17: The Politics of QAnon Spirituality (w/Seane Corn & Jared Yates Sexton)
At this point, we can say for sure that American spiritual and wellness communities are not only vulnerable to conspiracy brainworms but they’re actively hosting and spreading them. Seane Corn joins us to discuss what to do when QAnon rhetoric and hashtags co-opts lurches through yoga communities.
But is this really unexpected from a historical point of view? Our second guest, cult researcher and historian Jared Yates Sexton joins us to talk about his new book, American Rule. He discusses the longstanding conspiracies that have influenced America since its very founding as well as the chronic problem of American exceptionalism.
We all add in our own reflections on 9/11: how close to home it came, how one of us was in a cult when it happened, and how we learn and manage fear.
Show Notes
Thread on Pastel QAnon
The Birth of QAmom
Wellness Influencers Are Spreading QAnon Conspiracies About the Coronavirus
Seane Corn’s anti-Q post swarmed by QAnons
Inside Kelly Brogan’s Covid-Denying, Vax-Resistant Conspiracy Machine
The Brightest Stars Shine In The Deepest Dark
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And you can stay up to date with us at Conspirituality.net, where all of our resource pages and links and all of our show notes live.
We are on Facebook and YouTube, of course, but we are also now on Instagram, and that's going very well.
We've been getting a lot of mentions and people discuss Discussing what's going on there.
So I feel like we'll be spending a lot more time in that format.
That's at conspiritualitypod is the handle.
And of course we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can get access to user only or supporter only content that we offer every Friday or on the weekend depending on our on our schedule.
And I also just want to mention our Red Pill page.
We have a few resources on conspirituality.net but Just by the winds of social media, we got picked up by Gizmodo and the New York Times this week linking to our Redpill page, so the amount of activity has been tremendous.
And it is very much a user-generated page.
We have gotten so many direct messages and tags about people who are sliding down the QAnon rabbit hole, so we will continue to update that page as we find it.
I do want to point out That it is QAnon specific.
I know there's a lot of craziness happening right now with people falling into different conspiracy theory rabbit holes, but this page is specific to QAnon and that has always been the intention because I think we need to laser focus on that particular one at the moment and so Send us whatever you will, but just keep that in mind if you see someone talking about 5G or whatever, it's not going to make it onto the page.
Although that is still important.
And I think as a community, we should be tracking all of the different ways that this is manifesting right now.
Episode 17, The Politics of QAnon Spirituality. - Yeah.
At this point, we can say for sure that American spiritual and wellness communities are not only vulnerable to conspiracy brainworms, but they're actively hosting and spreading them.
Sean Korn joins us to discuss what to do when QAnon rhetoric and hashtag co-ops lurch through yoga communities.
But is this really unexpected from a historical point of view?
Our second guest, cult researcher and historian, Jared Yates Sexton, joins us to talk about his new book, American Rule.
He discusses the long-standing conspiracies that have influenced America since its very founding, as well as the chronic problem of American exceptionalism.
We all add in our own reflections as well on 9-11, which just happened this past week, the anniversary.
How close to home it came.
How one of us was in a cult when it happened.
And how we learn and manage fear.
Thanks, Julian.
So, first up for this week in conspirituality, one big thing that happened was that my feature on Kelly Brogan and Sayer G dropped at Gen By Medium.
We'll link to it in the show notes, but I'll reserve comment on it and some ephemera, some extra research that I compiled that I wasn't able to put into the article.
I'll defer that to next week, once the dust settles a little.
But for my segment, I'm going to talk about what cults can do during disasters, maybe even what they must do during disasters.
So, almost everyone seems to remember a very strange Or tragic 9-11-2001.
For me, the strangeness and tragedy of that morning was involved with the fact that it was almost exactly a year to the day into my residence at an apocalyptic cult called Endeavor Academy in the Wisconsin Dells.
Now, this was very strange because many of my fellow members regarded the event as a transformative moment in that core conspirituality sense.
An impersonal mass destruction had opened a portal for a very personal rapture.
So, I remember being in the apartment reading a book with morning coffee and my best friend at the time rang me from the academy and he said, did you hear about New York?
You have to come.
And we didn't have a television, we didn't have internet, except in the main building itself, which was an old converted resort.
So I raced there to find about a hundred group members crowded around the single television in the common room.
And on the screen I could see the black smoke, I could read some of the CNN ticker below the image, I was a little bit too far away to really make it out, but I didn't really grasp what had happened.
And the responses from the group in the room didn't help sort it out.
It was customary in gatherings and prayer sessions for members to have their arms aloft as in gospel revival, like reaching for the sky, but then also it was common for people to breathe and sigh very loudly and deeply, sometimes whistling.
To show that they were processing some kind of energy flow.
But then there were others who were sitting in just stony, dissociative silence.
Some were laughing uncontrollably.
Some were weeping.
And if folks were really activated, they'd be up out of their chairs and spontaneously breaking into this kind of like kundalini jitterbug across the floor, careening or smashing into others.
And if they would smash into others, sometimes the others would catch the bug from them and they'd start into being in the spirit as well.
Now, all of this was going on in that room, watching CNN, but at a fever pitch.
It kind of, like, around the television and especially the image of the smoke pouring up, it kind of felt like the monolith scene at the beginning of Kubrick's 2001.
But the black slab was the smoke and I didn't understand why the apes were freaking out and I guess I was an ape too, but I was in the back and I was quiet.
I remember it like a movie.
Also, people were shouting out things like, this is it.
The world is over.
Nothing is real.
It's an illusion.
Nobody dies.
The towers had already fallen.
And other poetic non-sequiturs.
And everything was related to buzz phrases in A Course in Miracles, which was the source text for the group.
And the course simultaneously invalidates human suffering and blames humans for it.
That's its whole sort of sealed loop.
So, it's not real, human suffering.
But if you feel it, you're delusional, and it's your fault.
That's its basic message.
Now, there was some political analysis within all of the speaking in tongues.
Something about how obvious and appropriate it was that it was the World Trade Center, that the end of the world would be announced by, you know, anchors who looked frozen, that the Twin Towers represented dualism, and also the fact that they crumbled so quickly and neatly into their footprints was proof of their illusory nature.
It took about an hour for me to take in the basics of what had happened.
But no one in the room was interested in any kind of factual pathway forward.
People thought literally anything.
The Muslims did it.
It was white nationalists.
It was Maoists.
It was an inside job.
They didn't care.
Nobody discussed what good sources of information would be.
Or what the appropriate responses should be because it wasn't about the data.
It was about the symbology and the confirmation that the incoherent apocalyptic ramblings of our leader were actually prophetic.
And the cruelest part of it was that everyone was supposed to be awestruck, excited, amazed that civilization was crumbling before our eyes.
And that meant that anyone who is legitimately terrified was either ridiculed or they talked themselves out of it.
They turned their stress responses into signs of transformation.
To this day, I'm not quite sure what I turned my stress response into on that particular day because I feel when I go into my body to remember it, I feel completely blank.
So then the teacher himself, Charles Anderson, comes into the room waving a Bible in one hand and A Course in Miracles in the other.
And he says something like, well, what did you expect?
And everyone erupted into Kundalini Opera Hour.
He read from one of the lessons and the book of Revelation, like it was the daily news.
He told us that he'd seen it before and that war was how he had woken up to the unreality of fear.
Because part of his story was that his spiritual awakening occurred on the day that he was one of the first GIs, or so he says, who entered Nagasaki on the ground to survey the bomb damage in 1945.
He says that looking at the impossible devastation ascended him physically into the realization that only God could be real.
But then he explains that he couldn't deal with it, so he came home and started drinking.
And I kind of believe this part of his story.
Anyway, for the next several months I had a secret life, which consisted of driving my car deep out into the country to listen to NPR for clues about what was going on.
And I haven't really thought about it this way before, but boring, straight-laced public radio with that slow rhythm and broad, sort of general American accent was kind of an anchor for me.
And sometimes I'd listen to the same news reports over and over, not because the content was telling me anything, but just to soak up the energy of people who were patiently trying to tell the truth.
So, I'm telling the story because it shows, at least for me, that there are conspirituality groups that are primed and ready to co-opt any disaster into their theology for both validation, but also for new prospects.
