Kony 2012: How Social Media Tried to Stop a War

Kony 2012: How Social Media Tried to Stop a War

Kyle [New]: [00:00:00] 2012 was a brief shining moment when the internet decided that a 28 minute YouTube video would single handedly end a decades long African conflict.

Adam [New]: I thought it was something like Fyre

Festival ,

It is actually about a guy called Joseph Coney and basically he takes charge of what's left of the LRA army, and turns it into something way darker. He is going to do the unthinkable and he's going to start raiding nearby villages abducting children to fight in his army, he literally orders them to kill their parents, so they'll be too ashamed to return.

Adam [New]: why would they agree to killing their parents ?

Kyle [New]: Otherwise they're gonna be killed,

I guess. That is awful.

It's horrendous. Adam.

Adam [New]: I had no idea it was this dark, Then as more and more news stations start picking up the story people start going, hang [00:01:00] on.

What exactly is this campaign? Because there is no sign of this 30,000 strong child army anywhere.

Adam [New]: So where are they?

Kyle [New]: Welcome to the Compendium, an Assembly of Fascinating things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

Adam [New]: We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw-dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

Kyle [New]: I'm, of course, Kyle Reese, your ringmaster for this week's episode.

Adam [New]: And I'm Adam Cox, [00:02:00] the clown union representative for this week.

Kyle [New]: What do they need union representation for?

Adam [New]: Uh, good hours, uh mm-hmm. Fair pay. You know, they go on the picket line and start, I dunno, squeaking their horns.

Kyle [New]: The new thing is that it's like not woke to like squeeze their nose anymore. Mm-hmm. So they need a union representative to stop that.

Adam [New]: Yeah. What we wanna try and protect, you know, the clowns from being, you know, misappropriate or not appropriately handled. And equally, we don't want them handling other people.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. They're a dying breed though. Right. So you need to put in these protections to kind of attract more clowns to the circus. Otherwise, what's left?

Adam [New]: I've never seen a young clown, do you know what I mean?

Kyle [New]: Oh, actually that's true. I guess in your mind though, you always think middle aged man for clown, you don't really think, oh, young.

Can you imagine like a 14-year-old being a clown? Exactly. It's weird. It's creepy.

Adam [New]: Yeah. So I think maybe when we get to 50, we'll think of a career change. Turn into clowns.

Kyle [New]: You are a clown.

Adam [New]: Okay.

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Kyle [New]: Mm-hmm.

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Kyle [New]: maybe we should keep the silence in. I can't remember any episodes that we've done in the past. Uh,

Adam [New]: what did I, oh, there was the NHS episode. Was that,

Kyle [New]: I think that might be in the first 20. Yeah, that's in the first 20. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So you can

Adam [New]: definitely enjoy that one. So that was all about how the NHS came to be.

Mm-hmm. From leeches to, COVID or something or other. It's a while ago since I've done it, but it's quite good. It is. It was a good one. A lot of nurses like that episode,

Kyle [New]: but I honestly don't think there's any more. I think we only just did one in that season. I can't remember any of other episodes.

I mean, there's like 20 odd episodes I can remember. The Beanie Babies obviously. 'cause that was our first one ever. Yeah. I guess, [00:04:00] do

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Kyle [New]: Go and check it out, please. And as a special thank you, our certified Freak Tier members now receive an exclusive compendium key chain.

As we keep saying, guys, there are so many of you out there that pay monthly on Patreon, but you haven't sent us a DM with your address. So if you do that, we will send one straight to your door so we can always be dangling near your hosen script.

Adam [New]: A hori ho hori hori. Yeah. We don't want your hori to be like cold and naked.

Kyle [New]: I don't even how you can make that sound sexy. Hori. I'm going to pound your hori. That's, that's too much. That's too much kids. Listen to this show, Adam.

Adam [New]: And lastly, guys, please follow us on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Your support helps us find other people like you who love a good tale of the unexpected.

Kyle [New]: Yes, please. Now that we are back for season three, we would be so grateful if every one of you who [00:05:00] hasn't left us a review yet, do so. Please.

Adam [New]: Yeah, it'll really help with our numbers. We're on about 580 on Spotify.

Kyle [New]: Well, that's ratings, right?

Adam [New]: Ratings. Yeah.

Kyle [New]: We want reviews, bitch. We want reviews,

Adam [New]: but I'd like us to get to a thousand on Spotify in this season and then lots more reviews.

Kyle [New]: I reckon it's possible if everyone bans together like a proper certified freak family, we can do it.

Come on guys.

So Adam, today on the Compendium, we are diving into an assembly of good intentions, weaponized, commodified, and sold in a $30 kit.

Adam [New]: Do you know what I'm, I'm not even going to bother trying to guess that, like that's so ambiguous.

Kyle [New]: What do you mean? All the information you need is right in there

Adam [New]: except about what it's about.

Kyle [New]: That's the whole point, Adam. Let's cast our minds back. Back into the compendium time machine once again. Where we're going, it's rolling. Pulled the lever, it's going and it's landing on. 20, 20 12.

Adam [New]: Oh, okay. That wasn't that long ago.

Kyle [New]: It [00:06:00] wasn't So, might even say Adam. It was a simpler time for us. We, the world were right at the cusp of that moment just before social media became the parasite that latched onto our mental health.

Mm-hmm. Just before the introduction of those endless scrollable feeds. Before likes had, attached themselves onto our self-worth.

Adam [New]: And when Instagram was, was that even a thing?

Kyle [New]: I think Instagram was a thing by this point, or was very new.

Adam [New]: That's when you just had like these really grainy pictures and filters that you just post of, I don't know what,

Kyle [New]: you make it sound like a negative. I want that back. Just let it be about photographs of your friends and your mates. None of these reels and Oh my God. Just, ah, just the production and the ads and stuff. It's just bullshit. But, by all accounts, it was essentially the calm before the social media storm that we see today.

What, what do you remember of 2012?

Adam [New]: Uh, well that was when London hosted the Olympics. Yep. Uh, which we went to, or Paris. The best Olympics in the world. Yeah. Yeah, we're biased, [00:07:00] but yeah. What else happened that year? What were you wearing?

Kyle [New]: Probably

Adam [New]: nothing.

Um, something slutty, uh, reveals

Kyle [New]: a bit of nipple. Tiny, tiny, tiny shorts. They say if your shorts, do not make you feel like an absolute slut, then they're not short enough.

Adam [New]: I know that my mama's always said that to me every time I left the house, you're no slut of mine.

Kyle [New]: That's the thing though. You're gonna wear like the tiniest shorts ever and you're gonna stop, reflect and go, Hmm, I've become my mother.

Uh, I dunno what else was going on in 2012. Well, I'm gonna tell you. Okay, because I've got a whole thing planned. 'Cause 2012 was the year that Obama, AKA Mack Daddy of the USA is reelected to his second term in office. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I missed that man. Right? Mm-hmm.

Hurricane Sandy has just devastated huge sways of the USA. The ongoing repercussions of the Arab Spring is now causing huge instability across the Middle East. It was also the year of the Sandy Hook shootings, which was just really [00:08:00] awful. That's when that little primary school was shot up by some awful, awful gunman.

It was also the year that Whitney Houston smoked a last crack pipe. Oh,

Adam [New]: yeah. That's not you. You made that sound like it was a positive.

Kyle [New]: That's true, actually. That's really sad. It was also the year that Whitney Houston smoked her last crack pipe.

Adam [New]: Oh, was it really? So that was 13 years ago.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. Uh, I don't think she died from crack. Apparently the official reporting is that she drowned in a bathtub. Yeah. After smoking crack. Okay.

PSY took the world by storm with an international hit gang, um, style. Remember we covered that on the poop cruise episode? That's what they were jamming to that year. Yeah. And of course, you cannot forget about, as you said, London 20 20 12, the Olympics, the best Olympics in the world, which we went to. I think we went to the Paralympics where we saw Oscar Pistorius. Mm-hmm. Doing his little thing on the track. And actually, in a couple weeks, we're actually gonna be doing an episode on Oscar Pius and the Killing of Riva Stink [00:09:00] Camp. Oh, interesting. 'cause we had that massive debate on our way back from ibi, didn't we?

Just a couple weeks ago where we were like, what actually happened? Did he kill her and cold blood? Did he not? Was it a tragic accident? So I went off, done the research, and I'm here to put the facts on the table.

Adam [New]: Well, I, I'm pretty sure it was a cold-blooded killing, but we'll find out in a couple of weeks.

Kyle [New]: Mm. And also, this was the year that we were jamming to Carly Ray Jepsen. Call Me, maybe remember one that was 2012. That was 2012. Adam, I

Adam [New]: feel like it was earlier than that.

Kyle [New]: Do you think? Yeah. I, I can't, like, it's all a blur in my mind, but it was also the year that somebody I used to know by a Gaer was that Yeah, you love that song.

Did I? I'm sure you did. Did you not used to serenade me with that song? Uh, no. Someone there that used to know, I think that's someone that you used to know.

But Adam, 2012 was also the year of Kony 2012.

Adam [New]: Okay. Do you even know what that was?

I've heard it talked about a lot, and then I instantly forget it. Okay. So this [00:10:00] is gonna be one of those episodes, which I will forget in 24 hours.

Kyle [New]: Well, hopefully you, this is exactly what happened in this, episode actually, because for those of you who do not know what

Adam [New]: Coney

Kyle [New]: 2012 was, in a nutshell, it was a brief shining moment when the internet decided that a 28 minute YouTube video and a hashtag along with a $30 action kit could single handedly and a decades long African conflict.

Adam [New]: Yeah, I definitely don't remember this.

Kyle [New]: Basically, Facebook was just popping off at the time. The hashtag on Twitter was basically king, and as a result, activism had kind of moved online and brought us kind of that peak white savior energy that was really popping off at the time. Do you remember, I can't remember her name, Stacey Dooley.

