Kony 2012: How Social Media Tried to Stop a War

[00:00:00] Kony 2012 was a brief shining moment when the internet decided that a 28-minute YouTube video could single-handedly end a decades-long African conflict. I thought it was something like Fyre Festival. It's actually about a guy called Joseph Kony and basically he takes charge of what's left of the LRA army

[00:00:24] 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 will be too ashamed to return. Why would they agree to killing their parents? Otherwise they're gonna be killed I guess. That is awful. It's horrendous Adam. I had no idea it was this dark.

[00:00:52] But then as more and more news stations start picking up the story, people start going, hang on, what exactly is this campaign? Because there is no sign of this 30,000 strong child army anywhere. So where are they?

[00:01:37] 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. We explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history and the jaw-dropping deeds of extraordinary people. I'm of course Kyle Riese, your ringmaster for this week's episode. And I'm Adam Cox, the clown union representative for this week. What do they need union representation for?

[00:02:05] Uh, good hours, uh, fair pay, you know, they go on the picket line and start, I don't know, squeaking their horns. The new thing is that it's like not woke to like squeeze their nose anymore. So they need a union representative to stop that. Yeah, well, we want to try and protect, you know, the clowns from being, you know, misappropriately or not appropriately handled. And equally, we don't want them handling other people. 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?

[00:02:34] I've never seen a young clown. Do you know what I mean? 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. Yeah. So I think maybe when we get to 50, we'll think of a career change and turn into clowns. You are a clown. Okay. Guys, if you're new to the show and you want to support us, then the absolute best way to support us and enjoy exclusive perks is to join us over at Patreon, because signing up is

[00:03:04] completely free of charge and you will get next week's episode seven days early. And for as little as $3 a month, which is less than a dollar a week, it's just a few cents. You'll become a fellow freak of the show, unlocking our entire back catalogue, including classic episodes such as... Maybe we should keep the silence in. I can't remember any episodes that we've done in the past. What did I... Oh, there was the NHS episode. Was that? I think that might be in the first 20.

[00:03:34] Yeah, that's in the first 20. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So you can definitely enjoy that one. So that was all about how the NHS came to be, 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 liked that episode. 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 the other episodes. I mean, there's like 20 odd episodes. I can remember the Beanie Babies, obviously, because that was our first one ever. I guess, do you know what? Don't listen to us. Just go and check it out. Go and check it out, please.

[00:04:03] And as a special thank you, our certified freak tier members now receive an exclusive compendium keychain. 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 hosenskrit. Hosenskrit? Hosenskrit! Hosenskrit. Yeah, we don't want your hosenskrits to be like cold and naked.

[00:04:33] I don't even know how you can make that sound sexy. Hosenskrit. I'm going to pound your hosenskrit. That's too much. It's too much. Kids listen to this show, Adam. 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. Yes, please. Now that we are back for season three, we would be so grateful if every one of

[00:04:59] you who hasn't left us a review yet do so. Please. It will really help boost our numbers. We're on about 580 on Spotify. Well, that's ratings, right? Ratings, yeah. We want reviews, bitch. We want reviews. Reviews. Well, I'd like us to get to a thousand on Spotify in this season and then lots more reviews. I reckon it's possible. If everyone bands 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,

[00:05:29] weaponized, commodified and sold in a $30 kit. Do you know what? I'm not even going to bother trying to guess that. Like, that's so ambiguous. What do you mean? All the information you need is right in there. Except about what it's about. That's the whole point. Adam, let's cast our minds back. Back into the compendium time machine once again. Where are we going? It's rolling. Pulled the lever. It's going... And it's landing on 20, 2012.

[00:05:58] Okay. That wasn't that long ago. It wasn't. Some 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. Just before the introduction of those endless scrollable feeds, before likes had attached themselves onto our self-worth. And when Instagram was... Was that even a thing? I think Instagram was a thing by this point or was very new.

[00:06:26] That's when you just had like these really grainy pictures and filters that you just post of, I don't know what. 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 the production, 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 do you remember of 2012? Well, that was when London hosted the Olympics. Yep.

[00:06:56] Which we went to. The best Olympics in the world. Yeah. Yeah. We're biased. But yeah. What else happened that year? What were you wearing? Probably nothing. Something slutty. Reveals 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. I know. My mum has always said that to me. Every time I left the house, you're no slut of mine. That's the thing though. You're going to wear like the tinier shorts ever and you're

[00:07:25] going to stop, reflect and go, hmm, I've become my mother. I don't know what else was going on in 2012. Well, I'm going to tell you. Okay. Because I've got a whole thing planned. Because 2012 was the year that Obama, aka Mac Daddy of the USA is reelected to his second term in office. Okay. Yeah, that was good. I miss that man, right? Hurricane Sandy has just devastated huge sways of the USA. The ongoing

[00:07:50] 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 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 her last crack pipe. Oh. Yeah. That's not, you made that sound like it was a positive. That's true. Actually, that's really sad. It was also the year that Whitney Houston smoked

[00:08:16] her last crack pipe. Oh, was it really? So that was 13 years ago. Yeah. I don't think she died from crack. Apparently the official reporting is that she drowned in a bathtub after smoking crack. Okay. PSY took the world by storm with an international hit, Gangnam Style. Remember we covered that on the poop cruise episode. That's what they were jamming to that year. Yeah. And of course,

[00:08:40] you cannot forget about, as you said, London, 2020, 2012, the Olympics, the best Olympics in the world, which we went to. I think we went to the Paralympics where we saw Oscar Pistorius doing his little thing on the track. And actually, in a couple of weeks, we're actually going to be doing an episode on Oscar Pistorius and the killing of Riva Steenkamp. Oh, interesting. Because we had that massive debate on our way back from Ibiza, didn't we? Just a couple of weeks ago where we were like, what actually happened? Did he kill her in cold blood? Did he not? Was it a tragic accident?

