We have promised two exciting audio shows to our readers and listeners during the last two weeks, but later found ourselves being forced to break those promises. The people from the Revolution Broadcasting network made those decisions for us, without warning, just before both of those shows aired. We want every person to know that we place great value upon keeping our promises. It is part of an unspoken code of honor to which we adhere. We do not appreciate any third-party tricking us into being fools and liars. We are sincerely sorry it happened. In retrospect, we now know that there was a reason for all the madness that we have recently witnessed in regard to our radio shows, but the truth behind it is not easy to accept; even for us. The time has come to set things right again, and that requires that we first expose the raw truth to all of you.
What Sarah and I regularly uncover reminds us of the adventures of Mulder and Scully from 'The X-Files'. That show's motto, "The Truth Is Out There" seems to regularly apply to our research. Some of our peers have trouble with how far we are willing to travel down the rabbit hole at times.
We should always exercise caution in what we wish for, and if that thing happens to be the truth, then we had better learn how to handle it, regardless of how unbelievable it might seem, or how undesirable our final absolute answers are. What we do is not for the meek, and we wear our battle scars like badges of honor. We have been chased away time and time again by people who were either angered or intimidated by our work, beginning with Earth Fare stores, during the time when we had a print magazine. We were also removed as the Supervisors of Alternative Medicine at Answers.com for upsetting a couple of pharmacists, to name just a couple of cases.
It is almost unnecessary to note that certain groups of people hate us for what we are doing, and we have been dealing with hatred for quite some time now. The overall character of those who passionately hate us usually helps to remind us that we are doing something good. Therefore, their hate-filled rants are sometimes as inspiring as the friendly messages which compliment our work. We expected things to be thusly exciting from the very beginning, and we understood what we were getting ourselves into. We always knew just how evil our enemies are. We knew that people, including very powerful people, would want to silence our work. They got our magazine removed from retail shelves, but we are still providing a beacon of hope via the Internet. Luckily, those who could do us the most harm have done little more than fire warning shots so far, but that could change in the time it takes to blink an eye. We expect it to happen, and we have been bracing for the impact for years.
Sometimes we get blindsided. We have experienced friends turning against us without warning, and without any apparent cause. We find ourselves in the middle of an information war, and we are fully prepared for our enemies, but not necessarily our friends. How do we react when a friend fires upon us? Do we return fire or just silently take the pain? Whatever choice is made, it is never easy. Such wounds always go much deeper, and something about it always reeks from the stench of betrayal. These occasions remind us that our skin is not quite as tough as we believed it was. We bleed too.
We have noticed a certain pattern from those who have betrayed us, and this includes the people running Revolution Broadcasting. The reason behind the friendly fire is always the same too. This is the general process: Our former friend first appears to have developed a mixture of schizophrenia and multiple personalities. Seriously. They generally find a need to criticize our work under the veil of being helpful, whilst sprinkling in periodic petty compliments to disguise what they are really doing. Even minor compliments begin with: "I like you but ...", because no statement can be made without the corresponding degradation. This is usually the first red flag. The next stage is when we usually catch them in lies, because they are willing to say almost anything to belittle, even when we have done nothing wrong. The following stage after that is when their criticism is actually meant to manipulate us into sabotaging ourselves. This is when all doubts dissipate about them having a less than noble agenda, and when it all starts happening, it all goes down as predictably as clockwork. The final stage is where they drop the mask, and go all-out to hurt us in any way they can, because they realize that their intent is already exposed.
In the case of Revolution Broadcasting, we got a Skype call from one of its leaders the day before our show about 9/11. He called to explain to us how a "real show" is done, and spent the first ten minutes cataloging his media superiority over us. Apparently, we have major flaws in our style and presentation. He was the only person who seemed to have noticed our glaring flaws, and in fact, we were flooded with praise about our first show on his network. Nevertheless, he kept us on the call for about an hour to ensure that we were sufficiently beaten down, and I must say that we showed remarkable self-restraint during the conversation. He accused us of heavy breathing on the show, and played a clip of us, replete with breathing background sounds to prove his case about how unprofessional we were. However, we have our own pristine copy of the show that was recorded at the source, and one would need either a powerful equalizer or a super-human gift to hear our breathing in the background. We immediately realized something was terribly amiss, because he was using a doctored version of our audio to belittle us into believing that we had done poorly. We did mention that schitzo thing, right? The person in question should make a note that I recorded the conversation should he decide to accuse me of lying about this affair. Another thing that I found interesting is that he spent much of the conversation attempting to goad both of us into demonizing Alex Jones. He had a real fixation with Alex too. Neither one of us took the bait. Anyway, Sarah and I hoped that it was just temporary insanity, or something akin, and so we decided to move on.
The next day, our show was canceled fifteen minutes before we were to go on air. The only explanation was that they needed a 9/11 special show, which was to feature the network's owner. The replacement show consisted of him and his wife ranting about 9/11 like two drunks from a trailer park. It was... incredible.
Regardless, we assumed that everything was more-or-less normal, so we prepared to do the next show, which should have taken place tonight. This time, we were notified several hours ahead of time that we would be canceled yet again, but we were only notified because Sarah had directly asked the owner about it. That's when the owner began with his own brand of schizophrenic behavior, and we were beginning to see the familiar red flags clearly.
He immediately told us that our show was too much trouble for so few listeners. The trouble thing really got my attention, because we do all of the work for free, which included logging into the streaming server, and then running the show entirely by ourselves. I had to wonder what work he could possibly be talking about, other than cashing the checks from his sponsors. When pressed about the numbers, he compared the high listener count from a show on a completely different network, which was entirely unrelated, and then claimed that our show had only 10 listeners. We had received more than 10 compliments from listeners, so Sarah and I immediately knew that he was lying. Then we also began noticing dramatic pauses between his answers, as if he felt uncomfortably exposed and angry. He told us that he needed to pull our show this week, because our marketing for it was obviously poor, after complimenting us on having an overall good show, of course. Next, when unable to produce a real reason for pulling the show, he pulled other people into a Skype conference to discuss our marketing failure on his network, upon which he pulled our marketing. Strangely enough, nobody had any suggestions whatsoever about what we should do differently, but apparently we are off the show until we figure out how to fix the non-existent and unnamed problem. He has not enough shows to fill the time slots that he has, including our now vacant slot, and yet we must somehow prove our marketing merit to him. He finally told us that our promotional advertisement needed to be remade because it was.... one second too long. He did not like my voice on it either. Perhaps I had been breathing again.
The motive behind this otherwise neurotic behavior is always the same. Jealousy is a very ugly thing. There is nothing we could have done better. In fact, the problem is that we did too well. We were told that we were chosen because we were the best out there, so I suppose they should have been more careful about what they wished for. We are certainly not going to intentionally bore listeners and dumb ourselves down for the sake of stroking egos with issues. It is not how we do things.
Sarah and I realize that further communications with the people at Revolution Broadcasting would be a foolish waste of our precious time. We hope you, as our readers, will understand why we have been so distracted recently, and appreciate that we have excused ourselves from their soap opera. More shows will be made, and this is a promise that shall be kept. Thank you for hearing me out.
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Thomas