50 PJ Vogt? It sort of flies by, but what she's saying here is unusual. The US 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.
31:07 Speaker 04 What's your message to platforms like Facebook?
31:10 PJ Vogt? The reporter asked him his message to platforms like Facebook.
31:13 Speaker 04 They're killing people.
31:14 PJ Vogt? And Biden says, they're killing people.
31:16 Speaker 04 The only pandemic we have is among unvaccinated. And that's, and they're killing people.
31:26 PJ Vogt? They're killing people.
31:30 PJ Vogt? Legally, 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. Talking to each other, and really only each other, their conspiracies only got more and more elaborate.
32:14 PJ Vogt? And then, they broke containment.
32:17 Speaker 05 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.
32:25 Speaker 06 He has promised to restore banned accounts, including former President Trump's. Tonight, what he's now saying about all of this. Here's our chief business coordinator.
32:32 PJ Vogt? Elon Musk takes over Twitter in 2022, quickly welcomes back many of the permanently banned vaccine skeptics. Marjorie Taylor Greene returns victorious. A couple of 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.
32:54 Speaker 07 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.
33:03 PJ Vogt? 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. It's called Died Suddenly.
33:23 Speaker 08 US 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-
33:32 PJ Vogt? There'd been a surge of anti-vax documentaries since COVID, but Died Suddenly was the breakout hit.
33:37 Speaker 08 A 19-year-old health worker has developed blood clots after controversial-
33:41 Speaker 09 Just days after getting their second COVID-19 vaccine-
33:44 PJ Vogt? 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. Instead, 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.
34:23 Speaker 10 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-
34:38 PJ Vogt? So 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.
34:52 Speaker 11 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?
35:10 PJ Vogt? 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. And the people who seem to have first noticed this, according to the film, are mainly embalmers and other people who work in funeral homes.
35:26 Speaker 12 I mean, I just buried someone recently who died suddenly. Was a sick person in their 60s, but otherwise was not sick. And...
35:39 PJ Vogt? 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.
35:53 Speaker 12 Somebody mentioned, go onto Google and then type in "died suddenly" and find the news articles that would pop up.
36:00 PJ Vogt? You see a Google search bar. You 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.
36:13 Speaker 12 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.
36:31 PJ Vogt? 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.
36:46 Speaker 13 It's my professional medical opinion that this is a bioweapon and that this was a bioweapon unleashed against humanity with the intent to depopulate and control the population of the world.
37:03 Speaker 08 But basically, it's achieving its goal. If the goal was to reduce the world's population, it's working.
37:09 Speaker 14 This has been well planned. This is Agenda 2030. This is the Great Reset.
37:15 PJ Vogt? 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. You don't just watch it. You watch it, and if you buy its theory, you have a bizarre kind of awakening. Afterwards, whenever you look at the internet, you've been given this pattern to search for.
37:49 Speaker 15 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.
38:08 PJ Vogt? This last internet future 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. I 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.
38:58 PJ Vogt? In this music video from 2012, Stu Peters, wearing a flat-brimmed twins hat out on the Twin Cities streets, is rapping about his desire to be famous.
39:19 PJ Vogt? 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.
39:30 Speaker 08 On your face now. I will hit it again. Him behind your back. Ah, ah, ah. Okay, okay, okay.
39:41 PJ Vogt? 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.
40:01 Speaker 15 Monday, November 15th, 2021. Welcome to the Stu Peters Show. My name is Stu Peters. Well, by now, anybody who puts America first.
40:08 PJ Vogt? A video podcast.
40:09 Speaker 15 Anybody who embraces the exceptionalism that is America has no doubt heard at 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.
40:30 PJ Vogt? 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.
40:39 Speaker 15 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 officially-
40:47 PJ Vogt? J-Proof, you get no points for guessing what the J stands for. According 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.
41:03 Speaker 15 It's run on the Jewish money-making scheme that's banned by Jesus Christ.
41:08 PJ Vogt? 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. It's a little like watching a cover band. But he pretty quickly found his hook.
41:37 Speaker 15 Wednesday, 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.
41:53 PJ Vogt? Anti-vaxxer paranoia in 2021 finally delivers Stu Peters to a level of internet fame that had previously eluded him.
42:00 Speaker 15 You see, they can disappear YouTube videos, they can delete Facebook posts, they can ban and deplatform 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.
42:26 PJ Vogt? That 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.
42:38 Speaker 15 It's time for today's Died Suddenly story of the day. For several weeks, we've been bringing you a news 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.
42:58 PJ Vogt? The 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 X 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. The Died Suddenly hashtag took off with the film, with the movie's X account continuing to highlight allegedly
43:40 PJ Vogt? 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 Stu 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."
44:09 Speaker 16 So you made a film called Die Suddenly. I'm just curious, what were you, what was your aim with that film? What were you trying to do or create?