It's actually more than primed and ready.
I think there's a lot of groups out there that actually need crises to reinvigorate the faith and their bonds.
It's like they're desperate for it.
It's like wag the dog, only it's wag the god.
Within a month, our entire group swung into full 9-11 rebranding.
In the video department, they were literally using World Trade Center collapse footage underneath Course in Miracle quotes.
Like, it makes me really nauseous to think of now.
And then, with no money and zero contacts and nowhere to stay, they sent groups of us to Manhattan to proselytize.
The super enthused group leaders were running around trying to get media interviews to go on air and say what?
I don't even know.
And I felt so dissociated and awful as I walked around trying to get out of my cult duties.
I just wanted to, I don't know, go to a cafe or something.
So, I think I was lucky.
I felt, I knew it was wrong.
And I remembered this guy coming up to our prayer circle in Washington Square Park and asking me where we were from.
And my fellow cult member looked him in the eye and like actually said, totally embarrassing, we're children of God and we come from heaven and this is not our home.
And he looked at her and he said, well, you should go the fuck back there because we're a little overwhelmed here, you know?
Unless you guys are doctors or something, thank you very much, but move the fuck along.
So it was very New York.
I split from the group in that moment, feeling utterly humiliated.
I mean, I split during that trip.
I didn't leave the group entirely.
And I think if I'd come into the cult as an alcoholic, I definitely would have started using again at that moment.
But for so many of the other members, the guy's sincerity was actually taken as resistance, a kind of spiritual resistance.
It only emboldened them.
So I'll just finish by saying, if anyone in the era of COVID, or the aftermath of this election, or the potential violence that follows it, or in the shadow of climate collapse disasters, if anybody within that context leaps into your frame with some kind of spiritual salvation message, try to find out where they're coming from.
Because It's likely that they've been practicing it for years, and it's even more likely that they need it more than you do.
You know, I've always been fascinated by research that came out where researchers had Interviewed people, um, I think like a month after 9-11 and then a year and then five years later.
Yeah.
And a lot of people, five years later, remember seeing the towers fall on television on 9-11, but there was no video shown that day of the towers falling.
That didn't happen till 9-12.
Right.
And it talks a lot about like how our memories are faulty and how we.
Yeah.
Everything that has happened since then plays into your memories, so who I am now almost 20 years later influences my memories and that makes me wonder, you have so much distance from that event, but can you pinpoint or remember times during that where you really did buy into the messages of the cult that this was there for a reason and that you were ascending in some ways?
Oh, I think in moments, like it was, in some ways, in a very personal sense, it was actually probably a lucky experience to have in the context of my indoctrination because I think it shook it.
Not, it didn't break it, but there were so many awful things, awful pressures and contradictions that surrounded those months that I may well have stayed longer in the group had that event not happened, because I do believe that there were moments that I was flashing into and out of, yeah, this is a reasonable explanation for, well, how would the world end anyway?
And how would something catastrophic feel?
Would I even know?
And so there was all kinds of ways in which bits and pieces of it made sense.
And then of course, everybody who I was really bonded to in the group was using the same ideology and spiritual bypass techniques to make sense of it as well.
And you want to be with them at the same time, right?
You don't want to, you want to empathize with, with, so there's kind of this like mutual feedback loop of, of, you know, this is the tool that we have to deal with the stress.
And, but also this is the way I'm going to bond with my fellows.
And then we're trauma bonded with a group and then additionally trauma bonded with the outer society, which has totally rejected us.
Watching the NXIVM documentary on HBO, as you see people start to leave or when someone expresses doubt, were there people in the group doubting this besides you?
Did you have communion with anyone about that or did it seem like everyone bought in pretty quickly?
The thing that a lot of the researchers say that I find to be very resonant with my own experience is that when you're in a high demand group, one of the ways in which you are primarily isolated, you know, first of all from outside sources, but then you're isolated from fellow members around through the system of taboos that rules what you are and are not allowed to talk about.
So, no, I don't have a clear sense of anybody else who had the same types of doubts or strange nauseated feelings that I had at that time.
But what I do know from, you know, researching cults and doing, you know, thousands of hours of, you know, Cult survivor interviews is that people find out later that their fellows were sharing similar impressions and had to hide those feelings and had to hide.
It's almost like, you know, it's, it's, it's like the secret of any kind of institutional abuse.
It really has to be, it really has to be concealed not only by the institution, but, but by the survivors from each other.
You know, as they fear retribution, as they fear isolation, further isolation.
Yeah, interesting overlap there.
We may have mentioned it before, but I used to go see Marianne Williamson, attempting to be a Democratic nominee for president at this tiny little church when I first came to the U.S.
when I was 19, when there were like 10 or 20 people there.
And she was very big into A Course in Miracles at the time.
And I sort of lost touch with her teachings for a while and then when the big earthquake happened here in 2004, I went to see her at this really, you know, several thousand people's Cedar Amphitheater where she was talking about the earthquake.
Through a very similar kind of lens of how, you know, what are the metaphysical lessons we're going to take from this earthquake about the nature of reality, about what the earth is trying to tell us, what spirit is trying to tell us, that sort of thing.
I'd be really curious what her, I mean, I imagine she would reject the interpretation, right, of course, in Miracles that that group has.
Well, one of the ways in which Endeavor Academy set itself apart was, of course, as the elitist and purest form of interpreting the book that would never really use it to interpret world events in a particular way, except to use the spectacle of a world event to prove to the participant that the fact that it doesn't make sense, that you can't actually conceive of what it means to have the World Trade Center collapse into its footprint, is this evidence that the world itself isn't real.
Not that something greater is going to come out of that, but that you're being shown just like Neo is being shown that he's living literally an illusion.
But he's not waking up to the monster world in the pods.
He's waking up into something that is indescribable.
If you were alive and cognizant in 1986, you likely remember where you were when the Challenger exploded.
Moments like that burn into your memory.
And likewise, I'm always amazed by people's stories of 9-11, like Matthew just shared and I didn't know, because of how strongly that day imprinted.
I was in the basement of the World Trade Center roughly an hour before the first plane hit.
I lived one path stop away at Exchange Place in Jersey City.
From the roof of my building, two blocks from the Hudson River, you had clear sight of the World Trade Center.
I'll post a photo in the show notes from the winter of 2001.
By the time the first plane hit, I was in a basement gym on 6th and 20th.
I noticed a few dudes rush out, but I finished my workout.
When I finally emerged on 6th Avenue and turned left to walk uptown, the first thing I noticed was that there were no cars on the street.
And then I saw all the people in the middle of the street staring downtown.
As I turned, a man nearby saw my confused gaze.
He told me a plane hit.
We could clearly see the smoldering building.
He was on a cell phone, a flip phone at the time, because 9-11 would have been a very different experience had everyone had a camera in their pocket.
He said something about an attack.
I watched for a few moments and then I walked uptown.
I didn't see either tower fall.
I was in the office of the magazine I edited at the time.
I was the only person who made it in.
And I didn't stay long.
Instead, I walked to 90th and 1st to stay with a woman I was dating, and there was no way for me to return to Jersey City that day.
After our initial expressions of confusion, we went into a very busy nearby restaurant for lunch.
And strangely, it seemed like a normal day six miles up the island, though that's how everyone was dealing with the mayhem.
The restaurant was especially important that day, as we were able to commune with one another, be in one another's presence.
Very different from this pandemic.
The next few months in New York City were actually quite tremendous.
Everyone was kind.
People made eye contact.
Sure, the army in the subways with machine guns was disconcerting, but also understandable.
There was a feeling of togetherness I had never felt in a big city, and I've lived in cities my entire adult life.
So I loved hearing about other people's experiences from that day.
But almost immediately after it happened, the conspiracy theories started.
The anti-Muslim nationalists trying to block a downtown mosque was bad enough.
But the truthers?
They got me.
And this is the wedge I always find myself in as an American.
The insistent rush to an extreme side of things.
So let's face it, the current administration is a bankrupt institution focused on maintaining power while looting our nation.
But there's never been a golden age for our government.
Jared Sexton breaks that down later during our conversation.
The Bush administration was bankrupt in its own way, but to claim that they were the engineers instead of opportunists misses the obvious.
That said, it's entirely possible to be critical of government, yet still love the country you live in.