She was kind of off in Africa. She was kind of doing some charity work and then she was kind of accused of kind of this white savior moment swooping in at the last minute, kind of all the cameras there. She gets all the credits when they discount all the work that all these other charities like Oxfam and the Red Cross had [00:11:00] kind of been doing in the region.

Adam [New]: Oh, okay.

Kyle [New]: So it was just kinda like filled with these glossy montages. You see Ugandan kids crying. There's a narrator whispering, don't worry, we've got this. We'll save you because Adam, for one surreal week, millions of people across the world genuinely believed that they could stop a wall by sharing a single link on the internet.

When this 28 minute video dropped on YouTube, it quickly became the first YouTube video to hit a hundred million downloads in just a single week. Which is obviously something that feels almost meaningless to us today, especially in light of creators like Mr.

Beast, who routinely attract three times that amount of views in just a matter of hours. But back then, this was a massive deal. And for context, before this video was released, the biggest videos on the internet included the Charlie bit. My finger video. Do you remember that one?

That cute little kid going, ah, he fucking bit my finger. Did he swear? No he didn't. No. It's for emphasis Rebecca Black's video Friday. Do you remember that song?

Adam [New]: [00:12:00] Oh God. Is that the one where he ended up like producing a, A record, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It's some

Kyle [New]: kind of rich, privileged kid from like LA or somewhere. I probably got those facts wrong, but she, yeah,

Adam [New]: it is terrible. She just talks about Friday. Friday. Oh, her parents really should have, you know, sent her to college.

Kyle [New]: But in comparison to Kony 2012, there had never been a video on YouTube that had s SWT over a hundred million views this fast. I'm talking Adam like in less than a week. Other videos obviously had managed to achieve their accolade, but normally it took months, if not years.

And as a result of this virality, it gained a huge amount of support and endorsement from some of the world's biggest celebrities. But very quickly. As quickly as 20, 20 12, took the world by storm. It also quickly fell to pieces as people started asking some serious questions about what was really going on in Uganda at the time.

Adam [New]: Okay. What was going on in Uganda then?

Kyle [New]: Well, the issue that they were presenting in this video was actually an [00:13:00] issue, but it became very clear that they had massively oversimplified a very complicated, decades long political issue that had been kind of raging through the region for, for decades, essentially since the 1960s.

When they were challenged about this, they literally responded by saying like, it was oversimplified by design because essentially the public, they were saying were just too stupid to understand the full breadth of the issue.

That's literally the sum up of what they were saying, right? So you can imagine you hearing that as the public and going, actually basically they're calling us dumb.

Mm-hmm. And so naturally that does not go down very well. But also this is literally day two of the video being released.

So this is how soon after K 2012 gets released that there's backlash dots coming at them. Then questions, Adam started being asked about where all the money was actually going, which led journalists to uncover connections to several very secretive, far-right evangelical Christian organizations who were doing some very, very shady shit in the country and exploiting [00:14:00] thousands of Africans across the region.

They were basically lobbying to ban the use of condoms at a time when HIV rates in the area were only just starting to fall in the region.

Adam [New]: They'd rather people die than wear a condom.

Kyle [New]: Christian values.

Adam [New]: Oh, okay.

Kyle [New]: Basically, They were also calling for the death penalty towards LGBT community members and opposing gay marriage. So they were directly lobbying governments in order to kind of push through this legislation.

But on top of that, it also got discovered that they had links to organizations that were exploiting farmers for cheap cotton picking labor as well in the region.

So it's not good. And the thing is though, it's not like all of this came out months and months after this video had kind of gone viral. We're talking day two, day three, day four, and it continued on until basically it all came to a crashing halt.

Adam [New]: Right. So it sounds like there's a meteoric kind of rise in this viral video, but then obviously it unravels pretty quickly.

Kyle [New]: That's right. [00:15:00] Yes.

So Adam, today on the compendium, I'm gonna tell you about this infamous Coney 2012 viral video, the one that took the world by storm for a very brief 72 hour period. I'll tell you about the man behind it and what he was actually trying to achieve and how it all fell to shit.

And maybe throughout this there will be a lesson to be learned to always do your research into the charities that you are supporting, but also understand that Facebook likes does not equal one child saved. Is that what they were saying?

Pretty much like that was the thing at the side. All these kind of really inspirational charitable videos where people like share and like, and kind of pass things on. People were liking them and thinking, oh, I've done, I've done my good deed for the day. I've saved a child. All you've done is just like that video, increase the reach and got it in front of more people.

That's all you've done. You've not actually done anything or meaningful?

Adam [New]: No, not at all. But the fact that people thought that.

Kyle [New]: Mm,

Adam [New]: wow.

Kyle [New]: So Adam, the man behind the Kony 2012 video is a guy [00:16:00] called Jason Russell. So he's born in 1978.

He's raised by very evangelical Christian parents in and around the San Diego area in California. And together they ran an evangelical theater group called the Christian Youth Theater. So it's kind of like high school musical, but before Christians, and way worse and way more cringey basically.

And their son Jason is the absolute epitome of a theater kid. Literally, his whole world is wrapped up in this. When he is around 13, he gets interviewed by a local paper where he talks about his passion for theater describing it basically as been his entire life. His first production is when he's like eight years old. And since then he's done like 20 productions. His first production is when he is eight.

Adam [New]: Yeah. In front of his parents,

Kyle [New]: not in front of his parents, part of the theater group. 'cause they run this theater group,

Adam [New]: right.

Kyle [New]: Running it. Listen,

Adam [New]: I thought he was running the show and I just went

Kyle [New]: like eight years old.

He very soon will be running the show and basically to prove how serious he is, he tells the journalist in this interview that theater isn't something that you do unless you're really into it. So basically he's super intense.

He's a super [00:17:00] intense theater kid and I fucking hate him already. Because every single theater kid I've ever met. It's just too way, too confident, too confident for you to even trust, as far as I'm concerned.

Adam [New]: Okay. Don't trust their hair. It's too stylized. I dunno.

Kyle [New]: Just someone who's really precocious and just really confident. Like, where's the fear in your eyes? Like when someone raises a hand at you and you go and you cower. Do you know what I mean? Like, I, like we did when we were kids,

Adam [New]: we were scared of our parents. Maybe they still cower, but maybe they like act and kinda like, oh, mom dirty. That

Kyle [New]: really dramatic.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: Oh, God forbid. Eventually in the year 2000, he ends up going to the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, which by the way, is one of the schools that was caught up in the whole, admission scandal, kind of controversy that kicked off.

Do you remember with Felicity Huffman? Oh, the one from

Adam [New]: Desperate Housewives?

Kyle [New]: Yeah.

Adam [New]: Did she go to jail the end? She, I think so. I think she for a couple of months or a week or, oh, I don't know. It wasn't for very long.

Kyle [New]: Mm-hmm. Probably not rich, privileged, white, woman, yeah. From Hollywood. Probably not.

And like I said, there's just a whole lot of privilege [00:18:00] around these kids going to kind of these schools in these areas in San Diego and California. So I really fucking hate them.

So after he graduates, he and a few of his mates are like, do you know what we should do? We should make a documentary.

They don't know what it's gonna be about yet, but they just know that it has to be really fucking good. So they put their heads together and they decide that, you know what? There's a lot of bad shit going on in Africa.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they honestly believe that Africa is a, is a country on its own at this point. Probably and the church that they belong to, they do a lot of missionary work kind of in and around the region of Uganda anyway. So they often hear about these really bad things that are popping off there.

And they think to themselves, our church already has an established network out there, so it's a really easy starting point for us. Maybe we'll land some kind of cool story when we're out there.

And this is the thing that always gets me about these so-called evangelical kind of charity missions that they go onto.

They pitch themselves as doing good humanitarian work, building worlds and schools handing out medicine baby formula. But when you take a closer look at it, it's [00:19:00] rarely about helping them in the way that they claim. And more often than not, it's mostly just about imposing their own beliefs on them.

Like you get the medicine, but only if you go to the sermons. Do you know what I mean? Like there'll be a school. Sure. But baked into the curriculum is most definitely gonna be Christianity in a way.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Isn't like what happened to help thy neighbor. Without like caveat without strings attached. Yeah, exactly.

Kyle [New]: So suddenly all these indigenous beliefs in the local practices that are prevalent in the area are just undermined and pushed to the margins. In some cases, whole communities are effectively shut out and don't have access to these resources unless they convert to Christianity.

Mm-hmm.

Now, I don't know whether or not that's exactly the thing that's going on here, but that is the general vibe of what a lot of these kind of Christian led kind of organizations do. When they go out on these charity works, they're there because they're trying to kind of help them see that Jesus Christ died for their sins .

And here's the thing, for a lot of these people, these missionary trips, like these kids are about to embark on, they're often treated like a rite of passage. The church [00:20:00] encourages them to go, they sign up without kinda really thinking deeply about what they're actually doing and what impact they're having in the region. They come home with this huge kind of white savior kind of glow, feeling like they've really had an impact in the world.

So again. I fucking hate them.

Adam [New]: Feels like someone that's going on a gap year.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. Gap year

Adam [New]: and kinda like, yeah. I helped out. I volunteered and I don't know.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. I really went out to kind of like connect with myself and connect with humanity and really help my fellow man, that kind of thing.

Right? Then they come back

Adam [New]: doing cocaine off the toilet seat at work. Exactly.

Kyle [New]: But the reality is they haven't really done anything. The biggest impact is often on them, not on the people that they actually went out to help.

So Jason Russell and his mates, they decide that they're gonna head off to dfa mostly because at the time it was popping off all over the news. So the things to themselves, if we're gonna make a documentary, this is where we're gonna find our story. Except when they get there, it's not quite what they expect. They start traveling around with kind of local guys. They're visiting a bunch of places, but ultimately there's just nothing there for them.

Mm-hmm.

But while they're out there [00:21:00] though, they start to hear whispers about these child soldiers in Northern Uganda all caught up in the Civil War. And instantly they're like, this is it. This is our story.