[00:09:09] So I went off, done the research, and I'm here to put the facts on the table. Well, I'm pretty sure it was a cold-blooded killing, but we'll find out in a couple of weeks. And also, this was the year that we were jamming to Carly Rae Jepsen, Call Me Maybe. That was 2012. That was 2012, Adam. I feel like it was earlier than that. Do you think? Yeah. 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 Gautier was out. You loved that song.

[00:09:39] Did I? I'm sure you did. Did you not used to serenade me with that song? Uh, no. Someone that I used to know. I think that's someone that you used to know. But Adam, 2012 was also the year of Kony 2012. 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 is going to be one of those episodes which I will forget in 24 hours. Well, hopefully, this is exactly what happened in this episode, actually.

[00:10:05] Because, for those of you who do not know what Kony 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 end a decades-long African conflict. Yeah, I definitely don't remember this. Basically, Facebook was just popping off at the time. The hashtag on Twitter was basically king.

[00:10:32] 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 the other charities like Oxfam and the Red Cross had kind of been doing in the region. Ah, okay.

[00:11:02] So it was just kind of 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 100 million downloads in just a single week.

[00:11:31] 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, I think so. But it's a parenthesis. Rebecca Black's video, Friday. Do you remember that song?

[00:11:59] Oh God, is that the one where you ended up producing a record, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Some kind of rich, privileged kid from LA or somewhere. I probably got those facts wrong. But she, yeah. It is terrible. She just talks about Friday, Friday. Oh, no, parents really should have sent her to college. But in comparison to Kony 2012, there had never been a video on YouTube that had swelled to over 100 million views this fast. I'm talking Adam like in less than a week.

[00:12:26] Other videos obviously had managed to achieve that 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 Kony 2012 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. Okay. What was going on in Uganda then?

[00:12:55] Well, the issue that they were presenting in this video was actually an 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 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.

[00:13:25] So you can imagine you hearing that as the public and going, actually, basically they're calling us dumb. 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 Coney 2012 gets released that this backlash starts 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

[00:13:52] Christian organizations who were doing some very, very shady shit in the country and exploiting 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. They'd rather people die than wear a condom. Christian values! Oh, OK. Basically, they were also calling for the death penalty towards LGBT community members and opposing gay marriage.

[00:14:21] 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.

[00:14:47] And it continued on until basically it all came to a crashing halt. Right. So it sounds like there's a meteoric kind of rise in this viral video, but then obviously it unravels pretty quickly. That's right. Yes. So, Adam, today on The Compendium, I'm going to 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.

[00:15:15] 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 time. All these kind of really inspirational charitable videos where people like share and like and kind of pass things on. People are liking them and thinking, oh, I've done I've done my good deed for the day. I've saved a child.

[00:15:44] 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 meaningful. No, not at all. But the fact that people thought that. Wow. So Adam, the man behind the Coney 2012 video is a guy called Jason Russell. So he's born in 1978. He is raised by very evangelical Christian parents in and around the San Diego area in California.

[00:16:08] And together they ran an evangelical theater group called the Christian Youth Theater. So it's kind of like high school musical, but for Christians and way worse and way more cringy, basically. And their son, Jason, is the absolute epitome of a theater kid. Literally, his whole world is wrapped up in this. When he's around 13, he gets interviewed by a local paper where he talks about his passion for theater, describing it basically as being his entire life. His first production is when he's like eight years old. And since then, he's done like 20 productions.

[00:16:38] His first production is when he's eight. Yeah. In front of his parents. Not in front of his parents. Part of the theater group because they run this theater group, right? Listen! I thought he was running the show and I just went like eight years old. He very soon will be running the show. And basically, to prove how serious he is, he tells a 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 intense theater kid. And I fucking hate him already. Because every single theater kid I've ever met is just way too confident.

[00:17:06] Too confident for you to even trust, as far as I'm concerned. Okay. Don't trust the hair? It's too stylized? I don't know. 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 we did when we were kids. We were scared of our parents. Maybe they still cower, but maybe they like act and kind of like, oh, mom, don't do that. I'm really dramatic. Yeah. Oh, God forbid. Eventually, in the year 2000, he ends up going to the University of Southern California School

[00:17:36] 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 Desperate Housewives. Yeah. Did she go to jail? I think so. I think she... For like a couple of months or a week. Oh, I don't know. It wasn't for very long. Probably not. Rich, privileged white woman from Hollywood. Probably not. And like I said, there's just a whole lot of privilege around these kids going to kind of these schools in these areas in San Diego and California. So I already fucking hate them.

[00:18:06] 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 going to 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 country on its own at this point. And the church that they belong to, they do a lot of missionary work kind of in and around the region of Uganda anyway.