But we don't play in that gray space anymore.
Vaccines work, and Big Pharma is a blade on our society.
Our healthcare system needs to be socialized.
Social media is one of the greatest utilities ever invented, and it's tearing our society apart.
The US government instigated the situation that led to 9-11 and they were blindsided because they got lazy and they probably thought a little bit too highly of themselves.
The problem is that Americans don't like to admit to our vulnerabilities.
That's the main point that Jared keeps coming back to in our interview.
The long-standing myth of exceptionalism.
Do you know what you sound like to someone from another country when you tell them that you are mandated by God to rule over the world as the greatest nation on the planet?
Well, you sound pretty religious, the exact type of evangelicalism that helped create this country, in fact.
Here's a game I play with some of my religious friends.
I ask them if, because I'm an atheist, I will not get access to the everlasting happy place they get to go to.
The more honest ones say yes, though some try to pivot and say that there's still time for me.
Some just punt the question entirely, and I don't really get mad about it.
I just like poking, because I want to hear what people have to say and I want them to know what they sound like when they say it.
But back to the present.
We just passed the anniversary of 9-11, and I saw those expectable truther posts, and right now, in this climate, at this time, I just felt disgust.
Anger no longer captures the feeling.
At least on 9-11 we had one another, but right now all we have is this screen and our small circles.
And that's hard.
I've personally been battling intermittent depression during this time.
Nothing overwhelming, but some days I just feel dry and empty by the end of the day.
I imagine it's happening to a lot of people, and it all comes back to this lack of social contact.
What filled me up after 9-11 was sharing a smile with a stranger on the street.
It always pulled me out of myself, and I'm someone who's prone to spending a lot of time locked in.
We don't have that now.
But we also have to remember humans are the most flexible and adaptable animal on the planet.
There is a matter of self-reliance and resilience that we need to discuss.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to discuss letting our guard down.
While listening to Matthew's interview with Sean Corn, I was inspired by how vulnerable she allowed herself to be.
She's aware that she doesn't know how to navigate this time, and she's courageous enough to admit it.
This is why the idea of American exceptionalism, this ingrained myth that we're America, we have it all figured out, needs to go.
Such a mindset, one that every American has been bred to believe for centuries, creates a kind of pressure that's hard to manage, and it's completely subconscious, which makes identifying it even more challenging.
One way you do manage it is by being mature enough to admit that you're vulnerable.
It softens the rough edges.
So while I come on to this podcast every week to discuss these topics, I will admit that I have no idea how any of this plays out.
But I do know we're at a juncture where history can be written in very disconcerting ways.
When I see these truthers and the anti-maskers and the lizard people and all this insane rhetoric trying to pass off as research, I lose my patience.
The social distance created by social media has allowed so many people to believe that they can speak their truth and not worry about the consequences, which just shows you how little they understand about the concept of karma.
Your actions and your words result in further actions and words, and you need to take responsibility for that.
I know a lot of people we interface with offline and online want unity.
I want that too.
But until we recognize the political reality of this moment, that foreign nations are instigating this division because they have their own interests in mind, and that a lot of the propaganda being spread is by our own government whose interest is to see this division continue, we're only going to continue to be dismayed by how many more people are indoctrinated into these conspiracy theories.
We're not meditating our way out of this one.
You know, there's a sentiment in the yoga world that the postures only work when they're at least slightly uncomfortable.
Because if you're not stressed a little bit, you don't grow.
Well, this moment we're living in right now is as uncomfortable as imaginable.
And falling back onto old habits does not meet the moment that we're in.
And again, I'll be honest, I'm not sure what does.
But I do know that doing the research is going to take a lot more than Instagram hashtags and prayer circles.
If you're in the yoga world, you know who Sean Korn is.
From her start in the Hell's Kitchen art scene in the 1990s, through training with all of the big and sometimes creepy names in the yoga world, to her pioneering work in attempting to integrate yoga and social justice activism, Shawn's career has really spanned and exemplified the arc of the global yoga movement.
In her latest book, Revolution of the Soul, she digs down into the tangle of trauma and trauma recovery and how that untangling can happen personally and politically.
Now last week she posted an anti-QAnon statement on her feeds.
It was Crowdsourced from a number of her colleagues and she posted it and she has the largest social media presence of the group that she's working with.
We'll share it because it blew up and you can read the comments but only if you have a lot of stamina.
So I sat down to talk with her about the origins of the statement and what she hopes will come of it.
Now this past Saturday you posted a statement against QAnon and it was co-written by you and wellness community leaders.
We'll link to it in the show notes.
Who were your collaborators on this and what have you all been seeing out there?
Well actually to be clear, I didn't actually write the statement.
I didn't add a single word.
I'm part of a group online that, like a private group of teachers and leaders that share ideas and information and concerns related to the upcoming election.
And of course, in those conversations, our concerns around QAnon, its alt-right commitments, commitments and the fact that it has seemed to infiltrate within the yoga/wellness communities has been something that has been obviously concerning us, interesting us, trying to figure out what is this intersection.
And so on this page, there's been a lot of back and forth in ideas.
So this statement was crafted amongst people within that group.
Agreed upon and then shared.
So, I didn't actually write it, but I stand behind it and I'm part of the group and part of that broader collaboration.
The reason why we're not being specific about who the authors were is really because of safety.
Right.
Some of the people who were participating in this don't have the time, interest, or bandwidth To want their names out there, so it was decided that this would just be a collaborative effort, and that anyone who posted it would really take ownership of its message.
And I can understand why, because now since I posted it, and since I've been, I guess I'm the most visible within those who have posted it, or rather I have the broadest reach, The feedback has been very intense.
The personal messages on my DMs have been threatening.
There's a lot going on.
So I actually understand and appreciate those who made the decision to keep this anonymous and to make this a more of a collective effort.
But I can't take credit for authorship.
I can only take credit for the statement that I put on my own page in the comments.
But I stand by the statement and I consider myself an energetic collaborator because of my willingness to post it.
Yeah, well, also energetic in the sense that, as you say, you have a large reach.
I think it's over 100,000 on Instagram, is that right?
Yeah.
So that's significant.
I think that's real collaboration.
Are you able to or willing to say anything more about the messages that you've received and measures you're taking to protect yourself?
I'm not new to this.
I post things all the time and I get negative feedback for years and years.
It's not that I'm immune to it, it's just that my skin is a little thicker and I'm pretty discerning.
I don't personalize a lot of it.
So there's a lot of the comments I can just kind of gloss over.
I'm just learning so much about the strategy behind QAnon and a lot of these people who wouldn't identify with QAnon, they're certainly followers of these conspiracies.
There is a language that's used And in different ways.
And right now, I'm seeing a language that feels deliberately dark, manipulative, veiled threats of my spiritual health and wellness, if you will.
If I was a Christian, I think that the language would be more akin to damning me for all of time.
Right.
It feels like that kind of thing.
There's also, I imagine, going to be like symbolic significance given to your reach and your presence as an influencer that, you know, as soon as you come forward in this arena, you're not just going to be a person, you're going to be representative of something.
And I'm wondering if you're getting that kind of feedback as well.
You mean in terms of if the Democrats are paying me?
Well, there's that.
Are you an agent of Mockingbird Media?
But also, it's just occurring to me now that you have kind of the public status that might draw the accusation of involvement in exactly what QAnon is trying to fight against.
Yes.
I'm definitely getting a lot of that.
A lot.
And I'm learning.
It's like, oh, I see.
That's a thing.
The accusation that I'm being paid or that there are parties that are funneling me information or are strategizing with me what I can and cannot post.
There's definitely been a lot of that.
It's all new and it's a little odd.
It's not particularly scary.
What I can say is that I felt an obligation to post this because I am seeing too many people within my community as well as colleagues that are using languaging that is clearly In direct alignment with QAnon.
Right.
And knowing what I know about QAnon, and knowing about their history, and that it is an alt-right conspiracy theorist, that it does have its history in white supremacy and racial terrorism,
The root of QAnon's messaging being that there is this cabal and that they're trying to save children from human sex trafficking.
There's so much in this languaging that's so absurd, that's laughable, if it wasn't so scary and dangerous that people are buying into it and manipulating it to speak to certain fears or needs within themselves.