And Adam, honestly, the situation on the ground there where the Civil War is kicking off with these child soldiers is really dire. The war literally traces its roots all the way back to British colonialism. Surprise, surprise.

It's the result of the British carving up huge parts of Africa in the 19th century. They draw these kind of arbitrary borders around various regions. They lump together completely different ethnic groups with distinct languages, customs and histories. But the British, after they draw these borders, they don't actually want to govern the actual region themselves.

So what they do is they implement a system called Divide and Rule, where the people of the country will actually govern the country on behalf of the British. The problem is not all the ethnic groups want to be ruled by the British. Right.

Adam [New]: Oh, really? That surprises me. Yeah. No one goes into this going, yeah, let's do this.

Like, so there's great Britains carving up the country mm-hmm. And then leaves us [00:22:00] to kind of manage it. Exactly.

Kyle [New]: So the groups that are like, fuck this shit, they end up actually getting marginalized and oppressed while the groups that are more cooperative are appointed to physically run the country, right? Mm-hmm. Now remember, they're different distinct groups.

There's a natural rivalry between them anyway. They have these different distinctions because they are different. Now you've got one that's ruling over the other. It's a problem. Yeah.

So basically it works out that the Uganda Kingdom in the south ends up gaining all the political power across the country. They receive the bulk of the economic developments of the education, and so the other ethnic groups, they're basically told you can go and suck it.

Adam [New]: How do they think that this was gonna work? Or like play out? It just feels kind of crazy. They're not thinking long term, basically. Yeah,

Kyle [New]: and a big part of this cooperation comes with the Uganda's. Peoples relative openness to Christianity, which are British, are all too happy to kind of impose on them. Meanwhile, the ethnic groups in the north, like the OCHO and the Lango, they're just completely marginalized.

The British end up recruiting heavily from the northern groups, the oppressed and [00:23:00] marginalized people for their army, which just only ends up deepening the divide. So I get it. They're thinking, why are we forced to serve in the war? We have none of the resources.

We've got no education yet we are the ones who are being scripted into the Army while the others just gets kicked back. Mm-hmm. So I get it.

And over decades, what you end up with is this very clear north south split baked into the country's identity.

And it ends up just breeding this resentment and distrust between the different ethnic groups.

So by the time Uganda Gains independence in 1962, you've got a political system literally designed to pit ethnic groups off against each other. So from here, fast forward a couple decades and surprise, surprise, the whole thing explodes into various coups and insurgencies.

And by the 1980s, it's literally all out civil war across the entire country. Right. It's dire, it's only gonna get worse.

Adam [New]: So if great Britain didn't do this before, how would've things played out? Would it have been better? Would it have been worse?

Kyle [New]: I can tell you now that if [00:24:00] the British hadn't come in and carved up, 'cause remember they didn't go in and claim Uganda. Mm-hmm. And well the region and call it Uganda, they were given it as part of a treaty. Right. All the different countries around Europe were like Africa, we can now get there.

Let's go in and divide it up and take it. And they were like, we want this bit, we want this bit. Oh we want this section here. And part of that dividing up the British got the region that we now know is Uganda.

So I don't think it would've mattered if the British, got Uganda. If any one of the other Europeans had got it, they would've caused a shit storm. The only one who got the lease was probably Germany because ran about this time, they lost a lot of their territory in Africa after the war.

Adam [New]: Sure.

Yeah. I just kind of think, well maybe Europe shouldn't have been involved, but obviously that's another story. It is. This is what's happened and this is where we're at.

Kyle [New]: Exactly. These are the facts.

So then in 1986, a guy called Yuri Veni, I believe I pronounced that correctly. You know, this is the compendium, I mean, I dunno any different at this point. [00:25:00] Basically he comes to power after leading a gorilla war in the south.

He basically wants to ensure that there's no political opposition against him, which leads into forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of people into what is essentially protected camps, concentration camps.

Wow.

This is designed to basically prevent large amounts of people being able to assemble and rise up against him. The camps Adam, they're atrocious, they're overcrowded. There's disease everywhere. People are literally starving. Dissidents are tortured and killed.

It's basically an outright genocide against the OCHO people who are living in the north. It's awful. It is. Out of all of this that various rebel movements start to spring up. The first of these and the most prominent is a group called the Holy Spirit movements headed by a woman called Alice Lana. Their whole thing is that they are a divine mystical rebellion that is literally led by spirits that routinely possessor and tell her what she needs to do in order to overthrow kind of the government and prevent this genocide from kind of happening.

Adam [New]: What are they telling her to do?

Kyle [New]: Apparently one of the [00:26:00] spirits guiding her is a 17th century Italian officer who tells her kind of, that he's given her and her army a bunch of protections, and basically that when they go into war, they're absolutely gonna be fine. So she tells her soldiers that they don't need things like guns or grenades, because essentially they're being protected by these spirits,

Adam [New]: by the magic.

Kyle [New]: Literally all they need Adam is rocks, which they say will magically turn into grenades when they throw them. Okay? And so she's literally sending these people into battle against soldiers with literal AK 40 sevens who just literally shoot them dead.

Adam [New]: How did she just sounds, yeah. She needs help.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. It's not a

Adam [New]: great strategy, is it? No. And why is it never like just fun spirits that come to you? Like, why don't you just go and party walk? No, that's the blobby. Yeah. Why don't you just do some small painting?

Kyle [New]: Yeah. It's never that. The thing is though, it is very complicated because they are essentially having a genocide committed against them, right? Mm-hmm. It's just that they put their trust in this crack nut.

Adam [New]: Yeah. You [00:27:00] thought it could turn things into,

Kyle [New]: oh, it gets worse.

It gets way worse when this becomes apparent that, of course, these people are running into bats and immediately being shot and then fleeing for the jungle. Right? She forbids them from doing that.

It's like, Nope, you cannot run into the jungle. Instead, what you need to do is you need to rub this magical ointment onto your skin, and basically the bullets will pass right through you.

Adam [New]: And they believe her after this. Mm-hmm.

Kyle [New]: It's not magical ointment either. It's literally shea butter.

Adam [New]: I mean, you know, you'd be really moisturized.

Yeah,

Kyle [New]: yeah. Moisturize me. Moisturize me. Spoiler alert. It does not work either. So then she tells them it's because their bodies are tainted from eating pork and onions and drinking too much alcohol and having way too much sex, and she says, because of this, the spirits have abandoned those people.

So if you don't want to get shot and killed, then you need to abstain from doing all of those different things. That does not work either.

Adam [New]: I dunno. People that are still there going, oh, that's where we're going wrong. I kind of feel like, no, you should have left.

Kyle [New]: Yeah.

Adam [New]: Like, 'cause I'd be like, excuse me, miss, miss. Mm-hmm. Can you go and [00:28:00] run into this crowd of people and throw your magic rock?

Kyle [New]: The reality is, Adam, a lot of these communities don't have any education. Right. They are brought up with their historic kind of customs and beliefs. A lot of it does revolve around these mystics and things like that.

So I get how they could potentially for, for it. Of course, seeing what's happening, they realize very quickly that actually that's not the case. But then there's another excuse and another excuse, and now you are accountable because you've been eating too much onion.

Adam [New]: It's so, yeah. I feel for these people,

Kyle [New]: And so it will come as no surprise that in 1987, thousands of these soldiers end up getting slaughtered. And Alice is forcily into exile into Kenya, and that's basically where she stays for the rest of her life.

So now there's a big empty void that needs to be filled by someone. And the person who comes in and takes control is Alice's cousin, a guy called Joseph Coney.

Else. That's where Kony comes from. Mm-hmm. Right? That's who Kony 2012 is. It's this guy called Joseph Coney, [00:29:00] and basically he takes charge. He denounces all the weird bulletproofing kind of magical spirits. He hands out actual AK 40 sevens and he turns what's left of the army into something way darker. He rebrands them as the Lord Resistance army.

Adam [New]: The problem is all of their soldiers have been slaughtered.

Kyle [New]: There's none of them.

Adam [New]: So where are you gonna get new soldiers from

either another country?

Kyle [New]: What he's gonna do is

Adam [New]: he's gonna do the unthinkable and he's gonna start raiding villages and abducting children to fight in his army.

Kyle [New]: And it's not just a few Adam over the years, the LRA Abducts, an estimated 30,000 kids into their army boys, literally as young as 10 years old.

So it's, it's awful.

They also take young girls as well, who they then sell into sexual slavery or marry off to kind of Connie's commanders. So it is literally dire, but there is a problem. The first chance that these kids get, of course, they run away, right? So what he starts doing is when he kidnaps them,

Adam [New]: he starts ordering them to literally kill their parents

Kyle [New]: before he takes [00:30:00] them.

That way. If they try to escape, where are they gonna go? But why would they do that anyway? It's for that reason, right?

Adam [New]: To survive. Why would they agree to killing their parents?

Kyle [New]: Otherwise they're gonna be killed, I guess. Ugh,

Adam [New]: geez.

Kyle [New]: And to make sure that, of course, they won't be accepted back into those communities if they do escape.

Yeah, they kill their parents, but they're gonna have aunts and uncles and family members and community members that might accept them. What they do is they force 'em to drink the blood of their parents or eat their flesh that way, if they do come back, then they're kind of gonna be stigmatized for eating another human being.

Basically. All of this is a way to trap them inside the LRA forever.

Adam [New]: That is awful.

Kyle [New]: It's horrendous. Adam. He also forces these kids to cut off their own lips, noses and ears, so they look monstrous as well, which is just heartbreaking.

And this is all to terrify the communities that they're attacking. And it's also a warning to the other kids who are thinking about escaping. 'cause otherwise that's what they're gonna be forced to do, and they're not having their lips and noses and ears cut off for them.

They're [00:31:00] forced to do it themselves. I just,

Adam [New]: I mean, I'm interested to what they actually say to these poor children for them to do that, right? Mm-hmm. Like usually you do that to kind of please someone or, yeah. You might do it to kind of protect yourself, but yeah. What's he doing to brainwash them?

What is he saying?