[00:18:33] 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 on to. They pitch themselves as doing good humanitarian work, building wells and schools, handing out medicine, baby formula. But when you take a closer look at it, it's rarely about helping them in the way that they claim.

[00:19:02] 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 they'll be able to school, sure. But baked into the curriculum is most definitely going to be Christianity in a way. Yeah. Isn't like what happened to help thy neighbor without like... Without strings attached. Exactly. In the area are just undermined and pushed to the margins.

[00:19:30] In some cases, whole communities are effectively shut out and don't have access to these resources unless they convert to Christianity. 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 that are 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.

[00:19:59] The church encourages them to go. They sign up without kind of 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. Feels like someone that's going on a gap year. Yeah, gap year. And got like, yeah, I helped out. I volunteered and I don't know. 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? And they come back.

[00:20:28] Doing cocaine off the toilet seat at work. Exactly. 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 going to head off to Darfur, mostly because at the time it was popping off all over the news. So they think to themselves, if we're going to make a documentary, this is where we're going to 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.

[00:20:58] But while they're out there 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.

[00:21:27] 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? Oh really? That surprises me. Yeah, no one goes into this going, yeah, let's do this.

[00:21:55] Like, so there's Great Britain's carving up the country and then leaves us to kind of manage it. Exactly. 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? 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.

[00:22:21] So basically it works out that the Buganda kingdom in the south ends up gaining all the political power across the country. They receive the bulk of the economic development, the education, and so the other ethnic groups, they're basically told you can go and suck it. How do they think that this was going to work or like play out? It just feels kind of crazy. They're not thinking long term, basically. Yeah. And a big part of this cooperation comes with the Buganda's people's relative openness to Christianity, which the British are all too happy to kind of impose on them.

[00:22:50] Meanwhile, the ethnic groups in the north, like the Acheoli and the Lango, they're just completely marginalized. The British end up recruiting heavily from the northern groups, the oppressed and 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 conscripted into the army while the others just get to kick back. So I get it. And over decades, what you end up with is this very clear north-south split

[00:23:18] 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 of 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.

[00:23:48] It's only going to get worse. So if Great Britain didn't do this before, how would have things played out? Would it have been better? Would it have been worse? I can tell you now that if the British hadn't come in and carved up... Because remember, they didn't go in and claim Uganda 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.

[00:24:17] 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 as Uganda. So I don't think it would have mattered if the British got Uganda. If any one of the other Europeans had got it, they would have caused a shitstorm. The only one who got the least was probably Germany, because around about this time, they lost a lot of their territory in Africa after the war. Sure. Yeah, I just kind of think, well, maybe Europe should have been involved. But obviously, that's another story. This is what's happened.

[00:24:47] And this is where we're at. Exactly. These are the facts. So then in 1986, a guy called Yauri Museveni. I believe I pronounced that correctly. You know, this is the compendium. I mean, I don't know any different at this point. Basically, he comes to power after leading a guerrilla war in the South. He basically wants to ensure that there's no political opposition against him, which leads him to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of people into what is essentially protected camps. Concentration camps! Wow.

[00:25:16] 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 Iecholi people who are living in the North. It's awful. It's 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 Movement headed by a woman called Alice Quena.

[00:25:46] The whole thing is that they are a divine mystical rebellion that is literally being led by spirits that routinely possess her and tell her what she needs to do in order to overthrow the government and prevent this genocide from happening. What are they telling her to do? Apparently one of the 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 going to be fine. So she tells her soldiers that they don't need things like guns or grenades

[00:26:14] because essentially they're being protected by these spirits. By the magic. 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-47s who just literally shoot them dead. How did... She just sounds... Yeah, she needs help. Yeah. It's not a great strategy, is it? No.

[00:26:42] And why is it never like just fun spirits that come to you? Like, why don't you just go out and party more? Mr. Blobby. Yeah. Why don't you just do some more painting? Yeah. It's never that. The thing is, though, it is very complicated because they are essentially having a genocide committed against them, right? It's just that they put their trust in this crack nut. Yeah. Who thought could turn things into... Oh, it gets worse. It gets way worse. When this becomes apparent that, of course, these people are running into battle and immediately being shot and then fleeing for the jungle, right?

[00:27:11] But she forbids them from doing that. It's like, no, 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. And they believe her after this? Mm-hmm. It's not magical ointment either. It's literally shea butter. I mean, you know, you'll be really moisturised. Yeah, moisturise me, moisturise 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...

[00:27:41] 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. I don't know. People that are still there going, oh, that's where we're going wrong. I kind of feel like, no, you should have left. Yeah. Because I'd be like, excuse me, Miss, can you go and run into this crowd of people and throw your magic rock? Look, the reality is that a lot of these communities don't have any education, right?

[00:28:06] 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 fall for it. Of course, seeing what's happening, they realise very quickly that actually that's not the case. But then there's another excuse and another excuse. And now you're accountable because you've been eating too much onion. It's so, yeah, I feel for these people. And so it will come as no surprise that in 1987,

[00:28:34] thousands of these soldiers end up getting slaughtered. And Alice is forcibly 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. That's where Coney comes from. That's who Coney 2012 is. It's this guy called Joseph Coney. And basically he takes charge. He denounces all the weird bulletproofing kind of magical spirits.