So many of my colleagues were reaching out to me directly and using things like concern for me, wanting me to understand about this Great Awakening, wanting me to understand more about Big Pharma, and that there were this underground cabal, and that Trump was actually this light worker, and that he was being used and willing to take the hit for all of mankind to confront these dark forces.
Now, did some of these contacts come from people that, did it really surprise you?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, because at first I would be very polite in that, because these are long-term relationships.
Right.
And say things just like, you're kidding?
Or, you don't really believe this, do you?
And so finally I had to say, Please do not send me any more of this information.
I do not believe what you believe.
I am not comfortable with this dialogue at all.
This is dangerous.
This is misinformed.
This is manipulative, it's exploitative, and it's dangerous to the community.
Please, and I hate to say the word, do your research, because that's, you know, part of their catchphrase, but it's like, Do your research.
It doesn't take long going down the rabbit hole to see where these connections are.
And if you understand anything about cult mentality, of course there's going to be a threat of truth to what's being said.
And so if people are hungry for that truth, they're going to grab it.
And I understand that.
But I also could feel this Different thing happening where there was an investment to get me to their side.
Right.
To get me to understand and that was new.
The urgency, the panic, that frightened me a little bit and also these people are quite influential.
A lot of students have been reaching out to me about it and because I've been doing this for a long time and I do have the support of a broader community of Off The Mat and other people that I'm in relationship with, I would rather take a hit and have some of this conflict come my way rather than a new or younger teacher that might not have the experience or the community to back them taking those risks, either personally or professionally.
And so I felt that when I saw the statement, I was like, yeah, I can get behind this, but I did not expect it to get the response.
That's why I'm on with you now, because I felt an even more broader responsibility after the fact, because I saw how complex this is, how confused many people in the community are, and basically by me posting it in that way, I'm not much different from the messaging of QAnon in the way in which I'm posing my community to pay attention, do the research, beware.
I'm very well aware I'm doing a very similar action and yet at the same time I feel like I must Step out of the way and hope for the best.
Yeah, you know, I was gonna actually ask that part of this statement, you know, I've just got it here, it says, beware, stay in your body, use discernment, be skeptical of the real motives behind QAnon, and most importantly, stay in connection with your friends and family.
Like, with the exception of that last sentence, because we know that this movement is ripping communities and families apart, You know, that language is very much aligned with what you would hear from a QAnon supporter.
So it's a very tricky territory, and I'm wondering whether the choice within, internally, your group to be confrontational in that way actually acknowledges that, well, actually, this is an information war, a ground war, and we're going to invest in it.
I'm hoping it works in that way.
I know that within the group that I'm working with that there is going to be more information that's going to be coming out.
I will post whatever feels true for me and hope that people read it, check in with their bodies, do some of the work, but really look historically at what QAnon puts out and perhaps look historically at what someone like myself or members of the community put out.
I can't say I don't have an agenda.
I do have an agenda.
I am concerned about the health and the welfare And really the psychological resiliency of members of my family and my community.
I'm concerned about this election.
I'm concerned about continued racial terrorism.
I'm concerned about all this misinformation.
I'm concerned about people calling COVID a hoax.
Like, I do have an agenda.
I am aware I'm straddling that line and But I will try to navigate it as honestly as I can, with as much transparency as I can, but not shy away from delivering opposing information that I hope is helpful for the community not to be seduced by some of this manipulative languaging.
Like, for example, in doing my own research and going down this rabbit hole, I was led to a sight of a woman, young woman, maybe in her 20s.
Her Instagram is beautifully curated.
Beautifully.
There's clearly some thought and resources behind it.
The font, the tone.
She looks like any other wellness influencer.
Right.
And so my eye was immediately drawn to her content just because of its familiarity.
It resonated with my nervous system like, whoa, this might be nice.
And there's a post of like a beautiful, a beautiful picture of some food that she cooked.
And then there was a beautiful picture of her doing yoga.
And then there was a beautiful picture of her and her family running on the beach.
And then there was a beautifully crafted, well-fonted, like a series of slides.
Right.
That were pro-guns and then pro-life and then COVID's a hoax.
Right.
And it was all strategically set up that I leaned back and I thought, I'm not sure this person is real.
I'm not sure that this isn't, that there's not money behind this and that this isn't strategically curated to appeal to someone like myself who is attracted to this world.
Do you know it's a really interesting point because there's been a couple of research pieces that have been put out just over the past week or so, one by a scholar in Montreal who's studying what he calls pastel QAnon and I think there was an article in Mother Jones called The wellness influencers who are making QAnon look beautiful.
And neither of them proposed that there was manipulation or strategy behind that, but rather the influencers themselves were making their convictions aesthetically pleasing according to these standard performance standards of Instagram.
But that's a really interesting thought that you bring up, which is, If you really wanted to make this go viral, you'd figure out how to make it look as beautiful as, you know, influencer wellness on IG does.
It intrigued me.
Yeah.
Like, I leaned back and I just had that thought.
And I'm not paranoid by nature.
Like, I'm not suspicious by nature.
But something about it, I was like, this is bigger.
This is moneyed.
Yeah.
Well, I also pick up on what you're saying about you recognized it.
And this is where I had maybe a little bit of a difficult question for you, which is that it seems that the influencers are toxically mimicking spiritual and wellness influencers.
They position themselves as prophets, healers, shamans, interpreters of global events, and it's all in relation to poorly defined source texts and in a landscape of low critical thinking and high charisma and low accountability.
I think in a way, They're moving into media patterns that are already established by spirituality and wellness influencers that have made their mark over the last 10 years.
And so I'm wondering, where do wellness influencers go from here to distinguish themselves clearly from those who are using, you know, the beautiful ring lighting and the excellent composition and the gorgeous clothes and the hashtags for, you know, veggie drinks or whatever?
Yeah, Matthew, all these are amazing questions because I don't know the answer to that.
Like I had said to you earlier, I'm navigating this landscape in a very new way.
Before I posted, I've taken time To research and to explore and to really check in with myself about how I feel about what is happening, what I know about being in the spiritual community.
With a little charisma and some solid talking points, it can be very easy to manipulate people Especially those who suffer from low self-esteem or a feeling of not being in community.
It's that cult mentality.
As a leader in the community, I'm very aware of that, how easy it would be to manipulate people and how seductive it is.
And it's something that I personally could never do but I see of course happen all the time within the landscape that I'm a part of.
But I do recognize the language, the tone, the pitch that seduces people into feeling seen, valued, heard, and recognized.
And I'm watching it happen via QAnon, these curated sites, the languaging and the memes.
It feels deliberate.
I don't have a lot of experience In witnessing it in hashtags and in soundbites when there's not a real person on the other side of it.
That's very new, so my brain is having a hard time trying to adapt to some of the same strategies that one would use to manipulate someone into cult thinking.
Now, I might discover in the future that I'm very wrong about everything that I'm saying, but right now my instincts are really inviting me to explore this.
So, to answer your question, I don't know how we differentiate ourselves.
I don't know how we protect ourselves.
What I know for myself is that I will commit to using my common sense, my truth, and my platform to be very clear about where I stand and what I believe.
Try to post information that is responsible and that pushes back to some of these theories and invite the community into a conversation and I hope be able to hold the conversation in a way so that it doesn't get too out of control.
That's the best that I can do in the position I'm in.
As far as other Teachers, leaders, people, I really don't know yet how to differentiate ourselves.
I would just say do the work.
Check this out.
See where you stand individually.
Notice how all the connections goes back to Trump.
Many of it goes back to Trump and some of these ideologies.
And take a stand for what you believe in.
So even in my post, I was very clear in the way that I posted was, please don't tell me COVID is a hoax.
Not when almost 200,000 people have died because of the disease.
Please don't tell me that I'm not interested in eradicating sex trafficking.
So I keep telling the community, please don't tell me.
So I'm putting it back on myself, rather than saying to the community, you know, this is bullshit, don't believe in this.
It's more like, here's what I'm not going to believe in.
If you do have a charismatic impact, you're mobilizing that in a very personalized way.
And I think you're really getting to the core of this dilemma, which is that when influencers can influence people in the wrong way, how do you sniff it out?
Like, how do you see it?