Kyle [New]: Adam is probably simple. Do it or you get killed. It's life or death at this point. There's no negotiation in it. They've probably seen a bunch of other friends in this army meeting the same fate.

Adam [New]: I just think like these kids who are innocent, that all their innocence is being stripped.

Yeah. As soon as they join this guy,

Kyle [New]: it's awful.

Adam [New]: I had no idea it was this dark,

Kyle [New]: and Adam, this is not just cruelty. This is literally psychological warfare. It's breaking these children down and then rebuilding them into weapons of pure obedience to serve in this army. Mm-hmm.

By the late 1990s, early two thousands, Northern Uganda is in complete free fall. You have tens of thousands of kids in these villages living in constant fear that they're going to be [00:32:00] kidnapped and recruited into the LRA.

This is actually what Jason Russell is walking right into the middle of When they arrive in Uganda, they start meeting with locals, in particular, the kids who are living in fear of being kidnapped when they arrive, they also notice that every evening just before sunset, there is this wave of kids from the surrounding villages that start embarking on this daily miles long walk to the nearest city of Gulu.

It is almost like a pilgrimage that they're making. And it's every single night. The purpose of this is so they can go and sleep on the streets of the town knowing that they'll be safe from being kidnapped in the middle of the night.

Adam [New]: Why? Just what, being on the street? Yeah.

Kyle [New]: Because the LRA are in the surrounding jungles, they're almost being ambushed in the middle of the night in these small little villages surrounded by this jungle.

Adam [New]: And so they're leaving, what you think is the safety of their own home with their parents, and they're gonna go to the city to sleep with all these other children.

Kyle [New]: Yeah.

Adam [New]: Wow.

And I guess the parents let them, because they're like, well, actually you're safer there than you are with us,

Kyle [New]: Yeah. So Jason and his mates, they [00:33:00] follow these kids. They film footage of thousands of them literally sleeping under bridges in abandoned buildings, in makeshift shelters. If they're lucky, they might even get a spotlight, like in a safe house where one of the locals has offered them somewhere to sleep away from the elements.

When you see the footage of these kids, Adam, they are literally piled in these halls. They're all asleep. They literally look like corpses just stacked on top of each other. That's how tight this space is, right? They just need somewhere to sleep. Mm-hmm. And so Russell's friends, realize. This is it.

This is the story that we're going to tell in our documentary.

So they sort of hone in on a few of the kids. In particular, a young boy called Jacob, who makes this journey to Gulu every night. And Jacob has it bad Adam. He talks about how he's lost his brother to the LRA. He's literally breaking down the footage and he's talking about how he'd rather be dead than living in this world without his family.

And that he hopes, he's gonna see them again in heaven one day. And when you see him [00:34:00] recounting that, it's just heartbreaking.

Adam [New]: And that's because his brothers killed his parents.

Kyle [New]: I don't know the situation whether or not his parents have been killed. But yeah, he's making this pilgrimage every day.

He's very clearly a very traumatized little boy. When Jason and his team get all this footage, they then head back to the USA and they make a documentary called The Invisible Children, and they then set up a charity under the same name, invisible Children Incorporated.

The purpose of their documentary is, of course, to raise awareness and then raise money off the back of that to help these kids.

Mm-hmm. Very noble. Sounds great. Right.

To raise awareness. They end up traveling to a bunch of different schools and Christian conferences. People are absolutely moved by what they're watching, and so they start donating whatever they can.

Mm-hmm. The money is then used to pay for scholarships and rebuild a bunch of schools in the northern area. It funds vocational training, job skills programs, particularly for young women.

And this is what they end up doing. They make more videos to [00:35:00] raise, more awareness, to raise more money, and then invest those donations to help these kids. Mm-hmm. Eventually, they start hosting events like displaced me, where part, where participants can make a donation and then spend the night sleeping outside to experience what these kids are going through.

So it's 100% a choice for you as a participant, unlike the kids in Uganda who are literally having to do this just so they don't have to kill their parents. So it's awful. It's, in my opinion, it's a little bit misguided. Like you cannot ever put yourself in that position sleeping on the streets at night.

Fine. But why are you sleeping on those streets on that night? Right? Yeah. You're doing it so you don't have to live your life in a fucking army and slice off your own lips.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: But I get it, they have noble intentions, right? Mm-hmm. They're raising money. That's the positive.

I just think that trying to put yourself in that position is probably not the best thing to do.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: At this stage, they're not a huge operation. But their proximity to LA does attract advocacy from a few celebrities like Kirsten Bell [00:36:00] and the Fallout Boy.

Fallout Boy in particular, they get inspired to make their own music video about a love story between two Ugandan kids in Gulu, basically. And it's called, the song is called, I'm Like A Lawyer the Way I'm Always Trying to Get You Off.

How is that related Exactly. That is, the actual title because nothing says sensitive humanitarian outreach, quite like a pun about like acquittals in courts.

Adam [New]: Yeah. It doesn't make sense. It just sounds like they're jumping on a bandwagon.

Kyle [New]: It, it sounds like it. So when they're asked about why they made the video, they said it's because it would be more dangerous and more compelling and groundbreaking than just making a documentary.

The fact that they call it groundbreaking. Like for what reason you all you're doing is making a video for Western audiences?

Adam [New]: Yeah. Do

Kyle [New]: you know what I mean?

Adam [New]: You're just promoting a song and yet Okay, fair enough. There might be some awareness to it, but it doesn't sound that

Kyle [New]: no

Adam [New]: genuine.

Kyle [New]: And this is at that peak time in the lead up to 2012 where Facebook is popping off. People are kind of seeing these kind [00:37:00] of inspirational kind of charitable videos. They're sharing 'em, they're liking them.

And this is where that mentality comes in. Like, oh, I'm doing my part by simply liking it or kind of showing sympathy towards, I'm showing support a flight. Exactly. Yeah.

Adam [New]: I like Fallout boy,

Kyle [New]: but no, I dunno if I do, when journalists asks, have you ever seen uh, love story between your garden people?

They're just like, oh, no,

Adam [New]: no, but this is what we think it looks like.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. So it's very much this clueless white savior complex thing that was popping off around about this time without any real understanding about what was actually going on.

And also when they say more dangerous and compelling than making a documentary dangerous. In what way? Exactly. What is it going to do? There's nothing, there's no initiative behind the video.

Adam [New]: Yeah. You are not like at risk of your life or anything like that. If anything, you're just, I don't know. Maybe you've got some bad chicken sandwiches for the crew that you've put out that's not anything.

Kyle [New]: Exactly. Apparently they said that they shot the video in Uganda because it would be cheaper [00:38:00] that way they could donate whatever was left over to causes in Uganda through the charity. Invisible children. Right. Okay. So the methods are mental, the intentions aren't noble. They're getting some cash and that's going to, apparently these are good causes.

Mm-hmm.

So basically this is the peak period where we see the rise of digital gestures being conflated with actual activism. Right. You're not actually doing anything. Don't fucking like a video. It doesn't do anything like one, like does not equal one save child. It's literally worse than thoughts and prayers.

Oh, there's been another, another shooting in a school and like 40 kids have been killed. Thoughts and prayers. Fuck you. Does nothing ban the fucking guns? Do you know what I mean?

Adam [New]: Yeah. Take some action.

Kyle [New]: So the invisible children start making a bunch of videos to raise awareness and then raise money. Their contents, Adam, it's very much a choice. They're all evangelical kind of theater kids. So imagine high school musical with a lot of Jesus, but also they're starting out at this point, so it's very much low budget, right? Mm-hmm. They're a charity.

The main [00:39:00] targets are high schoolers and middle schoolers, and in one of their videos, it's literally them at a high school trying to talk to these kids about ny and it's clear that none of the kids care, right?

It's all orchestrated video. They're just kind of sitting in there and their arms are crossed, they're rolling their eyes. It's just kind of white kids kind of booing at them. Like, we don't wanna know about activism, who, we dunno who NY is, screw these Ugandan kids. Basically. It's that kind of vibe.

They're all just much rather be in math class, which, which says a lot.

So you see Jason and two other guys in the video, they dunno what to do. They can't hold the kids' attention. So they huddle together in the gymnasium and they're like, dude, what are we gonna do? These kids just don't get it, man. And Jason turns the others and goes, let's just do what we always do.

Dance. Oh God,

Adam [New]: you can always solve a problem with dance. Literally.

Kyle [New]: So they're going to fall NSYNC mode. They start breaking out into song, doing a dance. The corniest lyrics you've ever heard, I'm, I dunno if I should sing it or if I should play the video.

Adam [New]: I don't know.

I if you sing it, what is what we,

Kyle [New]: okay, I'll, I'll try to [00:40:00] sing it. It goes,

we're on a mission for Uganda. Deep inside your mind, all the kids in their background are just kind of laughing and pointing at this point. They then sing it needs attention and a dance to make you sparkle and shine. Oh my God. And then suddenly all the kids at that moment on that line, sparkle and shine.

They start nodding and agreeing. Yeah. Like, yeah, you are right. This man is speaking through song. Our language Yeah. Is a total 180 at this point. The kids are like, yep, that's all we need to care about. These poor, crummy kids in Uganda and then Adam. It just goes on from there and they just all burst into song. It's like a high school musical, skip. Basically it's 100% in earnest. This is not satire at all. Like they are serious and this is what they're doing.

Basically, they're going around America touring these schools, raising awareness, raising money, which people assume is going straight back to these Ugandan kids in Africa.

Adam [New]: Right? Sure. Okay. Sounds noble on the surface of things. Mm-hmm.

Kyle [New]: Did you not pick up what I said people [00:41:00] assume is going straight to the kids in Uganda?

Adam [New]: Well, how are they selling it? Are they saying like, we're giving back, we are helping these causes, or who? Yeah. What's the narrative here?

Kyle [New]: We're gonna get to that because all of this starts in 2024.

This is the main way that these kids have been supporting themselves for the last eight years. Raising money to raise awareness, keeping a little back to support themselves.