[00:29:04] He hands out actual AK-47s and he turns what's left of the army into something way darker. He rebrands them as the Lord's Resistance Army. The problem is all of their soldiers have been slaughtered. There's none of them. So where are you going to get new soldiers from? Either another country? What he's going to do is he is going to do the unthinkable and he's going to start raiding villages and abducting children to fight in his army. And it's not just a few, Adam.

[00:29:32] 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 awful. They also take young girls as well, who they then sell into sexual slavery or marry off to kind of Coney's commanders. So it is literally dire. But there's 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, he starts ordering them to literally kill their parents before he takes them.

[00:29:59] That way, if they try to escape, where are they going to go? But why would they do that anyway? It's for that reason, right? To survive? Why would they agree to killing their parents? Otherwise they're going to be killed, I guess. Ugh, jeez. 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 going to have aunts and uncles and family members and community members that might accept them. What they do is they force them to drink the blood of their parents or eat their flesh.

[00:30:28] That way, if they do come back, then they're kind of going to be stigmatized for eating another human being. Basically, all of this is a way to trap them inside the LRA forever. That is awful. 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 because otherwise that's what they're going to be forced to do.

[00:30:56] And they're not having their lips and noses and ears cut off for them. They're forced to do it themselves. I just, I mean, I'm interested to what they actually say to these poor children for them to do that, right? 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? Adam is probably simple. Do it or you get killed. It's life or death at this point. There's no negotiation in it.

[00:31:25] They've probably seen a bunch of other friends in this army meeting the same fate. I just think like these kids who are innocent, all their innocence is being stripped as soon as they join this guy. It's awful. I had no idea it was this dark. 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. By the late 1990s, early 2000s, northern Uganda is in complete freefall.

[00:31:55] You have tens of thousands of kids in these villages living in constant fear that they are going to be 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.

[00:32:24] It's 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 in the streets of the town knowing that they'll be safe from being kidnapped in the middle of the night. Why? Just being on the street? Yeah, 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. And so they're leaving what you think is the safety of their own home with their parents and they're going to go to the city to sleep with all these other children. Yeah. Wow.

[00:32:52] And I guess the parents let them because they're like, well, actually, you're safer there than you are with us. Yeah. So Jason and his mates, they 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 spot like in a safe house where one of the locals have 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

[00:33:22] just stacked on top of each other. That's how tight this space is, right? They just need somewhere to sleep. And so Russell and his friends realise 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 in the footage

[00:33:51] 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 going to see them again in heaven one day. And when you see him recounting that, it's just heartbreaking. And that's because his brothers killed his parents? 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 traumatised 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.

[00:34:21] 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. Very noble. Sounds great, right? To raise awareness, they end up travelling 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. The money is then used to pay for scholarships and rebuild a bunch of schools

[00:34:50] in the northern area. It funds vocational training, job skills programmes, particularly for young women. And this is what they end up doing. They make more videos to raise more awareness, to raise more money and then invest those donations to help these kids. Eventually, they start hosting events like Displace Me 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

[00:35:19] having to do this just so they don't have to kill their parents. So it's awful. In my opinion, it's a little bit misguided. 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? You're doing it so you don't have to live your life in a fucking army and slice off your own lips. Yeah. But I get it. They have noble intentions, right? They're raising money. That's the positive. I just think that trying to put yourself in their position is probably not

[00:35:48] the best thing to do. Yeah, yeah. At this stage, they're not a huge operation but their proximity to LA does attract advocacy from a few celebrities like Kirsten Bell and the Fall Out Boy. Fall Out 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.

[00:36:17] How is that related? Exactly. That is the actual title because nothing says sensitive humanitarian outreach quite like a pun about like acquittals in court. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It just sounds like they're jumping on a bandwagon. 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? All you're doing is making a video for Western audiences. Yeah.

[00:36:47] Do you know what I mean? You're just promoting a song and yeah, okay, fair enough. There might be some awareness to it, but it doesn't sound that genuine. 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 of inspirational kind of charitable videos. They're sharing them. 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 a plight. Exactly. Yeah. I liked Fallout Boy, but no, I don't know if I do. When journalists ask, have you ever seen

[00:37:16] a love story between Ugandan people? They're just like, oh, no. No, but this is what we think it looks like. 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. Yeah.

[00:37:46] You're 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. Exactly. Apparently, they said that they shot the video in Uganda because it would be cheaper. That way, they could donate whatever was left over to causes in Uganda through the charity Invisible Children. Okay. So, the methods are mental, the intentions are noble, they're getting some cash and that's going to apparently these good causes. So, basically,

[00:38:15] 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 saved child. It's literally worse than thoughts and prayers. Oh, there's been 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? Yeah, take some action. So, the Invisible Children start making a bunch of videos to raise awareness and then raise money. Their content, Adam,

[00:38:46] 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? They're a charity. Their main 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 Kony 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

[00:39:15] kind of booing at them like, we don't want to know about activism. We don't know who Kony is. Screw these Ugandan kids basically. It's that kind of vibe. They'd all just much rather be in math class which says a lot. So, you see Jason and two other guys in the video. They don't know what to do. They're like, dude, what are we going to do? These kids just don't get it, man. And Jason turns to the others and goes, let's just do what we always do. Dance! You can always solve a problem with dance.