I know I'm interviewing you, but two thoughts come to my mind and one is that like, if the pastel QAnon sort of body snatches a bunch of wellness aesthetics and spiritual language, it almost feels like one
technical response would be to consciously generate an entirely newly identifiable aesthetic you know like as identifiable as the Margaret Atwood thing with the with the red with the red robes and the white hats and stuff like that like it feels like the community needs to reassert its own appearance and its presence in the world and then the other thing is that like
Because so much of the aesthetics and the presentation of wellness slash QAnon is so confusing, the open-ended question is, you know, what does it really provide?
Like, are they going to be there when the shit hits the fan?
And are they really fostering, you know, relationship amongst community members?
And are they really providing support?
Because that's really the difference between performing something and coming through.
In response to that first part, what you're suggesting is this idea of a collective rebrand.
And in theory, yes, but when you're dealing with a lot of individuals who are trying to move into creating some of these brands and they may not be able to see what's happening themselves or not interested or invested, I just don't think that that's going to happen.
To your other thought though, There is truth to that.
Who is going to hold that space later on?
Although I'm sure that some of my colleagues, they're having that same conversation with their people.
They could be having a mirrored conversation to what you and I are having right now based on what they believe around anti-vaxxing and big pharma and the great awakening, thinking that we're all sheeps and that we've all drunk the Kool-Aid and that we're concerned about our own integrity.
I think that right now it's going to require individuals to take a stand and to be transparent and vulnerable in the face of this conversation.
And hopefully people like yourself and Derek and Julian who are who are organizing this inquiry in a way that brings it to the mainstream.
Because there's a lot I don't know and can't answer because I'm in the middle of it right now on a communal level.
But you are all bearing witness to the parameters and bringing in all different kinds of communicators And it's why I referenced you all in my own comment, because I think that people need to hear all these different voices right now, that it might help them to navigate the complexities of this.
My concern is it's also, for some, it's going to orient them towards QAnon when they weren't aware of it before.
Right.
That's another concern that I have, is elevating their visibility in their platform.
Right.
It's a huge conundrum, and the guest that we had on several episodes ago, Imran Ahmed, speaks directly to that about how
The weirdest thing about engagement on social media, you know, undertaking an empathy to try to steer somebody towards better evidence or towards, you know, less paranoia actually enhances the presence of the content in the eyes of the AI and makes, you know, QAnon actually more attractive to Facebook's robots and pushes it even further into suggestions and so on.
I think the other pickle that we seem to be in, and you know, when you have a large social media following, I don't envy you really because it must keep you up at night, that very question of, you know, am I going to spotlight this further?
And what do I do about disinformation comments?
Do I block people?
Do I ban people?
All of the things that you are probably wanting to work on as a bridge builder, carry this risk with them.
It's all new because, like right now, I was speaking with my dear friend Hala this morning about this, that as the comments have, at first the comments on Instagram, very different than the demographic on Facebook.
On Facebook, there's a lot of vitriol from the get-go and much less support, which I found very interesting.
On Instagram, it was different.
There was a lot of support right out from the gate, But as this is evolving, I'm now starting to see, and I don't yet know how it works, but legitimate QAnon sites are now coming into my site.
For sure.
They're using very specific language to agitate And the language is not always divisive.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it's not.
And I'm watching the exchange go back and forth as an opportunity for me right now to really listen and learn.
To watch how these conversations run, what the strategy behind these conversations are, and then to go to the links myself just to see who are these people?
What are they doing?
And there are a couple that I had to block.
Only because, like I said, there was some veil threat in it, and that's just something that I had to make a decision for me.
Like, I'm not dealing with that.
I'm not going to navigate that, nor am I going to support that kind of languaging on a public site, because then it says I validate it.
No, those people go.
You know what I love about hearing you describe this is that I don't think a lot of people have insight into what it's like to manage such a large platform and following.
And what it really shows me is that, first of all, there's never any handbook for it.
Except for, you know, probably that whole part of the industry that is teaching people how to expand their reach and win more clicks and stuff like that.
So there's all of that.
I see folks in your position as growing up in a landscape in which or professionalizing in a landscape in which social media is just continually new and it feels like you can fall back on okay well this is my personal authenticity and my responsibility I'm going to say what's true for me and I'm going to watch and learn from this conversation all reasonable things for an adult to do and at the same time the larger the platform gets the more you become almost a public official
Right?
Where you've got to make, you've got to start making decisions, but nobody's going to tell you when or how about safety, about whether or not you're actually, whether the people who infiltrate your threads are drawing people to them.
And like, who's going to give you advice on that?
It's, it's, it's, it feels like you're on your own.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
I very much on my own that way.
And I'm sure anyone who uses their platform in the way that I often do, they've figured out how to navigate.
So again, I'm not new to it.
I'm just new to this rhetoric.
Right, right.
So it's just a different language that I'm trying to orient myself to, because sometimes the language, the first three sentences will sound like they are actually in support of what I'm talking about, and then the zinger comes.
And I see like, oh, this is how this works.
In the past, I often let my community engage, and I try not to interfere with the engagement, because I like to think that there's a lot of adults on there that are really reasonable, and that they kind of take care of each other.
Because this is newer for me, and there's some more complexities in this, and also, People are on edge.
They're hyper-vigilant.
There's a lot going on.
People are triggered in ways perhaps they wouldn't have been a year ago.
My responsibility is also a little heightened to watch out for using this space as a way to finally say that big fuck you that's been sitting in their gut.
That might not really Be relevant to that particular moment.
Right.
But real for them nonetheless.
So I have been watching with a little bit more of a discerning eye just to check the temperature of the dialogue, yet at the same time wanting the dialogue to be there and only interfering if I need to.
And I have had to a couple of times go in and post a comment.
But I've been pretty fortunate on my site that it's That people take care of each other.
But this is different in that I almost feel like there are people watching my page.
Figuring out the tone to use in order to sway people to a different point of view.
Like, I'm watching an exchange where it starts off a little aggressive, then it starts to move into, oh, I hear when you say dot, dot, dot.
I didn't think of it that way, dot, dot.
Thank you for giving me that information.
Perhaps you'd be interested in this.
And I'm like, holy shit, they're using like non-violent communication as a way.
As a way of recruiting, right.
Wow.
Wow.
So, so wow.
Okay.
So in real time, you watch your threads become this recruitment battleground.
I'm in the process of a deep investigation and observation.
I am not solid in everything I'm saying to you.
I'm saying out loud really for the first time, but I am giving you insight into the back end of this somewhat like that.
I'm not just posting and being like, okay, everyone, you know, have fun with that.
I'm going to go fluff up my hair.
But I'm also trying to bear witness to how this works on the other side and my role in navigating it, managing it without manipulating it.
I'm fascinated by that because this is something that I've had to do now for years.
But in different contexts.
No, it's very, very acute.
It's very escalated.
And there's a lot on the line.
You know, one more question.
What are your hopes for the many friendships that are being, your friendships that are being stressed by this?
You talked about, you know, fellow teachers sending you information and you having to give boundaries.
Do you think repairs will happen?
I hope so.
I don't, I really don't know yet where all this goes.
It's very, this is very scary because of how polarized it is.
I'm as rigid in my convictions as they are.
Right.
And I am certain that their interpretation of me is similar to my interpretation of them.
I don't know if repair can happen unless one of us acquiesces our point of view and surrenders to the other.
That's what it feels like right now and I've never really experienced that.
So I really, I don't know.
Am I hopeful?
I mean, Matthew, not to get all woo-woo, but I have to always hold in my heart that all of us are learning and growing and maturing right now in a really big way, and we're being pushed to our edges, and we're being forced to think more critically and to expand our awareness of what community means, what wellness means, what yoga means, and that there is not just one
One singular attitude that lives within these communities that there is an eruption that perhaps was essential and necessary.
Now believe me, I'm not excusing any of this behavior, but I do recognize that a lot of us within the wellness world have been able to lean back on our resources, our privilege, our identity, and the structure hasn't been shaken enough for us to have to think more critically.
The structure is being shaken.
I can't help that ultimately it is a good thing It's also a destructive thing, a hurtful thing, and I do believe that there will be harm caused and relationships shattered as a result.
But big picture, I can't speak for the community, I can speak for myself, that I will grow and learn and mature as a result of this time, and I hope that I am More compassionate.