44:16 Speaker 15 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 then it's just been relentlessly pushed as this safe and effective vaccine. It's a complete lie. It's a total lie. And it's-
44:30 PJ Vogt? Stu Peters, he's dressed in the MAGA uniform, red tie, tight blue blazer. He's got a sort of business fash haircut, the sides cropped, the top gelled into a ski jump.
44:40 Speaker 15 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.
44:48 PJ Vogt? The 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.
45:01 Speaker 15 It's great. It'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.
45:14 PJ Vogt? The reporter presses on. She tells Stu Peters that she's spoken to a woman whose husband died of a congenital illness.
45:21 Speaker 15 The whole planet is full of great distress right now.
45:23 Speaker 16 She was harassed. Do you feel okay about the fact she was harassed?
45:27 Speaker 15 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? Is 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.
46:12 PJ Vogt? Stu Peters, to my eye, seems unwell.
46:17 PJ Vogt? 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 Sue 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, which 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
46:59 PJ Vogt? them up as evidence of the COVID vaccine bioweapon. In December 2022, the Died Suddenly X 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. The groom has his head nestled 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.
47:43 PJ Vogt? 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.
48:08 PJ Vogt? We 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 Stu Peters and the "die 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. We 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
48:53 PJ Vogt? 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 BitShoot, 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, a 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.
49:35 PJ Vogt? 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. The 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.
50:28 Speaker 17 Hi, my name is Blaine Oliver. I was Whitney's father.
50:32 Speaker 18 And I'm Jan Oliver, her mom.
50:34 Speaker 19 I was Whitney's best friend.
50:36 Speaker 20 Whitney's former roommate.
50:38 Speaker 21 Whitney's younger brother.
50:39 Speaker 22 We were like sisters to each other.
50:42 Speaker 01 This is Alex Oliver, Whitney Oliver's husband.
50:49 Speaker 17 So 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.
51:03 Speaker 19 Whitney and I first met at a summer camp for kids with diabetes.
51:08 Speaker 22 When I first met Whitney, we would drive around, listening to music, getting stoned.
51:14 Speaker 21 My main memories with her, I think, were kind of riding in the car, hearing her sing, sing along with her favorite stuff.
51:22 Speaker 19 We'd sing "Madonna's Mouse" or "Bill to Spill," or, you know, whatever.
51:26 Speaker 17 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.
51:36 Speaker 22 She was the loudest singer I had ever heard. And 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.
51:49 Speaker 20 She had a slight southern lilt to her voice.
51:53 Speaker 17 You could usually hear her talking above everyone else.
51:57 Speaker 20 I just miss Whitney's joy. I feel like she could inject a lot of positive energy into a situation.
52:04 Speaker 17 There are so many things that we miss, but I can hear her laugh today.
52:09 Speaker 19 She didn't laugh, she would cackle.
52:12 Speaker 21 I'm sure a lot of people will mention this, but had a great big laugh that would fill up a room.
52:17 Speaker 17 She had her own fashion style.
52:19 Speaker 19 Her favorite haircut.
52:22 Speaker 19 Was to do like a bangs that had like a widow's peak, you know, something that felt very almost Star Trek.
52:28 Speaker 01 She taught me so many things. She taught me the value of family. She taught me literally everything I know about art.
52:35 Speaker 20 I'd somehow never seen Point Break, Die Hard, Moonstruck, or Spice World until I met Whitney, but she remedied all of that.
52:43 Speaker 18 She was proud of her work. She was proud of her family, her friends, her husband.
52:57 Speaker 01 If I could say anything to her now,
53:01 Speaker 01 I think I'd want to let her know that we're all doing OK. 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.
53:18 Speaker 01 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'd tried to have a baby sooner.
53:35 Speaker 01 And I hope that she knows that. I know that wherever she is, whatever plane of existence she's on,
53:45 Speaker 01 she knows what's in my heart.
53:48 Speaker 01 And it's so hard. I can never say enough about how much I love her and miss her.
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57:01 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character-driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands. Another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability. If these public servants can't survive in
57:46 PJ Vogt? government today, what does that say about us? I am so excited that this new book is out. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I read everything he writes, and I'm very excited for this one. Blockers by Michael Lewis. Available wherever books are sold. Learn more at blockersbook.com. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Viori. I have been living in my new gear from Viori, and honestly, it has completely transformed my daily routine. I picked up the Sunday Performance Jogger from their Sunday collection, and they've quickly become my absolute go-to pants, whether I'm heading out for an early morning run, working from home, or grabbing coffee with friends. The soft, lightweight, four-way
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59:20 PJ Vogt? Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support from Kim Kupel, 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 Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shaw. Our agent is Orin 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, early next-- consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show.
1:00:05 PJ Vogt? Follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
1:00:34 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner, running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.
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