[00:39:45] Literally! So, they go into full NSYNC mode. They start breaking out into song, doing a dance, the corniest lyrics you've ever heard. I don't know if I should sing it or if I should play the video. I don't know. If you sing it, what are we expecting? Okay, I'll try to sing it. It goes, We're on a mission for Uganda deep inside your mind. All the kids in the 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,

[00:40:15] all the kids at that moment, on that line, sparkle and shine. They start nodding and agreeing. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. This man is speaking through song. Our language! It's 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 skit basically. It's 100% in earnest. This is not satire at all. Like, they are serious. And this is what

[00:40:44] 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 Udicandan kids in Africa. Right, sure. Okay, sounds noble on the surface of things. Did you not pick up what I said? People assume it's going straight to the kids in Uganda. Well, how are they selling it? Are they saying like, we're giving back, we're helping these causes? Or, yeah, what's the narrative here? We're going to get to that because all of this starts in 2024.

[00:41:14] This is the main way that these kids have been supporting themselves for the last eight years. Raising money to raise awareness, keeping little back to support themselves. They are literally qualified for nothing else. They are just theatre kids. So some might say, it'd be a fucking shame if the war in Uganda ended. Right? Ah, because then what are they going to do? So on the 5th of March 2012, Invisible Children released a video. It is completely the opposite of the high school

[00:41:43] 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 centred around these kids in Uganda and their plight. Instead, it's centred around Jason himself and his four-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 arses up

[00:42:12] that he films walking through the supermarkets in a very white suburban area. Hang on, so he's got a son called Gavin? How old is he? Four. And what year is this? 2012. No one has any business naming a child Gavin in this dawn of time. It might be a family name. Remember the Christians? No. Might be an old family name. I'm sorry, there should not be a Gavin, someone named Gavin this side of the millennium. Blowing up people's arses in supermarkets. That's also bad.

[00:42:41] 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 that social media and the connected public can change the world. Translation, stick around, buckaroos, because you're about to save the planet from your laptop. That sounds convenient. Yeah. Very convenient. Jason Russell then introduces himself through this home kind of video.

[00:43:12] He's at Gavin's birth with his wife in hospital. Jason whispers, hi Gavin, we've been waiting for you. 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 from this video is going to explain why that matters. Then, there's a smash cut to northern Uganda in the early 2000s. 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

[00:43:41] 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 listens, he's visibly gutted, and that's the turning point for Jason where he promises Jacob that he's going to do everything that he can to stop Coney and put an end to this war. Then we skip back to Gavin

[00:44:10] 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's very, very, very cute. So Jason shows him the picture of Coney and explains how he steals kids and he forces them into these wars and Gavin is like, oh no! And then cues a montage of Coney. There's mugshots, there's maps, there's numbers

[00:44:40] flashing across the screen, over 30,000 kids abducted. There's footage of villagers 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 International Criminal Court in The 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,

[00:45:09] but nobody would ever say, yeah, I know who Coney is. He's the number one most wanted criminal in the world. Yeah, I don't know even if I know what he looks like, to be honest. So that's a picture of him. Oh, so that's what he looks like. Very greasy guy. 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. That's the point of this video is that he is 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,

[00:45:38] we need to make Coney 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 news feeds. 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 sense to me. It does. I don't know if I'd say famous is the right way you need to make him, but we need to spread the word. Well, yeah, it's the same thing. I think he's maybe using very simplistic

[00:46:08] kind of language. Yeah. 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, fists 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,

[00:46:38] 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 Joseph Coney. So yeah, do you get the sense of how inspirational? Imagine this is very fast paced, there's a lot going on. There's no image

[00:47:08] in that video that's on the screen for more than two seconds. 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 at this point in time. At this point, I have no objection to this video. It is really incredible. He then introduces the action kit, which you can get through their website and it costs you $30. It's a $30 donation, basically. It will contain two Coney 20 2012 bracelets, one for you, one for your friends. It will then contain stickers,

[00:47:37] but most importantly, posters with Coney's face on it. It's kind of like the Shepard 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 this video will all come together on April the 20th, 2012. One night,

[00:48:06] in every major city on earth, the world will flood the streets and do what they call cover the night. It's literally plastering posters of Coney'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. This does sound like a good way to spread the news and get it out there. Albeit, it does sound a bit like merch in terms of what you can buy, but I understand the poster,

[00:48:36] you want to 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. 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 going to get onto that because the video is great. It's done really well, but it's about the execution and what follows and it's just really, it's very messy. But basically, he's saying that after the cover of the night event, everyone is going to know

[00:49:05] 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 500,000 views in the entirety of the year 2012, but it ends up getting 100 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

[00:49:35] 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. Sadly, that is what works in this society. But there's also where the problem lies, right? Amongst this virality of this video. Jason literally becomes one of the biggest celebrities in the world. Everyone is talking about him. Everyone wants to know who this Coney dude is. He's been invited

[00:50:04] to all these different talk shows from the West Coast to the East Coast. He even gets invited onto 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, Nicki Minaj, the Kardashians. Everyone agrees, yeah, this is bad. But then, as more and more news stations start picking up the story, within the first 72 hours, people start going, hang on, what is this campaign exactly? Because yes,

[00:50:34] 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 run up that isn't even mentioned in this 27 minute video. And so, this starts circulating while Jason is on all of these talk shows where initially, it's all positive. Who's Coney? Who are you? What do the invisible children do?