I get concerned that I might become more cynical, but it's something that I will confront and face if that also happens.
I do believe, still and always, that our community is one that does, and I hate to, I don't want to use the word community, but there are leaders within the community that are curious and open-minded And are willing to do this work and to peel back some of this bullshit to find out what is the core of our humanity and where does it intersect?
And what are the fears that people are aligning to right now and why?
And how do we address the root of those fears that can bring us into some kind of communion?
I will always stand on the side of hope.
I will always stand on the side of compassion.
Yet, I also won't use the language of hope and compassion to mask the dysfunction that does exist at this time that needs to be addressed.
And I think that if we really look at the beliefs of the people at QAnon, it comes down to fear.
And if you pull back the fear, it's grief.
And that's the one thing I think all of us can share right now, is that we are grieving.
We are deeply grieving.
That we are grieving an unimaginable loss.
That if maybe that can get excavated, that we can begin a shared conversation coming from that place.
But it's all yet to be seen.
But I will, I have to remain hopeful just because I wouldn't want to live a life without that as its foundation.
Thanks so much, Shawn.
Thank you, Matthew.
I really do appreciate this and I applaud the work that you and Julian and Derek are doing in relationship to conspirituality.
I think it's important and I hope that you continue to bring in really diverse speakers who would be willing to explore some of this particular rhetoric at this time because Too much is dependent upon navigating these truths and these manipulations.
And I think the more people that can have a place where there is a resource where they can make these decisions for themselves is going to be useful.
So I appreciate the way in which you all are laying out information at this time.
Jerry D. Sexton is an American author and political commentator, as well as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University.
His new book is American Rule, How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People.
He's very active on Twitter, at jysexton, and I highly recommend following him.
He also does livestream whiskey YouTube Q&As, which I also recommend.
Both whiskey and listening to him discuss American history, the American present, and how conspiracy theories play into all of this.
As you'll hear during our conversation, America was founded on a conspiracy theory of sorts, the myth of American exceptionalism.
And as he says during our talk, you cannot understand America if you aren't aware of its history of conspiracies.
There's a lot of talk in the wellness world about karma, which I mentioned earlier during the This Week in Conspirituality, and we often treat it as some sort of mystical force.
But I want to remind everyone that the word in its most literal translation simply means action, with the implication being that one action sets off a chain of events that influences further actions.
There's nothing metaphysical or mystical about this process.
But if you want to understand how QAnon has infiltrated the communities that it has, you have to look back at past actions in this country to recognize how we've been set up to be receptive to it.
Okay, enough of that.
Jared will explain in more detail.
After reading Howard Zinn in college, I had always wondered why that book wasn't assigned in high school.
And I didn't even, it wasn't assigned to me in college.
I had to go out and buy it and learn about it to really understand American history and who we are as a people.
And I honestly feel like moving forward, your book should be in public school curriculum.
As a big picture, I want to kind of start off big picture and then hone in.
You write that American rule is the story of how a myth constructed an empire and led to its downfall.
What is that myth?
Well, first of all, thank you.
That means a lot.
I felt the same way about a people's history of the United States.
I have to tell you that I found it at a really important moment in my life.
When I first read it was back in 2003 in the lead up to the Iraq War, and I felt very much orphaned at that time.
You know what I mean?
I felt very much like there was something There was something wrong about the way that the country was working and the fact that we were running headlong into this obviously immoral and illegal war.
And that book created a foundation of understanding for me that I'm still trying to understand for myself.
American rule is part of that.
And what I eventually came to understand is, and you have to think, I was covering the election in 2016.
And I've studied politics and I've studied history for years and years and years.
And the election in 2016 and the emergence of Donald Trump spoke to me that there was something about America that I didn't understand.
That there was some sort of facet to our reality that didn't work the way that I had thought that it did, like months before this whole thing became a thing.
And back in 2016, I was warning a lot of people because I was going into these Trump rallies and, you know, talking to the people there and hearing what they had to say and, you know, a lot of anti-democratic things, a lot of violent things, a lot of racist things that they were talking about.
And I realized afterward that I needed to go back to the very beginning of this subject And sort of unwind American history and sort of relearn it for myself to understand, like, where did it go wrong?
And what I ended up finding out was that it's not that something went wrong, necessarily.
It's that the way this country has worked from the very beginning is completely the opposite of what I thought.
And the reason it's the opposite of what I thought is because I and a lot of people that I know and a lot of Americans were raised up within this mythology of American exceptionalism.
This idea that America is ordained by some sort of, whether you want to believe it's like a Christian god or some sort of almighty omnipotent, you know, being, or even the universe, even if we're just carrying out the will of the universe.
That myth was used from the very beginning in this country to paper over a lot of terrible mistakes, terrible treatment, and manipulations that of course ran counter to our espoused principles.
So what I discovered in this work was that from the very, very beginning, this was a weaponized mythology, and that it has continually been used and refined and focused in order to exacerbate profit and power of the already wealthy and powerful.
You opened the book by writing that you were part of the cult of the Shining City, which was white identity evangelicalism rooted in the myth of American exceptionalism.
And you note that this identity has all but broken our politics.
So when did you first recognize that you were raised in a cult?
Well, so the whole idea, when I call it the Cult of the Shining City, I just want people to understand that this is not a group that is like, we are the Cult of the Shining City.
This is a certain type of white identity evangelicalism that is taking control of the American right.
And I grew up in it and, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, the allegory of like Plato's cave.
You're in a cave, you don't know you're in a cave.
You have absolutely no idea that the reality that you've been raised up in and has formed your worldview, there's something wrong with it, right?
There's something off because it's the only thing that you've ever known.
I felt very weird about my evangelical community and teachings at a very, very young age.
They were steeped in not just very, very quiet, barely papered over racism, but constant conspiracy theories.
And not just like an Alex Jones type of conspiracy theories, although for sure that was part of it, but also supernatural conspiracy theories.
idea that there were enemies of America who happened to be in league with Satan and things like that.
I grew up with that thinking that that was reality.
And I eventually left the church and that community behind.
And it wasn't until I started doing research for American rule that I started to understand exactly why that reality was the way that it was.
And that's because so much of American evangelicalism is rooted in the Christianity of the Confederacy, which is not Basically, when we talk about the Civil War, we talk about how great the generals were.
How great their troop movements were.
And the reason is because to look at the Confederate States of America and what it was and what it actually embodied, is a damning indictment of American culture, American religion, and American history and society.
So it wasn't until I actually started working on this book that I actually was able to put two and two together and understand why I was so uncomfortable with the way that I was raised, and why I was so uncomfortable with my place in the world back then.
Talking about the founding myth, I want to start there.
You mentioned conspiracy theories, which is really my focus right now, especially I want to build into QAnon and where we are now.
I tell you, you cannot understand modern America without understanding conspiracy theories.
You just can't.
Yeah.
Also, my parallel work life is in fitness, and I've worked as a fitness instructor for a long time.
I always try to get across in my writings on health and fitness that Our habits today, you can't really understand how we are, what we are, without looking at evolutionary biology and the conditions that used to exist that created us as an animal.
And I feel the same way about society, without understanding history and our place in it.
And what you write about is that I mean, from day one, James Madison's goal was to protect wealthy landowners, for example.
And you talk about how the Founding Fathers were extremely elitist.
Their view was not democracy for all, it was only for a certain amount of people.
And it makes me wonder...
I know this will be a contentious question in some ways, but do you think there should be a basic literacy test for voting or something we have to, like a driver's license, that we need to at least understand something before we can get to the ballot box?
Well, so the problem with that is anytime you want to talk about like a literacy test or some sort of information test, obviously the first thing that ends up happening is it's used as a weapon against, you know, vulnerable populations.
Yes.
What I would say is this.
I would say that not only is our educational system woefully underfunded, but it has been under constant Constant attack for generations, right?
So what I would argue is this.
I would argue that, for instance, you brought up the framing of the Constitution.
I thought I understood it.
I had no clue, right?
I wrote about it in the book.
I was like, This sounds so ignorant now that I've written this book.
I didn't understand that there was so much time in between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
I didn't understand the events that led up to the Constitution.
I didn't understand that James Madison did not have authority to write a Constitution.
