For the Record

Around two years ago, word began to spread about a deadly new virus from China.

The autohoaxers of the world weren’t too worried: we just autohoaxed like usual.

Lately, however, some people have called my autohoax credentials into question…

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Post #121

For the Record

Written and published: 7-Dec-2021

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Introduction

As many of you know, I’ve been a fan of fakeologist dot com for years.

I first heard of the site in 2015, and my initial appearance on a fakeologist call was in May of that year.

Some time ago I wrote an overview of the Fakeologist site.

That review is probably due for refurbishment, the last time I updated the page was late 2019.

However, a lot of the information on that page remains as valid today as it was when I first wrote it.

I remain a big fan of Ab and still listen to most of the audios he uploads.

Last year he published a chat with his late-teen daughter about the state of the world.

I was so impressed by the discussion that I uploaded a video to promote it:

Father and daugher discuss the Konyvirus at the Beach

I’m also a patreon of Ab’s site, for the low low price of just nine dollars and eleven cents per month.

Ab’s patreons don’t get anything extra, I just support his site because I believe in the importance of independent media.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

If fakeologist dot com ever disappeared, I’d be genuinely upset.

I love that place. It makes my life better.

Sometimes we take things for granted when we allow ourselves to focus on the negatives rather than the positives.

That’s why a lot of people only realise how much somebody or something meant to them when that somebody or something is gone.

I’m not going to make that mistake with my Truth Uncle Ab:

I’m going to appreciate the good work he is doing while he is here.

Ab takes care of himself and is only in his fifties, so here’s to hoping he’ll be here for several decades to come 🥂

Even if I sometimes disagree with Ab’s take or his style or whatever:

Who cares? It’s trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Ab, if you read this, you’re a legend, you’ve done good work.

Neither of us believe in heaven but if it turns out we were wrong, I look forward to sharing a long island iced tea with you up in the clouds some day.

With all of that said, lately I have noticed a little bit of animosity among certain fakeologist regulars towards yours truly.

I know, hard to believe, right?

Somebody at fakeologist saying something negative about JLB?

You wouldn’t read about it.

Seriously though, an outspoken dude like myself will always attract a certain level of antagonism and antipathy.

It comes with the territory, and if I couldn’t handle it, I would have disappeared shortly after arriving in the scene, all those years ago.

The difference lately seems to be that the snarky remarks about JLB apparently stem from a comment I made on a recent fakeologist audiochat.

The comment I made was along the lines of, ‘I was the first person in the world to autohoax the coronavirus’.

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An extreme claim

I can understand why this might at first seem like a wild statement to make.

How could some dude from Australia claim to be the first in the world to call this thing a hoax?

Especially now, almost two years later, when almost everybody in our corner of the internet knows this is a hoax.

How could anybody claim to be the first person to have called it?

Fair question.

Now I’m going to answer it.

According to the official timeline of events, here is what happened.

On January 22, 2020, Wuhan authorities announced that they were temporarily closing the city’s airport.

This was reported by CNN in an article entitled:

‘Wuhan coronavirus outbreak kills 17 in China as first case found in US’

That same article is still available, however it was updated the next day (Jan 23) with a new headline:

‘Wuhan coronavirus death toll rises, as city imposes transport lockdown’

How do I know the original title of that article?

Because I used it as the basis for my first video about coronavirus, in which I called it a hoax.

This video was originally uploaded to youtube, and reached thousands of views before they deleted it (for ‘medical misinformation’ or some nonsense like that).

I can still find the video information in my youtube studio, here is what comes up:

This is how it works on the creator side of youtube:

When they delete a video, you can still see the basic information, but the thumbnail is removed, along with the stats.

So if somebody wants to dispute my claim that the video reached thousands of views before deletion, then fair enough, I probably can’t prove it to you.

What cannot be disputed is that I uploaded the video on Jan 22, 2020 (US time).

This was the same day I first read about the coronavirus in the mainstream news in multiple outlets.

As soon as I noticed that several different major news organisations around the world were running with a story about some ‘Wuhan virus’, I decided to autohoax it.

My ‘Why Coronavirus Has Me VERY Scared’ video followed the same formula I had used to good effect with the Epstein ‘suicide’ hoax.

Fortunately, that video, from August 2019, has not yet been deleted by youtube.

Epstein Suicide Story is a HOAX

The Epstein video was, up until that time, the most successful (by viewcount) of any video I had uploaded to my then-new youtube channel.

(My original youtube channel was deleted by youtube in early 2019, shortly before I flew out of Australia)

My logic was that the ‘You DO know this is a hoax, don’t you’ shtick may be worth trying again.

So I autohoaxed the ‘Wuhan virus’ the same way:

‘You DO know this coronavirus news story is a hoax, don’t you?’