[00:51:05] But then, he's been criticised 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 don't know 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 going to watch a deep dive of a video into the weeds of a decade long civil war? He's basically calling the public idiots.

[00:51:34] Yeah, it's interesting because it's almost like there should be a teaser and then you find out more. Exactly. And I get that's probably what he's maybe trying trying to get at by saying like, well, if we just release a documentary, it's not going to get maybe as far reached as something that goes viral and kind of pulls on the heartstrings. But equally, yeah, it's kind of like there's more to it than just 28 minutes. Exactly. I'm not sure whether or not he linked to the Invisible Children documentary. That is the original one they did that he could have easily done

[00:52:04] because now you've wrote people in, right? You've really got them to care. A lot of people probably would have gone, I'm interested in this other documentary. Yeah. It should be mentioned in the video. Exactly. Find out more or whatever, hear more about specific people or whatever. So it's such a small detail that could have kind of like this line of question not been an issue. 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 Kony

[00:52:33] 2012 hyper-trained kind of experiences. After this, people start of what was actually happening. The film makes it sound like Joseph Kony is right now in Uganda holding 30,000 children hostage and force them to fight in 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. So where are they? When they ask the Uganda government about this,

[00:53:03] 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 that peak was just a few thousand. Well, that's still bad, but yeah, fair enough. Today, their numbers are best, like 700, and those are all now dispersed across the Democratic Republic of Congo,

[00:53:34] 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, and it's not. And basically, to sum up, Uganda is like, yeah, we don't actually know what this video is trying to get at, because there's no issue here. That must have been really weird to wake up and see all this and be like, hang on a minute, what is this noise and going on? So, he'd already been dealt with six years ago. He's still alive, by the way. He's just been, he's ousted from the country. And I guess some

[00:54:04] maybe children found their way back or whatever, but okay, that was in 2004. And what we're saying is by 2000, so within two years, they had dealt with the problem. It was when they were in Uganda, it was at its peak. Kids were doing these to kind of escape. And then that's when the Uganda government started doing something about it to protect these kids. So they went in 2004, it was a huge issue, and they'd never thought during that time, between 2004 and 2012, just to check in, just to see how things are,

[00:54:33] what's the latest figures? 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 are now adults, right? Jacob, the little boy from the film, he's actually

[00:55:03] studying to become a lawyer at university at this moment in time. That must have been strange to see that then. So all those night commuter journeys shown in that footage are just not even happening anymore. And so, out of this, the Ugandan Prime Minister drops a response video basically saying, thanks for caring and all the white saviour bullshit, but this video is painting like Uganda is still at war and we're not. So you're a few years too late if you want to care. Yeah. So after this, people start pointing out that Kony and the LRA aren't the only villains in the story.

[00:55:33] 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 Ugandan's 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 groups. Right, okay, so they're actually not a good government.

[00:56:03] 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. And so, with Jason, I'm trying to understand why he hasn't picked up on this before, or why does he... Unfortunately, I don't have the answer for you. I don't know 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

[00:56:33] it did, right? 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? Yeah. 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 going to happen? I know maybe you didn't think it'd be as big, but surely it would get scrutinized at one point or another. Remember,

[00:57:03] he's 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, etc. So I don't know. It's very misguided. Next, people start questioning this whole effort to make Kony famous, right? They're like, if Kony 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 would be wiping out the very same

[00:57:33] abducted children that the video spent half an hour trying to make us care about. That's true, actually, because now these are the bad guys. 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-47s in an RPG. Basically, the SPLA are a rebellion group fighting against the Sudanese government during the Second Sudanese Civil War. So they're not the LRA,

[00:58:03] 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, it very much looks like the Invisible Children are cozying 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 them for photographs with this bazooka? So dumb! So yeah, it doesn't

[00:58:33] look like they are a serious kind of organisation and charity looking to help these kids, especially in light of the mounting questions and criticisms that are 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 they're supposedly supporting in Uganda. together. They decide that they're actually going to hold a

[00:59:02] screening for it for the local Ugandan people. So it's a big deal because basically they want to show the Ugandan people, specifically those affected by the LRA in the past, that the world really cares about them, right? 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 by the end they're literally throwing rocks at the screen.

[00:59:31] 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. Yeah, asking his kid about this bad guy. Exactly, but most importantly, Kony hasn't even been in the country for like six years. They must have been doing this and like, well, this is not new news. They're like, sure he's 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 even exist and you're

[01:00:01] exploiting us to get that? Like, for what purpose? Just ask some of these people about like, before you go into this, I don't understand. 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 throughout the charity's history. One of the women in the film, she is outraged because she explicitly refuses permission for her face to be shown and it's because she's severely disfigured by the LRA.

[01:00:31] She doesn't want her face being used for this commercial endeavour, which in reality had nothing to do with helping them. 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 Kony 2012 video are millennials, right? They're our generation. The issues that matter the most to them are social ones, gay rights, abortion rights, human rights violations across the world.