And many people considered it a coup, and he even admitted at some point, he was like, yeah, it's a coup, it's a coup, but it's a good coup, which is just mind-blowing.
And you know, it's funny, You brought up the elitism of the Founding Fathers.
I had never even thought about reading James Madison's notes about the Constitutional Convention.
And they're there!
I mean, you can go on Amazon or Bookshop or whatever today and go order it, and what you find is just a verbatim readout of how elitist and how racist the Founding Fathers actually were, and how they created this system because they didn't trust common people.
Right, because they thought the common people would totally ruin the country, and the only people who should really have any power were white, wealthy, and powerful men.
So one of the things that I would say is, I think instead of sort of something at the ballot box, what I would say is that one of the main issues that we need to have right now, besides, of course, stemming off conspiracy theories and the rise of fascism, is that we have to start fighting a battle to not just reinvigorate education, is that we have to start fighting a battle to not just reinvigorate education, but to save education from these people who have used it as a
I mean, there's absolutely no reason why we don't, as Americans, understand how the country was founded, except for the fact that we're hiding something that was unseemly and was a basis of control.
And I think we have to look at it through that lens, which is, man, we have so many battles that have to be fought right now to even try and get this country on the right track.
And one of the big ones has to be how we deal with our history and how we deal with education.
So I would hope that we would be able to save something through education and a lot of the other problems downstream would start to get better as a result of that.
One of the things we talked about last week on our podcast was the fact that a lot of environmentally-minded wellness people should be celebrating the fact that carbon emissions are down due to lockdown because they had created this platform of saving the earth, and yet they're anti-mask, they're anti-the COVID is a hoax, all of these things.
And it's like, It's like the message was good until it impinged upon their daily life.
And I also think about Bill Maher on Friday had said in a show, he had pointed to a study where he said that something like 80% of American adults now have a newfound appreciation for teachers.
Because now they have to play the role of teacher as well as everything else going on.
And I wonder if something like this could actually help education along and your view on that.
Well, I'm glad you brought that up in terms of that community because weirdly enough, I didn't expect to talk about this today, but I've been researching a lot about how UNO has made these inroads in really unexpected places.
You know, and like, fitness communities is one of them, and like, you know, living spheres and like, you know, sort of alternative thought or new age thinking spheres.
Like, there's all these weird communities that it's starting to like, seep into.
And I think one of the reasons, and this goes back to the idea of the teacher thing, so one of the reasons I wrote American Rule in the first place, because there was a moment when I started writing it where I was like, this thing's too big, I don't really know what to do with this.
I actually had to sit with it for a while and realize I sort of had to roll back my own identity and my own place in this country and start to understand that so many of the things that I thought about my identity and the things that I believed were based on faulty premises, right?
So one of the reasons I think that conspiracy theories are making these inroads is because the myth of American exceptionalism that I'm trying to deconstruct, it creates a dichotomy, right?
It creates a situation where, okay, so if America is this special nation, if there's something inherently special about America, well then how are we failing right now?
Right?
How are we faltering as a country?
And by the way, the coronavirus has just totally brought to the surface so many American problems that we could ignore.
Do you know what I mean?
I'm not even just talking about inequality and race.
I'm talking about our healthcare system.
I'm talking about our infrastructure.
I'm talking about our shared sense of reality, if there ever was one, right?
So all of a sudden, it creates this vacuum, which is, okay, America is a special nation.
Well, why is it faltering?
Within the myth of American exceptionalism, there's only one solution, which is, well, we're being sabotaged from beyond and within, right?
There's something that is happening right now.
There's an attack on us, and people are attacking us.
And by the way, to borrow something from the Bush years, they're attacking us because they love our freedom, which is just an incredible lie, right?
But when you actually start looking at history, what you start finding out is that conspiracy theories, particularly nationalistic conspiracy theories, are what happen when a country's mythology starts to wane a little bit, right?
When all of a sudden this country that's supposed to be very, very powerful starts to decline.
And so what you end up finding Is that we have to step outside of the paradigm of exceptionalism, and when we do, there are so many more explanations for why things have happened, like, that are based on fact, that they're based on, like, real events and actual reality, right?
The alternative is to stay steeped in that reality and have no other choice besides to start embracing things like the deep state or QAnon or all of those things.
So, I completely agree.
I On top of the fact that we don't appreciate teachers and we don't pay them and we constantly attack them because they hold keys to dismantling a system of mythology and civic religion, right?
Now we have to listen to them.
We have to start listening to experts and people who understand this stuff and stop rejecting them because they happen to rub up against the idea of exceptionalism.
And I think that's exactly true.
I think the teachers are the heroes that we need right now.
And the fact that they have been under attack for so long should tell you everything you need to know about what powerful people think is dangerous to their power.
I always think about the time of American anti-intellectualism in the 60s where it started, but you can trace it throughout our founding and fine anti-intellectualist movements.
But you write specifically about our fascination with pseudoscience, pointing to eugenics and the mound builders, for example, as an example of times in the past where we've just gone off the rails.
So as crazy as QAnon is right now, there has been plenty of precedent for it.
Can I explain the mound builder thing real fast?
It is one of the craziest things I've ever come across in my research.
Listen, there were a few moments in this book where I had to walk away from it, like go for like a long walk in the neighborhood, and the mound builder thing was one of them.
So, you know, we have Andrew Jackson, who's a total genocidal madman, right?
And Andrew Jackson is really interested in taking Native American land, because there's a lot of money to be made, there's a lot of territory to be distributed, right?
So it's all about getting rid of them, so like, you know, his Wealthy Southern base can get hold of that land, right?
So, suddenly him and all of the other white supremacists in the country start believing in this myth of the mound builders, which has been completely debunked.
And by the way, the first debunker of that was Thomas Jefferson, which is kind of funny if you think about it.
And this whole idea is that there were these structures in North America Which were built by ancient Native American people.
But white people, like, were so elitist that they were like, oh, there's no way Native people built these.
Obviously, there were white people in America before them, and they killed them and slaughtered them.
And because they killed them and slaughtered them, this fictional, mythical, like, white race, then that meant that anything we did to them, including genocide and systematic oppression and destruction, was obviously Okay, right?
Which is the conspiracy theory mindset.
The entire idea behind this, and it's been from the very beginning, is, you know what?
These other people, if we give them a chance, and tell me if this sounds familiar in 2020 AD, right?
If we give them a chance, they'll hurt us, right?
They are conspiring to hurt us, and so I tell you what, we need to hurt them first.
And that is always what leads to fascistic behavior, is this mindset that's like, no, they are coming for us, and so we have to go for them first.
So the Mountain Builder, again, I kind of went colorblind for a couple days and just walked around in a haze.
I was like, I cannot... He mentioned it in the State of the Union, Derek!
Like, I was so shocked it showed up in the State of the Union!
It would be interesting matching that against our last State of the Union.
Well, and that's one thing, I mean, and this is, again, the importance of history, because history is long, our memories are short, and we have to understand, like, there's so many repetitions you bring out in this book that you're seeing where it originated from.
For example, you brought up Andrew Jackson there, and he completely disregarded a Supreme Court ruling for the Cherokee Nation for recognizing them, and then just plowed ahead with a genocide, as you just mentioned.
But he remains on our $20 bill.
He was supposed to be off this year, but he's not.
And I do wonder, what kind of means or methods do we need to actually, in this fractured environment right now, actually teach people history?
Do you see a light at the end of this road for that?
Well, okay, so there's good news and there's bad news.
The bad news first and foremost is, I hate to bring this down on a Sunday afternoon, or on a sunny afternoon, I should say, we are on the brink of total sectarian violence and civil war.
We just are.
I mean, if you actually look back at how the civil war occurred, the conditions are pretty similar, right?
I talk about that in American Rule, this idea of the mythology of us versus them and its constant sectarian warfare.
The good news is this, and I think this is the hope at the end of the day.
The truth is, is that mythology that we're talking about, that weaponized history, yes, does it play upon people's worst instincts?
Does it play upon things like tribalism and polarization?
Absolutely, it does.
And there's a deep evolutionary part of us that is very susceptible to this stuff, right?
But here's the trick, when you actually start casting light on it, and by the way, we're not talking about Democrat, Republican, left, right, red, blue, any of these made up social constructs, right?