And, once again, it worked, because the Jan 22 coronavirus hoax video reached thousands of views before being kyboshed by youtube.

For further context, note that The Guardian reported ‘human to human transmission’ of the virus on Jan 21.

China confirms human-to-human transmission of coronavirus

If you perform a google search for ‘wuhan coronavirus’, and limit the date range to 1-Oct-2019 -> 20-Jan-2020, here is what you might see:

(If this image is too small to see, you can find an enlargeable version here)

There was an article from the BBC on January 9 about a ‘mystery illness caused by coronavirus’.

I checked the wayback machine and it confirms that the article was published on January 9.

January 9 was the same day that the WHO released their statement about a ‘cluster of pneumonia cases’ in China.

That statement is the top result in the google search screencapped above.

January 9 was also when the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control released their ‘Threat Assessment Brief’ regarding the virus.

It seems to me as though January 9 was when the story first began growing legs.

I searched through the google results for several pages and there appear to be no major news articles about the ‘Wuhan virus’ prior to January 9.

There is however this video dated January 4:

Mystery illness outbreak in Wuhan, China

(That video is worth checking out, what a trip down memory lane)

The point of all of this is to demonstrate that the ‘Wuhan virus’ only became a thing around January 9.

And it only began receiving worldwide mainstream coverage about a week or so later.

You can test all of this out for yourself, using google and the wayback machine (or whatever other search methods you prefer).

My coronavirus autohoaxing was therefore, at most, three weeks after there even was a story to autohoax.

That is, three weeks before my video, there was no story to autohoax, it didn’t exist yet.

It would have been logically implausible for myself or anybody else to autohoax this story prior to January, 2020.

I’d go further and suggest that most folks hadn’t even heard of the ‘Wuhan virus’ before mid-January at the earliest.

In any event, it is certainly possible that somebody else did autohoax this one before me.

If we can find evidence to support this notion, I’ll be the first to acknowledge it and retract my claim of being the first coronavirus autohoaxer in the world.

I’d like to ask anybody out there with any such evidence to please forward it to me (johnlebon123 at gmaymay).

In the meantime, I’m making the reasonable inference that I was indeed the first person in the world to autohoax the coronavirus.

It would certainly make sense, given that I am in fact the World’s Leading Coronavirus Skeptic.

Now, you may ask, as a renowned skeptic, is it not my job to search for the earliest coronavirus hoax content at other outlets, just to see if perhaps they beat me to the punch?

Okay, let’s do that.

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Cluesforum

Over at Simon shack’s Cluesforum, they have a thread dedicated to the ‘Coronavirus Circus’.

The first post is dated to January 24.

They were, like myself, and others, on to this hoax rather quickly.

Slightly later than yours truly, sure, but quick enough to deserve credit.

Simon and I may have had our differences in the past but I truly appreciate the good work he did back in the day.

If it weren’t for this bullshit pandemic, I’d even try to contact him to see if we could arrange a meetup some time.

Drink some nice wine, eat some fine food, laugh some hearty laughs about good old Harley Guy.

It would be epic.

Italy is not that far from Bulgaria.

Europe is such a small place, I never realised until I got here.

Now it looks unlikely I’ll be able to leave Bulgaria any time soon.

It is what it is.

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Piece of Mindful

This is an excellent group blog run by a lovely gentleman named Mark Tokarski.

Several other people, including a Member of this very website, also contribute detailed and thoughtful pieces from time to time.

Often you’ll find the best stuff in the comments, there’s a terrific regular audience at PoM.

Anyhow, I tried searching ‘virus’, ‘coronavirus’, and ‘wuhan’, and the earliest post I could find was this:

Coronavirus Doctor Li Wenliang Does Not Exist (8-Feb-2020)

It’s an intriguing post, definitely worth checking out, especially given what we know has happened in the almost two years since.

Perhaps there were earlier posts (or comments) about the coronavirus hoax at PoM, but I searched and couldn’t find any.

Most of their commentators today seem well aware of the hoax, this is definitely a blog worth checking out if you haven’t already.

In fact several of the most prominent Members on this site over the past three or four years made their way here via PoM.

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Fakeologist

I checked the fakeologist archives to see when the coronavirus first became of a topic of interest there.

The search function at fakeologist is not particularly helpful, so I took the time to look through the archives of the entire month of January.

Only two posts mention the term ‘virus’:

Event 201 – Coronavirus script (29-Jan-2020)

Imagine this scary thing coming for you (23-Jan-2020)

In his 23-Jan post, Ab wrote this:

Viri are a hoax.
As such, you can’t get them.
As such, don’t be afraid of the latest figment of the controllers’ imagination, the corona version.

Ab was hip to the broader virus hoax well before I wised up to the ruse.