[01:01:01] 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, Kony 2012 has received $26.5 million through the purchases or the donations for these $30 action kits. Wow, that is a phenomenal amount. Is that just in three days? Very short period of time, yeah. Donations have also flooded in from Oprah, who gives $2 million. And so people want a breakdown of how this money is being divided up and spent.

[01:01:31] 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 entire model is

[01:02:01] just this feedback loop of videos for awareness for money. I mean, obviously, they've got to pay that. I understand that, but the split doesn't sound right. I don't know what the split should be, but 70-30 doesn't sound right. Doesn't seem 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 2 out of 4 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

[01:02:30] readily available online. It's shocking. Yeah, because if they raised 26 million, and only 30% of that, what is that? That's like... And that's just for this video. Remember, historically, over the eight years, that's how they've been operating. There are 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. Yeah. Then, when this comes to light, journalists uncover some very questionable behavior after stumbling upon a video from 2010 where the charity

[01:03:00] managed to secure a $1 million grant from the Chase Bank community giving contest. Basically, the way you win this grant is your appeal has to go through several rounds of voting via 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. And so, who created those accounts? Who knows? Probably an organization that had created them on their behalf, but it must have been thousands and thousands in order to win

[01:03:30] the grant, essentially. Yeah, okay. 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 won a million dollars, 100,000 for Tahiti, and 900 extra for me. Wow. Lol, lol, lol. So, yeah, that's that 10%, I guess. Yeah. That's going to the actual cause. That is

[01:04:00] horrendous. Who is that director? I can't remember his name, but yeah. This is so 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'd 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 for himself. Yeah, I don't buy that. Yeah,

[01:04:29] 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 organisation is scrambling to kind of show evidence that the entire $1 million actually did go towards the intended programmes in Uganda. But honestly, this is the turning point, basically, because people don't believe it. It just seems like there's just one thing after another, after another. So people just assume that everything from here on out is just bullshit. Yeah, they've lost the trust in these people. 100%, their reputation is squashed basically,

[01:04:59] and it's like three days in. The media completely turn on them. They're accused of being a bunch of rich, white, spoiled, privileged party kids just playing the white saviour 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, 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

[01:05:29] a literal naked meltdown on a public street in San Diego. What, he just goes out, he's streaking? It's the middle of the day, like I said. He is butt naked, he is seen ranting at passer buyers, he is kind of 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 literally acting like zombies? That's what this looks like and I think a lot of people think it was bath salts that he was on. Yeah, for him to kind of

[01:05:58] flip like that. Yeah, at one point reports say that he was seen masturbating on people's lawns. Remember, this is the middle of the day. On their lawns? Yeah. Maybe it's good for the grass. Honestly, I tried to find that clip because Jason is pretty hot but I couldn't find it. You do, however, do get a nice shot of his literal arsehole from behind as he bends over. Oh, yeah. That's not pretty, though. He basically ends up getting arrested. Obviously, the footage is sold to TMZ for like $30,000. Jason is then taken to hospital where he

[01:06:28] 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. But she stresses that this is not who Jason is, that he is actually a hero to thousands of people in Uganda and around the world. So they're still maintaining that he is the saviour. I mean, he's done some good but it's kind of questionable. Yeah, exactly. It's just not well executed and has backfired

[01:06:58] essentially. So after he gets out of 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. I'm surprised she's not like, I want my money back or at least I want to know my money has gone evidence. You would think, right? That's the kind of hard-hitting journalism you'd 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? Yeah, that's weird. So why did she

[01:07:28] 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 there's a coordinated kind of thing. But one

[01:07:58] of the key take-homes from this interview is that Oprah says and it completely overshadows everything in this interview. She says so you had a meltdown. People say it's because you're gay. Is this is what people are important questions here. What does he

[01:08:28] say to that? Oh he says yeah I've heard that before but the important thing is he doesn't deny it. He just laughs and says yeah I've heard that one. I'm a theatre kid. Does he have a child? Yeah he has he's not gay. Which obviously doesn't mean anything. But that's so stupid. What does that even matter? doesn't. The important thing is that this is and while all of this is going on the efforts to trace the money gets

[01:08:58] deeper and it gets very dark because they discover funding has been linked to a multi layered network of far right evangelical Christian organizations across the USA and it starts when they see that at the charity's inception they receive funding from a company called A1 Self Storage now the company itself is owned by the caster family who had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support California's Proposition 8 bill which is basically tied to the ban on same sex marriage right

[01:09:28] that this is a big deal from there they then discovered that in 2006 the charity also took $235 thousand from the National Christian foundation it's another group linked to the caster 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're a charity right which is fine I get it except it's proven that in 2007 they applied to join the Barnabas group

[01:09:57] and when you fill out your application you have to 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 so they're just as bad as these other people that they're trying to say well we're not going to reject their money but this proves that they're exactly the

[01:10:37] looks like from an optics point of view right they're 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 more progressive right but here's the problem all of the on the ground efforts that they had facilitated were being facilitated through

[01:11:07] the family so 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 a faith then no education for you worse 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

[01:11:36] one way publicly while quietly pushing kind of an evangelical agenda behind the scenes and in response to this the Invisible Children claimed 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 as Trojan horses saying we are able to be the Trojan horse going into the secular realm and

[01:12:06] 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 yeah it

[01:13:31] 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 disguised as doing good. And so after everything, the entire crescendo of the Kony 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 the streets,

[01:14:00] plus the posters of Kony's face all over lampposts, walls and billboards, etc. And by sunrise, a whole planet was supposed to wake up knowing who Joseph Kony was, basically. So this is meant to be their moment, except, Adam, it wasn't. When the evening of the 20th of April arrives, barely anyone shows up. Well, most people know at this point who he is, right? The answer has kind of already been solved. Remember, they sold 500,000 kids. It's a huge amount.