They are literally qualified for nothing else. They're just theater kids. So, some might say, it'd be a fucking shame if the war in Uganda ended. Right? Ah, because then what are they gonna do? Mm-hmm. So on the 5th of March 20, 20 12, invisible children release a video.

It is completely the opposite of the high school musical style video that they made in the past. This time it's cinematic, it's bold, it's really emotional. it is a masterpiece, Adam. It is very well made. It genuinely pulls on your heartstrings. But here's the thing.

The video itself isn't really centered around these kids in Uganda and [00:42:00] their plight. Instead, it's centered around Jason himself and his 4-year-old son, Gavin, who by all accounts, is a very, very cute, very smart, very precocious little boy who loves using special effects to blow people's asses up that he films, walking through the supermarkets in a very white suburban area.

Adam [New]: Hang on. So he's got a son called Gavin. Mm-hmm. How old is he? Four. And what and what year is this? 2012. No one has any business naming a child Gavin in that this type door all the time. It

Kyle [New]: might. It might be a family name. Remember, they're Christians.

Adam [New]: No. Might be an old family name. I'm sorry. There should not be a Gavin. Someone named Gavin. This side of the millennium

Kyle [New]: blowing up people's asses in supermarkets.

Adam [New]: That's also bad.

Kyle [New]: So the video opens up Adam with a shot of Planet Earth rotating in space. It's very dramatic music in the background. The first message on screen is the next 27 minutes are an experiment proving this social media and the connected public can change the world.

Translation [00:43:00] stick around Buckaroos because you're about to save the planet from your laptop.

Adam [New]: Well, that sounds convenient.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. Yeah, very convenient. Jason Russell then introduces himself through this home kind of video. He's at Gavin's birth with his wife in hospital. Jason Whispers. Hi Gavin. We've been waiting for you.

It's, it is really sweet. So the setup is essentially, now that I have a son, he wants a safer world for Gavin. And the next 25 minutes left in this video is going to explain why that matters.

Then there's a smash cut to Northern Uganda in the early two thousands. The footage is super shaky.

You see kids sleeping on floors, crammed into bus stations, walking miles and miles every night, all trying to avoid being abducted by the LRA. As we explained, it's really harrowing.

Next, we then meet Jacob, who is one of the kids who makes this pilgrimage every night, and he tells Jason that his brother has been killed trying to escape the LRA and how he's alone terrified, and that he'd much rather die than live like this.

And Jason [00:44:00] listens. He's visibly gutted. And that's the turning point for Jason, where he promises Jacob that he's gonna do everything that he can to stop Kony and put an end to this wall.

Then we skip back to Gavin, and Jason asks, what do you think daddy does for a living? And Gavin is like, bless him. He goes, you stop bad guys from being mean.

And Jason smiles. And he's like, that's right. Do you know who the bad guys are? And Gavin goes, the Star Wars people. So he is very, very, very cute. So Jason shows him the picture of Coney and explains how he steals kids and he forces them into these walls. And Gavin's like, oh no. And then cues a montage of Coney.

There's mugshots, there's maps, there's numbers flashing across the screen. Over 30,000 kids abducted there's footage of villages literally being torched and families being murdered. The narration is deliberately simple. The footage is deliberately shocking. And then Jason says that Joseph Coney is actually the world's number one most wanted war criminal, which he is.

If you go to the [00:45:00] international, criminal court in Hague and you see their list of the most wanted, he's still number one. And yet nobody knows his name, so he's number one. But nobody would ever say, yeah, I know who Coney is. He's the number one most wanted criminal in the world. Yeah,

Adam [New]: I dunno. Even if I know what he looks like. To be honest,

Kyle [New]: so that's a picture of him.

Adam [New]: Uh, so that's what he looks like?

Kyle [New]: Very greasy guy.

Adam [New]: Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a photo of him in life. That's crazy. Considering such a criminal He is. And notorious.

Kyle [New]: That's the point of this video is that he's this awful, awful guy. He's the number one most wanted criminal on the planet, yet nobody knows who he is.

Right? And so Jason is like, we need to make ney famous so that everyone knows who this guy is. He says that in the age of Facebook, awareness is power. Politicians only care about what people vote for.

Voters only care about what they see on their newsfeeds. And so if we flood the internet, if we make Coney as famous as Justin Bieber, politicians will have no choice but to act. That makes [00:46:00] sense to me.

Adam [New]: It does. I dunno if I'd say famous is the right way you need to make him, but we need to spread the word.

Kyle [New]: Well, yeah, it's the same thing. I think he's maybe using very simplistic kind of, language.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: So then in the video there's a montage of global activism, kind of rising up rallies and things like that. You see kids literally crying and chanting fist raised in the air.

You see shots from London to Sydney to New York, all interspersed with this really upbeat, inspirational music of people taking action. It's really hyping you up at this point.

And then Jason calls. In the celebrity cavalry, Oprah Gaga, Clooney Bieber. He says that everyone needs to tag them, tweet them, make them care about this mission.

He then says, once you've done that, you need to contact one of the 12 US policy makers listed in the description. And they are the ones that have the real power, to make positive change. And he says, you need to flood the inboxes. You need to blow up the phones. You cannot let them ignore this war criminal that is [00:47:00] Joseph Coney.

So yeah. Do you get the sense of how inspirational, imagine this is very fast paced. Mm-hmm. There's a lot going on. There's no image in that video that's on the screen for more than two seconds.

Adam [New]: Yeah. I get what you're saying. And also he is kind of saying like, this is what you can do to make a change. Which almost sounds kind of noble. Yes. At this point in time.

Kyle [New]: At this point, I have no objection to this video. It is really incredible. He then introduces the action kits, right, which you can get through their website and it costs you $30. It's a $30 donation. Basically, it will contain two Kony 20, 20 12 bracelets, one for you, one for your friends.

It'll then contain stickers, but most importantly, posters with Connie's face on it. It's kind of like the Shepherd fairy style posters, like the Obama Hope kind of posters, reds and blues, et cetera. But with war crimes written all over it. And then he says, once you've done all of that, those three things tag the celebrities, reached out to the policymakers and got your action kit.

Once you've done all of that, the entire purpose of [00:48:00] this video will all come together on April the 20th, 2012, one night in every major city on earth, the world will flood the streets and do what they call cover the night.

Literally plastering posters of Connie's face on every wall, lamppost anywhere that they can put a poster and when the world wakes up the next morning, there'll be no escaping the question of who Joseph Coney is.

Adam [New]: This does sound like a good way to like spread the news. Mm-hmm. And get it out there. Albeit it does sound a bit like merch. Yeah. In terms of what you can buy. But I can understand like the poster you wanted to kind of get the word out and people to comment on WhatsApp bracelet, if everyone's wearing them. I get it, but I'm also questioning it.

Kyle [New]: I wouldn't question it. I would say on the face of it, this is an incredible video. Really effective. The problem is what lies beneath it, and we're gonna get onto that. Because the video is great, it's done really well, but it's about the execution and what follows. Mm-hmm. And it's just [00:49:00] really, it's very messy.

But basically he's saying that after the cover of the night event, everyone is gonna know who Joseph Coney is.

And so the US government will have to do something about him, right? And that's essentially the video. And Adam, when it's released, literally overnight, it explodes.

They were initially hoping for like 500 thousand views in the entirety of the year 2012. But it ends up getting a hundred million views in just seven days becoming the fastest and biggest viral video in YouTube history. It's huge. I cannot express how massive this video is.

And here's what they do brilliantly. They really do take a complicated geopolitical conflict that spans six decades, and they make it really simple and easy for people to understand and also consume and relate to, right? And really care. Mm-hmm. Sadly, that is what works in this society, but it's also where the problem lies, right?

Amongst This virality of this video, Jason literally becomes one of the biggest celebrities in the [00:50:00] world. Everyone is talking about him. Everyone wants to know who this Kony dude is. He's been invited to all these different talk shows from the West coast to the East coast. He even gets invited on to Oprah Winfrey. And so along with the virality of this video, celebrities all over the US start endorsing the video. We're talking Rihanna, bill Gates, Nick Minaj, the Kardashians, everyone agrees. Yeah. This is that. Mm-hmm.

But then as more and more news stations start picking up the story within the first seven, two hours, people start going, hang on. What is this campaign exactly? Because yes, they've made a video very simple to grasp, but also, like I said, that is where the problem lies. They're missing a ton of context and information about the realities of what was actually going on in Uganda, like the lead up to what happened in Uganda has literally a six decade runup that isn't even mentioned in this 27 minute video. ? And so this starts circulating while Jason is on all of these [00:51:00] talk shows where initially it's all positive. Who's Kony? Who are you? What do the invisible children do?

But then he's been criticized for overly simplifying this very, very complex issue that's got like six decades of history attached to it. To which Adam, he literally says, and I dunno if he was briefed or even had time to even think about the answer.

He literally says, we could have made an hour long video that explores the entire history. But in his words, who's gonna watch a deep dive of a video into the weeds of a decade long civil war? He's basically calling the public. Idiots.

Adam [New]: Yeah. It's interesting because it's almost like there should be a teaser and then you find out more

Kyle [New]: Exactly.

Adam [New]: And that I get, that's probably what he's maybe trying to get at by saying like, well, if we just release a documentary's, not gonna get maybe as far reached as something that goes viral and kind of jaws on the heartstrings, but equally, yeah. It's kind of like there's more to it than just 28 minutes.

Kyle [New]: Exactly. I'm not sure whether or [00:52:00] not he linked to the Invisible Children documentary, that is the original one they did, that he could have easily done. Because now you've wrote people in. Right. You've really got them to care. A lot of people probably would've gone, I'm interested in this other documentary.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: It should be mentioned in the video.

Adam [New]: Exactly. Find out more or whatever, hear more about specific people or whatever.

Kyle [New]: Mm-hmm. So it's such a small detail that could have kind of like this line of question not been an issue. Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? But even in the Invisible Children, I'm not very clear whether or not he even asks or even explains about the history.