It took for the coronavirus hoax for me to look into virology, and at some point in 2020 I finally figured out that viruses are in fact a hoax, nobody died nobody got hurt by some invisible body-possessing demon.

I’ve given Ab credit for this on plenty of occasions over the past 18 months or so: he figured out the virus hoax a long time before I did.

However, his earliest post about the coronavirus hoax is dated to January 23, a day after my video.

Recall that the recent animosity towards JLB among certain fakeologists is based on my apparently-controversial claim that I was the first person in the world to autohoax the coronavirus.

Ab wasn’t far behind me. In fact it may have only been a matter of hours.

It doesn’t even really matter; seriously, who cares?

Well apparently my factual claim of being the first coronavirus autohaxer in the world does matter to a few folk out there, because lately they have been making snarky remarks about it.

These are folks I get along with well when we’re on the same call.

Folks I think would be good fun to have a beer with, if I ever return to Australia.

Somehow my factual comment about being the first in the world to autohoax muh coronas is important to them, which is why I took the time to put together this post.

I know a lot of folks will read all of this and accuse me — once again — of being ‘arrogant’ or whatever.

Others will realise that I have, in this very post, once again, acknowledged that Ab was miles ahead of me in the bigger picture i.e. all viruses are a hoax.

Once you take off the blinders, you’ll see that I’m actually a very humble guy.

Possibly the most humble guy who ever lived.

However, when the evidence points to a conclusion, I speak truth to that conclusion.

And my conclusion, based on the available evidence, is that I was the first person in the world to autohoax the coronavirus.

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In Closing

When I made my claim, during a recent chat with Ab, about being the first person in the world to autohoax the coronavirus, I didn’t think I was saying anything controversial.

I certainly didn’t expect it to spark (or bring to the surface) any animosity from certain folks over at fakeologist dot com.

Of course I understand that the JLB shtick is not everybody’s cup of tea.

The strange mix of extreme skepticism, Aussie idiosyncracies and accent, occasional braggadocio, cutting instrospection and humility, relative youth, sensible self-promotion, and shameless eccentricity… it can be a lot for somebody to take.

And that’s before we even get to the a-he-hees and the shamones.

I don’t blame people for hating on me, especially if they are new to my work, and especially if they are Australian.

Australians don’t tend to take too kindly to self-promotion, and I happen to be the World’s Leading Skepticism Promoter, so my material will naturally be grating to many of my countrymen.

I hope that one day, some of those folks out there who still harbour some antipathy towards me will see that, ultimately, I’m just some guy who went out there and tried to do something different with his life.

I don’t mean anybody any harm.

I’m trying to have some fun in a world gone mad — and getting madder by the day.

Due to my autohoaxing tendencies, occasionally I will be the first person in the world to autohoax some worldwide news event.

The presently-available evidence suggests that I was indeed the first person to autohoax the coronavirus.

During the same clip, I then sang some lines from a Beyonce track, in flamboyant falsetto, while on camera for a youtube video which thousands of people around the world would eventually see.

Speaking of which, I’d like to give praise to the great almighty, the force which has allowed me to carry on through what have been, at certain stages over the past few years, some dark times.

Here’s to you, Kek, you cheeky, soul-testing mofo.

Hit me like a ray of sun
Burning through my darkest night
You’re the only one that I want
Think I’m addicted to your light

If you would like to know more about the Power of Kek (peace be upon him) I recommend you check out the following:

Article #55 – The Art of Honk War by Some Zoo (6-Sep-2019)

One more thing:

While going through the archives of fakeologist dot com, I found this 20-minute monologue I recorded on the fakeo discord server on January 19, 2020.

At the time I was attending the Nomad Summit in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Attending the Summit had been a dream of mine for years, and finally, after so much time and effort, the dream became reality.

The Summit — and the recording —  were just days before coronavirus became a thing, and we all began talking about it incessantly, for what would be two years and counting.

Whether you love me or hate me (or anything in between), you might find that audio worth your time.

I really am just some dude on a strange journey, in a bizarre realm, where it sometimes feels like nothing is what it seems.

Massive thanks to the people who make all of this possible.

You guys and gals know not to take any of this too seriously, and I’m glad there’s still a few of us like that, out there in the world.

I hope you’re all taking better care of yourselves than I’ve been taking of myself lately.

When in Bulgaria, do as the Bulgarians do.

Speaking of which, I’m off to get another drink.

A-he-hee, shamone 🍹

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Credits

The folks who make all of this possible.

Independent research and content creation requires time and effort.

I continue to do this because about 100 people around the world support it.

Without them, none of this would be possible.

That’s a fact.

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Post #121. Written and published 7-Dec-2021. 3,000 words. Publicly available.