[01:14:29] 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. It's just so embarrassing. Yeah. Well, you know, they've shown their true colours.

[01:14:56] They're not a company or a foundation that can be 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? 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. If it gets enough responses,

[01:15:25] 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, Kony was no longer an immediate threat. And B, he wasn't even in Uganda. So the question is, if the US government did do anything, what is it that they were supposed to do anyway? Yeah. I don't know. Go find him. Put him in prison. But then if Uganda wasn't bothered about that. No. 700 people is not really a force that's an imminent threat to anyone.

[01:15:54] Yes, what he does is really bad. Yes, he's a terrible person. Yes, he's number one on the warlords kind of list of most wanted. But he's not an active threat right now when the rest of the world and the US government 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 there'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 government are forced to do is come up with a compromise. The US Senate passed a resolution who basically condemned Kony

[01:16:23] and they 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 he stumbles out of the jungle. Okay. That feels very, I don't know, not that thorough. 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,

[01:16:53] the US government, they officially announced that they were shutting down the entire operation because the reality is, like I said, he's not a threat. Do we know anything that's happened to him now or that's it? He's kind of just a bait. He's still out 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 Kony was number one on the most wanted list, even though he was no longer an active threat. So he sees the massive traction

[01:17:23] that Kony 2012 is getting and he thinks to himself, if the US government goes in and gets Kony, he will be the one who will lead the prosecution against him for war crimes, right? 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 Kony stuff is kicking off, he realises very quickly that the US government aren't actually going to go ahead and do anything.

[01:17:52] 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 Anjali Jolie and Brad Pitt. Like an A-list power couple. Yeah. How are they going to take down Kony? Basically, the plan is for Anjali Jolie and Brad Pitt to go to Uganda where, just a reminder, Kony isn't even living anymore and they're going to reach out to Kony's people and arrange a dinner date. The thinking is, basically, why wouldn't Kony accept a dinner invite from Anjali Jolie and Brad Pitt?

[01:18:21] I think it would be suspicious. Yeah, 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. Because he wants to do it instead. No, well, so this guy is so confident

[01:18:50] the plan is going to work. So he goes to George Clooney and asks whether or not they can use his satellites. Yes, satellites. Apparently, George Clooney had co-founded a satellite program called the Sentinel Project which basically monitors human rights violations around the world. I didn't know that, did you? Incredible. Basically, this criminal courts guy, he wants to use George Clooney's satellites to be able to zoom in on where Kony was hiding so that Brad and Angelina could go off and do their thing. In the end, George is like basically, lol, no,

[01:19:20] 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. So the answer is no. So the entire thing just fizzles out and it just goes from strange to even stranger. That is bizarre to think that was his plan of bringing him down. 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 charity. They continue to make more videos to raise more awareness, to make more money, just to make more videos.

[01:19:50] 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 this entire saga, they end up making $30 million from that Kony 2012 video. Of that, 70% of their money, they literally just kept for themselves. Wow, that's just, that's so bad. It begs the question, doesn't it? Like, how were these charities even able to get away with that? This is one that we all,

[01:20:19] like it's a famous one that's gone wrong. What about other charities out there? It turns out that this is literally how non-profit 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 going to go away. It's what they were raised in. It's what they know. But Jason, he's still very much on the scene.

[01:20:49] 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 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 as viral in the way that it did. And he talks about how it caused this massive breakdown because of all the stresses, etc.

[01:21:17] 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. So he's a bit deluded then? He's deluded. 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. Yeah.

[01:21:47] I mean, I guess he's almost set like a bit of a blueprint on how to create a viral video. Correct. And if that's what he's kind of latching onto, then fine. But yeah, he hasn't really done any good. He should just say that then. Do you know what I mean? Because what he did create was incredible. It's just he didn't have the substance behind it. He didn't have all his ducks in a row before this blew up. Yeah. If he found an actual genuine cause that was current at the time, this would have been great. Exactly. Minus obviously keeping 70% of the money. But apart from that, it'd have been great. But it's awful that they can do that, right?

[01:22:18] Crazy. And Adam, that is the story of Kony 2012. 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. Which we should do an episode on. But yeah, I thought it was just like something like that. I didn't realise it was down to an outdated war and corrupt charities. Mental. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the moral of the story is always do your research. Yeah. Obviously, there's a lot of good

[01:22:47] charities out there, but make sure you find out the right one. 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 people. Like 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? Their main demographic was trying to appeal to millennials. And then they're quickly scurrying in the background to try and cover the fact that they're actually associated with all these

[01:23:17] right-wing evangelical Christian networks that their main demographic does not want. Yeah, yeah. 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. No, because they're 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. 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

[01:23:47] the money was going to, right? Or just the directors. 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 things. We hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did. And if today's episode sparked your curiosity, then please do us a favour and follow us on your favourite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people discover the show. And for our dedicated freaks out there, don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon.

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