And so basically this is the first wobble that the Coney 2012 Hyper train kind of experiences.

After this, people start questioning the facts of what was actually happening. The film makes it sound like Joseph Coney is right now in Uganda holding 30,000 children hostage and force 'em to fight this war.

So journalists reach out to the Uganda government. Some even go to Uganda to get a sense of what's physically happening on the ground. But there's no sign of this 30,000 strong army anywhere.

Adam [New]: So where [00:53:00] are they?

Kyle [New]: When they ask Uganda government about this, they're like, yeah, that's because we dealt with them six years ago.

They say We exiled him from the country. He's not even in Uganda anymore. They then explain that yes, there are reports of 30,000 kids being kidnapped, but that's over decades. The total numbers at any one point at their peak was just a few thousand.

Adam [New]: Well, that's still bad, but yeah, fair enough.

Kyle [New]: Today their numbers are best like 700, and those are all now dispersed across the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. So they're not in Uganda. Uganda has eradicated this problem, but this is seen as very much a Ugandan problem. Yeah. It's not, and basically to sum up Uganda is like, yeah, we don't actually know what this video's trying to get at because there's no issue here.

Adam [New]: That must've been really weird to wake up and see all this and be like, hang on a minute. Yeah. Like, what is this noise? And going on. So he'd already been dealt with six years ago.

Kyle [New]: He's still alive, by the way. He's [00:54:00] just been, he's ousted from the country. Ex

Adam [New]: fine. And I guess some, maybe children found their way back or whatever, but, okay. That was in 2004. Yeah. And what we're saying is by 2000, so within two years they had dealt with the problem.

Kyle [New]: It was when they were in Uganda that it was at its peak. Kids were doing these pilgrimage to Gulu to kind of escape. And then that's when the Uganda governments started doing something about it to protect these kids.

Adam [New]: So they went in 2004. It was a huge issue and they'd never thought during that time, between 2004 and 2012, just to get like check in, just to see how things are, what's the latest figures?

Kyle [New]: Do you know what they probably did, but this is how they make the money. Right. Wow. Maybe it's too much effort to find another plight. Who knows? But this is the problem. Yeah.

So the reality is when Jason first went to Uganda in 2004, that was pretty much the peak of what was all happening, right? Since then, the LRA had essentially been eradicated. In reality, all of those kids, including the ones in the footage they've been recycling for eight years on our [00:55:00] adults, right?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jacob, the little boy from the film, he's actually studying to become a lawyer at university at this moment in time.

Adam [New]: That must have been, yeah. Strange to see that

Kyle [New]: then. Yeah. So all those night commuter journeys shown in their footage are just not even happening anymore. And so out of this Uganda Prime Minister drops a response video basically saying, thanks for caring and all the white savior bullshit. But this video is painting like Uganda is still at war and we're not.

Adam [New]: So you're a few years too late if you want to care.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. So after this, people start pointing out that Kony and the LRA aren't the only villains in the story. In the video, Jason frames the Ugandan government as the good guys, the heroes in all of this but it completely ignores the fact that Ugandans current government, the people who are in power, have its own very serious list of human rights abuses. And the invisible children are essentially saying, donate money because we're going to go in and help people on the ground, but also give some of that money to the current government who is just as corrupt as all the other rebellion [00:56:00] groups.

Adam [New]: Right. Okay. So they're actually not a good government.

Kyle [New]: No. I mean, they're not forcing people to cut off their own lips and recruiting child soldiers, but they are guilty of systematically oppressing a whole set of ethnic groups.

Adam [New]: And so, like with Jason, I'm trying to understand why he hasn't picked up on this before, or like why does he,

Kyle [New]: unfortunately, I don't have the answer for you. I dunno why he just hasn't, he's just. A white Western kid who has gone into this quite naively, he didn't anticipate this video being as big as it did, right?

Mm-hmm. For him, all the other videos that he's been creating, that's his piecemeal, right? That's how he's making his salary. It doesn't have the reach that this video did, and then boom, it explodes. It opens it up to a whole new level of scrutiny where he then realizes shit, do you know what? We weren't doing our due diligence.

Yeah, you'd get away with it before,

Adam [New]: but then I also think if you're like tagging celebrities and you're trying to get on the news and all this sort of stuff, then what did you think was gonna happen? I know maybe you didn't think it'd be as [00:57:00] big, but surely it would get scrutinized at one point or another.

Kyle [New]: Remember, he's also also been doing this for eight years, right? So he's deeply embedded in this. He's probably kind of got its blinkers on, this is what he knows, this is what he's always done, this is what's worked in the past, et cetera, so I don't know. Yeah. It's very misguided. Mm-hmm.

Next, people start questioning this whole effort to make Coney famous, right? They're like, if NY isn't even in Uganda, then what exactly are you pushing the US government to do when they get there? Is it to eradicate what's left of the LRA if that's the case, then surely this means that the US Army will be wiping out the very same abducted children that the video spent half an hour trying to make us care about.

Adam [New]: That's true actually, because now these are the bad guys.

Kyle [New]: Yeah, Adam. It just keeps getting worse because after this, journalists then discover a photograph of Jason and his mates in Uganda back in 2008, and they're basically photographed with SPLA fighters, and they're basically holding AK 40 sevens and an RPG.

Basically the SPLA are a rebellion group fighting against the Sudanese government during the second [00:58:00] Sudanese civil war. . So they're like, they're not the LRA, but in all sense and purposes, they're the equivalent. They're an adjacent faction. And an RPG is basically a shoulder fired rocket launcher.

So from an optics point of view is very much, looks like the invisible children are cosing up to armed forces, which clashes hard with their whole image of save the children.

Jason says that the photograph was taken during downtime at Peace talks, basically stop killing the kids. Yeah. Great. Shall we post 'em for photographs with this bazooka? So dumb. Yeah. So yeah, it doesn't look like they are a serious kind of organization and charity looking to help these kids, especially in light of the mounting questions and criticisms that just keep flooding at them.

All of this happens. Remember Adam, within 72 hours. So it's very, very quick. The next thing that happens is a bunch of white Western evangelical missionaries working in Uganda. They get wind of this incredible video that's been made about these people who, who they're supposedly supporting in [00:59:00] Uganda.

They decide that they're actually gonna hold a screening for it for the local Ugandan people. So it's a big deal because basically they wanna show the Ugandan people, specifically those affected by the LRA in the past that the world really cares about them, right? Mm-hmm. So the locals are really excited too, because they've never really received any global representation for their own kind of histories and stories.

On the night of the screening, the whole village comes to watch it and Adam, by the end, they're literally throwing rocks at the screen. They hate it. And it's because it wasn't even about them. It was about some white dude and his son in the USA.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Uh, asking his kid about this bad guy.

Kyle [New]: Exactly. But most importantly, Coney hasn't even been in the country for like six years. They must have been doing this. And they're like, well, this is, this is not new news. They're like, sure he is bad, but this isn't even a problem anymore. Like, we need other things.

We need schools, we need water, we need medication, we need all these other things. And you're trying to get rid of a guy who doesn't [01:00:00] even exist and you're exploiting us to get that. It's like for what purpose?

Adam [New]: Just ask some of these people about, like before you go into this, I don't understand.

Kyle [New]: To them it felt like they were just being used as props to serve some kind of freaky tragedy porn to raise awareness and a bunch of money that they hadn't at this point seen a single penny of Mm. Throughout the charity's history.

One of the women in the film, she is Adam, she's outraged because she explicitly refuses permission for her face to be shown.

And it's because she severely disfigured by the LRA, she doesn't want her face being used for this commercial endeavor, which in reality had nothing to do with helping them. Mm-hmm. So after this, people start asking the obvious question, where is all the money actually going? And Adam, this is where things get really bad because first off, the main demographic responding to this CO 2012 video are millennials, right? Mm-hmm. There are generation, the issues that matter, the most of them are social ones, gay rights, abortion rights, human rights [01:01:00] violations across the world.

The video very much implies that the money is going towards funding these on the ground kind of initiatives so far in the aftermath of this video, Coney 2012 has received $26.5 million through the purchasers or the donations for these $30 action kits.

Adam [New]: Wow. That is a phenomenal amount. Is that just in three days?

Kyle [New]: Very short period of time. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Donations have also flooded in from Oprah, who gives $2 million. And so people wanna breakdown of how this money is being divided up and spent.

And this is when it comes out that the invisible children have historically and only ever intended to donate a maximum of 30% of that money to on the ground programs in Africa.

The other 70% is being used to pay for their salaries, travel expenses, and most importantly, production costs to make more videos. Basically, they're making these videos to raise awareness, to raise money, to make more videos, to raise more awareness, to raise more money. Essentially their [01:02:00] entire model is just this feedback loop of videos for awareness, for money.

Adam [New]: I mean, honestly, they've got to pay. I understand that, but the split doesn't sound right. I dunno what the split should be, but 70 30 doesn't sound right. It doesn't seem

Kyle [New]: right, does it? So people are like, hang on a minute. Why did we not know about any of this?

Turns out watchdog charity navigator, had already rated them two out of four stars, and this was due to a lack of accountability and transparency about where the money was going. People didn't even have to dig that deep to find that out. It was all readily available online.

Yeah. Shocking.

Adam [New]: Yeah. 'cause if they've raised 26 million and only 30% of that, what is that? That's like,

Kyle [New]: and that's just with this video. Remember historically, over the eight years, that's how they've been operating. There's some reports that say it's as low as 10% going to on the ground.

Wow. But yeah, that's the nice figure that I found. That's the maximum.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: Then when this comes to light, journalists uncover some very question behavior. After stumbling upon a video from 2010 where [01:03:00] the charity managed to secure a $1 million grant from a Chase Bank community giving contest.

Basically, the way you win this grant is your appeal has to go through several rounds of voting via like a Facebook campaign. Essentially.

And so when auditors go and look more closely, they discover that a shit ton of the accounts that had voted for this charity were actually fake accounts.

Adam [New]: And so who created those accounts? Who

Kyle [New]: knows? Probably an organization that had created them on the behalf, but it must have been thousands and thousands in order to. Win the grants essentially.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Okay.

Kyle [New]: Then a video leaks as well and it shows one of the directors of the invisible children drunk out of his mind on vodka slurring on camera and he says, I don't know if you've heard this or not, but we just want a million dollars, a hundred thousand for Tahiti and 900 extra for me.

Wow. LLL.

Adam [New]: So yeah, that's that 10% I guess. Yeah. That's going to the actual Cause that is [01:04:00] horrendous. So who, who is that director?

Kyle [New]: I can't remember his name, but yeah, this is,

Adam [New]: this is so

Kyle [New]: corrupt. When he's asked about it later on, his official statement was, look, , I was obviously joking. Who can drink that much vodka?

Certainly not me. I die. It was obviously water and this was obviously a joke video.

Basically he is saying that it was a video that he had made that he sent to another one of his colleagues joking that, they had won this money and like he was gonna keep it for himself.

Adam [New]: Yeah, I don't buy that.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. Optic optics says otherwise, right? It's not good for that.

So meanwhile, like I said, Jason is on the road, he's doing all these interviews. The organization is scrambling to kind of show evidence that the entire $1 million actually did go towards the intended programs in Uganda

but honestly this is the turning point basically. 'cause people don't believe it it just seems like there's just one thing after the another after the another. So people just, just assume that everything from here on out is just bullshit.

Adam [New]: Yeah. They've lost the trust in these

Kyle [New]: people. 100%. Their reputation is squashed basically.

And it's [01:05:00] like three days in the media completely turned on them. They're accusing of being a bunch of rich, white, spoiled, privileged party kids just playing the white savior card, celebrating their own success while kind of selling this feeling or changing the world.

And Jason is still out there, he's still doing interviews. He's showing up with his game face on. He is smiling through all the scrutiny. At this point, it's very clear in the media and to the public that they have just been funding a marketing machine

and then smack bang in the middle of all of this, Jason has a literal, naked meltdown on a public street in San Diego.

Adam [New]: Well, he just goes out. He's streaking.

Kyle [New]: It's the middle of the day. Uhhuh. Like I said, he is butt naked. Right? He is seen ranting at past buyers. He is kind of like talking like a crazy person.

He's slamming his fists on people's cars. Do you remember all that kind of bath salts controversy in Florida where people were taking bath salts and they were like literally acting like zombies? Yeah. That's what this looks like. And I think a lot of people think it was bath salts that he was on.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

For him to kind of flip like that. [01:06:00]

Kyle [New]: Yeah. At one point reports say that he was seen masturbating on people's lawns. Remember that's the middle of the day on their lawns. Yeah.

Adam [New]: Maybe it's good for the grass.

Kyle [New]: I honestly, I tried to find that clip 'cause Jason is pretty hot, but I couldn't find it.

You do, however, get a nice shot of his literal asshole from behind as he bends over. Ooh, yeah, that's not pretty though. He basically ends up getting arrested. Obviously the footage is sold to TMZ for like $30,000. Mm-hmm. Jason is then taken to hospital where he spends two weeks and an official statement from his wife reads that he basically had a psychotic break from all the pressure of doing so many interviews, but also the stress of having to keep defending himself.

Mm-hmm.

But she stresses that this is not who Jason is, that he's actually a hero to thousands of people in Uganda and around the world. So they're still maintaining that he is the savior.

Adam [New]: I mean, he's done some good, but it's kind of questionable.

Kyle [New]: Yeah, exactly. It's just not well executed and is backfired essentially. So after he gets [01:07:00] outta hospital, he goes on Oprah to do some damage control. And this Interview really grinds my gears because remember, Oprah is a massive donor to the invisible children.

Adam [New]: I'm surprised she's not like, I want my money back, or at least I wanna know my money is gone. You know, evidence that its gone somewhere. You would think,

Kyle [New]: right? That's the kind of hard hitting journalism you would expect her to ask. But she's 100% in on this PR damage control that is unfolding. Because of course if he looks bad, she looks bad because she's donated to the cause, right?

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: That's weird. So why did she do that? So she brings him in for an interview. He explains of course, that he was exhausted and that it was the speed and the reach of the video that was just so unexpected.

Oprah does ask some critical questions about all the criticism that he's kind of getting, which are very clearly canned responses that he's very clearly prepared for. He's very coherent when he's kind of given his answers to them. And basically Oprah's got her own damage control to do in this as well. So I understand that's a coordinated kind of thing. Mm-hmm. But one of the key take homes from this interview is [01:08:00] that Oprah says, and it completely overshadows everything in this interview, she says, so you had a meltdown. People say, it's 'cause you're gay. Is that true? What?

Adam [New]: And what has that got to do with

Kyle [New]: it? And when people report on this in the media, it's all people saying it's like, oh, he's gay. And it has nothing to do with it. But it overshadows a lot of the controversy. I mean, the controversy is still there, but this is what people are talking about rather than his answers to the canned responses,

Adam [New]: actual important questions here.

What

Kyle [New]: does he

Adam [New]: say to that?

Kyle [New]: Oh, he says, yeah, I've heard that before. But important thing is he doesn't deny it. He just laughs. And he says, yeah, I've heard that one. I'm a theater kid. Doesn't

Adam [New]: he have a child? Yeah, he is. He's not gay. Which, which is, which obviously it doesn't mean anything, but that's so stupid. What does that even matter? It doesn't,

Kyle [New]: the important thing is that this is just such bad journalism.

Adam [New]: I usually respect Oprah, but I would be like, no, I want to know my money is gone to something good.

Kyle [New]: And so while all of this is going on, the efforts to trace the money gets deeper and it gets very dark [01:09:00] because they discover that funding has been linked to a multilayered network of far right Evangelical Christian organizations across the USA, and it starts when they see that at the charities inception, they receive funding from a company called a Oneself Storage.

Now, the company itself is owned by the Caster family, who had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support California's Proposition eight bill, which is basically tied to the ban on same-sex marriage, right? Mm-hmm. That this is a big deal. From there, they then discovered that in 2006, the charity also took $235,000 from the National Christian Foundation. It's another group linked to the Casta family that also funds anti LGBT policies.

The argument from Invisible Children was, we're not going to refuse money that's offered to us. We are a charity. Right? Mm-hmm. Which is fine, I get it. Except it's proven that in 2007 they apply to join the Barnabas Group, .

And when you fill out your [01:10:00] application, you have to kind of say, what is your organization about? And in that application, they describe themselves as a ministry themselves, saying that they're on a mission to reach the American youth under Evangelical values, which of course would include anti LGBT bullshit, right? Yeah. Yeah. So they're just as bad as these other people that they're trying to kinda say, well, we're not gonna reject their money.

But this proves that they're exactly the same.

Adam [New]: And surely, even if they are doing this just to get the money, which I'm not sure I buy, they've gotta do something in order to give back, right? In order to receive that money, in order to promote these values.

Kyle [New]: But the thing is though, think what this looks like from an optics point of view, right? Are saying publicly, we're not associated with these organizations. They're insisting that they were a secular organization, so sure, you could argue that because Invisible Children was made up of a younger generation of evangelicals that maybe their values were a little more progressive, right?

Sure. But here's the problem. All of the [01:11:00] on the ground efforts that they had facilitated were being facilitated through another very secretive evangelical network called the Family.

So you've The resources that they were facilitating through the invisible children always came with strings attached. Building schools meant that Christianity was always baked into the curriculum. If you refuse of faith, then no education for you. Whereas still, it's also documented that the family were actively lobbying the Ugandan mps to push through anti LGBT legislation proposing life sentences and the death penalty for homosexuality.

There's some serious backhand bullshit going on here. They're presenting themselves one way publicly while quietly pushing kind of an evangelical agenda behind the scenes.

And in response to this, the invisible Children claim plausible deniability saying that they have no idea that any of this was going on.

Except again, in 2005, there's a video showing Jason speaking at a Christian conference where he literally describes invisible children [01:12:00] as Trojan horses saying, we are able to be the Trojan horse going into the secular realm and saying, guess what? Life is about orphans and it's about oppression. And that's God's heart. Translation will help you if you let us force Christianity onto you and our values.

Adam [New]: Yeah. It comes with a condition essentially. We'll help you so long as, we can impart our values and you do, as we say,

Kyle [New]: exactly our agenda. So it just doesn't look good for them, does it?

Adam [New]: No.

Kyle [New]: At this point, all they can do is just mostly post statements saying that they're not anti LGBT, they're not affiliated with any of these religious organizations. While that's happening, they quietly go ahead and delete all the religious aspects and FAQs and citations on their website just to get rid of them. Just to kind of hide the fact that actually they're deeply embedded in all of that.

Adam [New]: Yeah. It's like I'm trying to work out if they are, part of me thought maybe they were just being naive, like they were where everything else, but it sounds like, you know, actually there was something deeper under what they were doing.

Kyle [New]: Before the war, [01:13:00] cotton was one of Uganda's biggest exports in the country. But when the war came, the industry basically was completely destroyed. When the invisible children came back to Uganda, much of their work involve helping the industry recover. On the surface, this sounds really positive, but it turns out that the invisible children had partnered with a for-profit clothing company called Apollo Global.

And again, they have deep religious ties to the family, and their goal is basically to reestablish the cotton industry with Apollo global firmly in control of the production, which allows them to then exploit workers to access cheaper cotton. So it's just bullshit, it's just exploitation. Mm-hmm.

Disguised as doing good.

And so after everything, the entire crescendo of the Coney 2012 video was meant to culminate in one single night. April the 20th, 2012. Remember that was the big night where thousands of people around the world were supposed to hit [01:14:00] the streets, plaster, posters of Connie's face all over lampposts, walls and billboards, et cetera.

And by sunrise, the whole planet was supposed to wake up knowing who Joseph Coney was, basically. Mm-hmm. So this is meant to be their moments except Adam. It wasn't when the evening of the 20th of April arrives, barely anyone shows up.

Adam [New]: Well, most people know at this point who he is, right?

the answer is kind of already been solved,

Kyle [New]: Remember they've sold 500,000 kits. Mm-hmm. It's a huge amount. They've had like tens of thousands of people RSVPing on Facebook groups saying that they'll be attending.

On that night in Vancouver, they had 21,000 people said that they were coming to the cover the night event. Only 17 people showed up. Wow. Yeah. So across the globe it's exactly the same thing. Just empty streets, boxes of unused posters. The entire cover, the night movement just fizzles out is just so embarrassing.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Well, you know, they've shown their true colors. They're not a, uh, a company or a foundation that can be [01:15:00] trusted and also. What they're trying to solve is kind of solved. yeah. Why would you go,

And so what happened with Kony? Did they catch him after this?

Kyle [New]: A simple answer is no, basically, like the campaign itself does result in a ton of people sending in kind of texts and messages and emails to the legislators in the USA. Right? So they have to do something.

It's like the change.org kind of petitions. Mm-hmm. If it gets enough responses, then the government have to at least discuss it in the House of Commons.

Right? Sure. It's a similar kind of thing, but it's all just on paper. Right. Because the reality is Coney was no longer an immediate threat, and B, he wasn't even in Uganda. the question is, if the US government did do anything, what is it that they were supposed to do anyway?

Adam [New]: Yeah. I dunno, go find him, put him in prison.

But then if Uganda wasn't bothered about that,

Kyle [New]: no, 700 people is not really a force. That's an I imminent threat to anyone. Yes. What he does is really bad. Yes. He's a terrible person. Yes. He's number one on the wall.

Laws kind of [01:16:00] list of most wanted, but he's not an active threat right now when the rest of the world and the US governments are dealing with active threats that are taking place right now. Sure. If they find him, they find him, yes, they'll try him and they'll be a great day. But they're not actively going to try and put a stop to him because there's no threat there.

And so instead, what the US governments are forced to do is come up with a compromise. The US senates pass a resolution who basically condemned Kony and say that we're going to support ongoing efforts to dismantle the LRA

in practice. All this meant was that the US government were going to expand a small deployment of special forces already in the region. And I quote, just be on the lookout for Kony in case this system was at the jungle.

Adam [New]: Okay. That feels very, I don't know, not that thorough.

Kyle [New]: In other words, they responded just enough. To be seen, to be doing something without actually kind of launching a full out war to try and find this guy.

But then , Adam, the US government, they officially announced that they were shutting down the entire operation. Because the reality is, like I said, [01:17:00] he's not a threat.

Adam [New]: Do we know anything that's happened to him now or that's it? He's kind of just a faded still out

Kyle [New]: there. Yeah, he's still going.

One of the most bizarre side quests of all of this actually comes from the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court back in the Hague. Remember, he's the reason why Coney was number one on the most wanted list, even though he was no longer an active threat. So he sees the massive traction that Coney 2012 is getting. And he thinks to himself, if the US government goes in and gets Coney, he will be the one who will lead the prosecution against him for war crimes, right? Mm-hmm. And frankly, he's basically really keen on getting the spotlight on him. So he wants this to be a success.

We don't actually find this out until 2017 when a bunch of emails get leaked, but while all of this NY stuff is kicking off, he realizes very quickly that the US government aren't actually gonna go ahead and do anything.

So he decides that he's going to kind of hatch a plan of his own to try and catch Kony, and that plan involves none other than Angel [01:18:00] Jolie and Brad Pitt.

Adam [New]: like a A-list power couple. Yeah. How are they gonna take down Kony?

Kyle [New]: Basically, the plan is for Angela Jolie and Brad Pitt to go to Uganda, where just a reminder, NY isn't even living anymore, and they're going to reach out to Connie's people and arrange a dinner date.

The thinking is basically, why wouldn't Kony accept a dinner invite from Angela Jolie and Brad Pitt? I think it'd be

Adam [New]: suspicious. Yeah.

Kyle [New]: Like what's going on here? I mean, maybe they have one thing in common, and that's collecting kids. But at this dinner, the idea is that the international criminal court would ambush Kony and then they would arrest him, right?

And then this guy, this criminal court guy, would then get his moment in the spotlight. And did they ever actually say yes to this? Yes. It comes crashing down because of another person, another celebrity, George Clooney. '

Adam [New]: cause he wants to do it instead.

Kyle [New]: No, but well, So this guy's so confident the plan's gonna work. So he goes to George Clooney and asks whether or not they can use his satellites. Yes. Satellites. Apparently George [01:19:00] Clooney had co-founded a satellite program called The Sentinel Project, which basically monitors human rights violations around the world.

Uhhuh. I didn't know that, did you? No. Incredible. Basically, this criminal courts guy, he wants to use George Clooney's satellites to be able to zoom in on where Coney was hiding so that Brad and Angelina could go off and do their thing . in the end, George's like basically lol. No, none of you have a grasp of the situation.

For one, he isn't even in Uganda. And also he's not even a threat anymore. Yeah. So the answer is no. So the entire thing just fizzles out and it just goes from strange to even stranger.

Adam [New]: That is bizarre to think that was his plan in bringing him down.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. And all these leaked emails prove all of this was happening.

So following this, all the noise starts dying down around the Invisible Children's charity. They continue to make more videos to raise more awareness, to make more money, just to make more videos. And because of the backlash though, they completely lose all credibility. And so eventually they are forced to drastically downsize.

And all in all, throughout [01:20:00] this entire saga, they end up making $30 million from that NY 2012 video. of that 70% of their money, they literally just kept for themselves.

Adam [New]: Wow, that's

Kyle [New]: just, that's so bad. It's great. It begs the question, doesn't it, like, how were these charities even able to get away with that?

Adam [New]: I, this is one that we all, I guess a famous one that's gone wrong. What about other charities out there?

Kyle [New]: It turns out that this is literally how nonprofit frameworks are allowed to operate, right? It's all legal and it's just really gross. They're all still deeply connected to various right wing evangelical groups.

Their agenda just hasn't really changed their origins. Remember, they're all rooted in the evangelical sphere, so that's never really gonna go away. What they were raised in is what they know. But Jason, he's still very much on the scene. He doesn't really play a prominent role in the organization anymore.

When he does pop up, it's mostly. As the face of the charity. Basically. He's carefully trying to reframe everything that's happened through a [01:21:00] very curated narrative that basically just benefits him and the organization.

In 2016, he did a TED Talk where he basically explains that they weren't expecting everything to go viral in the way that it did, and he talks about how it caused this massive breakdown 'cause of all the stresses, et cetera, but how great the whole experience was, basically getting rich off a decades long civil war about traumatized kids in Uganda, which wasn't even a thing by the time this video came out, basically. But he's basically reframing how he played this massive role in changing the world and bringing activism to the digital age.

Adam [New]: So he is a bit diluted then.

Kyle [New]: He's diluted. I think it's important that he tries to reframe and reclaim the narrative of what is essentially a really embarrassing week of his life.

Adam [New]: Yeah. I mean, I guess he's almost set like a bit of a blueprint on how to create a viral video

Kyle [New]: correct.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Um, and if that's what he's kind of latching onto, then fine. But yeah, he hasn't really done any good.

Kyle [New]: He should just say that then. Yeah. You know what I [01:22:00] mean? Because what he did create was incredible. It's just he didn't have the substance behind it. Yeah. He didn't have all his ducks in a row before this blew up.

Yeah. If he found

Adam [New]: an actual genuine Cause that was current at the time.

Kyle [New]: Yeah.

Adam [New]: This would've been great. Exactly. Minus obviously keeping 70% of the money, but apart from that, it'd been great. .

Kyle [New]: But it's awful that they can do that, right?

Adam [New]: Mm-hmm. Crazy.

Kyle [New]: And Adam, that is the story of Kony 2012.

Adam [New]: Well, I didn't know that was Kony 2012, to be honest. Yeah. Shit show. I had no idea. I thought it was something like Fyre Festival, if I was honest. Um, which we should do an episode on. But yeah, I thought it was just like something like that. I didn't realize it was down to an outdated war and corrupt charities

Kyle [New]: mental.

Adam [New]: Yeah.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. So I guess the moral of the story is always do your research.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Right. Obviously there's a lot of good charities out there, but make sure you find out, you know, the right one.

Kyle [New]: Exactly. Most charities are businesses at the end of the day. And in today's world, the reality is that money is in the attention that they can garner from [01:23:00] people.

Mm-hmm. Plus eyeballs, literally on screens. And to get that attention. It's not above these folks to literally twist the facts and hide their true agenda, which is what they've done in this case. Right? Mm-hmm. Their main demographic was of trying to appeal to millennials, and then they quickly scurrying in the background to try and cover the fact that they're actually associated with all these right wing evangelical Christian networks.

Mm-hmm. That their main demographic does not want.

Adam [New]: Yeah. Yeah.

Kyle [New]: But also, I guess the moral is look where the money's going actually. Right? I don't think I would donate to a charity if I found out that literally only 30% of the money was actually going to the good causes.

Adam [New]: No. 'cause I like, well, who else is this going to?

Like how much work or how much does it cost in order for you to do the videos? You know, it shouldn't be that much.

Kyle [New]: Looking at their early videos with the high school musical stuff, that doesn't look like it's high budget. But apparently that's where the money was going to, right?

Adam [New]: Or just the directors.

Kyle [New]: Yeah. Yeah. So any last words? No. Should we run the outro? Let's do it.

And that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating [01:24:00] things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did,

Adam [New]: and if today's episode sparks your curiosity, then please do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show.

Kyle [New]: And for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget, the next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon. And as always, it is completely free to access.

Adam [New]: And if you want even more, join our certified freaks tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek and what's coming next.

We'd love for you to be part of our growing community.

Kyle [New]: We drop new episodes every Tuesday. And until then, remember, outrage is cheap. Change costs more than a share button. See you next time.

See you. [01:25:00]