What we're actually talking about is the use of power and oppression.
If you look at it and you're not trying to vote on a president or something like that, you suddenly realize that this weaponized history is meant to divide us in order to keep us from having more power and more wealth and more influence.
It's actually used as a political cudgel.
And the problem is that even the people who are holding onto it now the most, particularly supporters of Donald Trump, He's feeding them weaponized nostalgia, right?
This old mythology.
He's saying you do not need to examine the truth, right?
This old myth is completely fine.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's perfect.
Everyone after it, of course, is part of a conspiracy.
Those people are going to suffer because they don't want to deny that it's mythology, right?
They actually are going to make less money.
They're going to have less influence over politics.
Their towns are going to continue to fall in disrepair.
Everybody stands to benefit by disabusing themselves of these lies and these myths.
That's the hope.
is if we can actually move beyond them, maybe we can find a place where we can find some solidarity or at least the beginning of a shared reality that looks like an actual reality, and we can start to actually fight back against this stuff.
But that's the good news, is the truth is actually bipartisan.
What does a civil war look like in our era?
It would probably be an asymmetrical sort of a situation that looks a lot like what we have now, which would be a cycle of violence, Um, you know, all you have to imagine is the knob turned up a couple of degrees.
Like we've already seen the American right sort of embrace, well not sort of embrace, they've embraced a vigilante in the street who's, you know, killed two people, maimed another.
Um, it would be a cycle of violence like going into Portland and carrying out an extra legal killing of a, you know, a member of so-called Antifa.
It would turn into a pretty chaotic situation.
I think that we, unfortunately, because of our weaponized history, the only thing that we can really imagine is like two big giant armies gathering out in a clearing somewhere with drums and flags and bugles or whatever.
But what it would actually look like more is sort of an asymmetrical escalation between a lot of different people.
You would probably see parts of America start to drift away from one another.
You would see autonomous zones.
You would see probably a heightening of rhetoric that would even make what we see right now, make it seem almost quaint.
And it's very fascistic and murderous right now, but it would be turned up.
One thing you bring about in the book at a number of points is eugenics and the fact that America was really what gave Hitler a lot of his ideas.
I mean, the Philip Roth series in the book did that well recently, but you really nailed down specific instances where Hitler was influenced by this ideology.
And I wonder, a friend just told me this, so I have to fact check before, but he said that Trump is hiring lawyers right now, getting ready to contest the election on all 50 states, which totally sounds, of course, but I will make sure that's true.
But we know we're entering, like, I feel like we've just had an appetizer in 2020 for what's about to happen.
If he does get a second term, do you think that anything is off the table in terms of sorts of oppression on specific peoples in this country?
Well, I'll go ahead and I'll start with the link between America and the Third Reich, which is something that I assume you probably didn't learn about this in the classroom.
I didn't learn about this in the classroom because, of course, the weaponized mythology is that America went into World War II and we were the good guys and we knocked fascism out and it went away and that was the end of it.
The truth is that America and Germany were caught up in something called the Romantic Period in the 19th century.
It also has a lot to do with, of course, the genocide of the Native American people, Manifest Destiny, which we were always taught was about settlers going out and conquering the West, right?
Well, no.
It was about white people conquering a continent.
And the people at the time said as much.
It was about white supremacy taking over the country.
Well, Germany had its own movement of that as well.
So, we were linked philosophically through the Romantic movement, which was all about sort of the exaltation of ethnic groups, right?
And this goes back to the medieval time period, where after the fall of Rome, you know, you have all these ethnic groups trying to start countries and start up their own culture.
Well, eventually, when you get into the 20th century, I mean, our eugenics program was standard.
I mean, they took our laws, took them over to Germany, they took a bunch of eugenics experts from America over to Germany, they helped Germany set up their own eugenics programs, and they were welcomed like heroes.
They were given medals, they were given banquets, you know, they met with all of the major Nazi leaders.
Then on top of it, this idea of white supremacy being under attack, which is the underpinnings of fascism, That came mostly from American writers and thinkers who not only were bestsellers in America, but they advised presidents, they advised Congress, and then they would go over to Germany and they would be treated like heroes and given, you know, banquets and meet with Hitler and all these people.
So we, and by the way, the Philip Rock thing was really important because it brought up the fact that America had a burgeoning fascistic movement.
Until Pearl Harbor.
There were a lot of fascist groups in this country, including American Nazis.
And we have an American hero, Charles Lindbergh, who's remembered for his feats of heroism.
But he was published in, what was it?
Weekly.
No, man, it was like one of those things that my grandma used to get.
I'll think about it in a second.
It was like one of those little books.
Reader's Digest!
That's what it was.
So he was even published in Reader's Digest saying, we need to form an alliance with Hitler to save the white race from hordes of people of color or whatever.
Well, we've thrown that away.
We don't pay attention to it anymore.
And so as a result, we think that fascism is a purely like, uh, you know, aberration of 20th century Western Europe, right?
It's something that we couldn't possibly have here.
Here's the problem that we have.
I don't even know that Donald Trump could explain to you what fascism is.
I think he, I think if you asked him the question, what is fascism?
Like he would say something about Germany or whatever.
He's intuitively an authoritarian, and the reason that he's an authoritarian is because he is combined of a lot of different traits.
So like on one thing, he is narcissistic in his worldview, and if you don't agree with him, he will make you agree with him based on force, or he will eliminate you, right?
Those are things that he intuitively does.
And they run across, these authoritarians, they run across democratic institutions and they find where they're weakest.
I always like to tell people it's like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, right?
There's like the electrified fence and they try and find where the electricity isn't.
And when they find holes, they burst through it.
And that's the problem, is that American democratic institutions have been whittled away for decades.
decades now, intentionally.
And it's been done for power and profit.
And now Donald Trump is just knocking those fences over left and right.
So I always tell people, I don't know that Donald Trump would necessarily want to be a dictator.
I don't think he wakes up in the morning and is like, this is the plan, but he naturally does it.
And he's surrounded by people who see the advantage of having a person like that in power that they can form alliances with.
So what can happen in a second term, particularly if he steals an election, if he doesn't pay attention to what the results are, The big call this morning before we got on here is there's a bunch of really, really wild-eyed conservatives calling for the Insurrection Act to be used on Election Day, which I've been trying to warn people that there's a real possibility we're going to see paramilitary groups at the polls.
There's a possibility we might see federal troops in certain places.
I mean, everything is on the board.
And by the way, I know everyone's like, oh my God, this is America, it can't happen here.
It happens a lot of places, and it can happen here.
But if he gets another term, there's very little to believe that things won't be off the table.
And I will throw this out there, and again, not to get too dark here, but it's true.
We have a crisis right now, particularly on the West Coast, where climate change has just wreaked unbelievable havoc.
I want people to think about how we've treated immigrants and refugees on the border of America, right?
We put them in cages, we've separated them, we treated them with great cruelty.
We've done, and intentional cruelty, by the way.
It was a strategy to say, if you come to America, quote-unquote, illegally, we will harm you, right?
I want you to imagine, after seeing that, what will happen if more climate catastrophes occur, and they will, then if more climate catastrophes occur, then why would you believe that things wouldn't get worse?
Why would we treat these people with human dignity?
Why would we treat them with kindness?
Why would we welcome them?
So we need to understand that when we're voting in November, we're also voting for what happens post-2020.
We're voting for what happens, you know, I hear you.
My wife and I have been coughing all week.
I mean, we're in Los Angeles, so we're not even that close to the fires, but the smog here is the worst it's been in 30 years because of that, and it's been affecting our health here, so I can only imagine.
directly by what we do in this election. - I hear you, my wife and I have been coughing all week.
I mean, we're in Los Angeles, so we're not even that close to the fires, but the smog here is the worst it's been in 30 years because of that, and it's been affecting our health here.
So I can only imagine.
And the fact that we don't band together, This episode of Conspirituality, the podcast, will be also partly talking about 9-11.
I was in one of the towers less than an hour before a plane hit.
I was there that day.
I mean, I'm from New Jersey and I lived in New York.
And the one thing I always will remember was for those couple of months in New York, Something you don't do in New York, which is you look at everyone in the eye and you say hello during the course of your day.
That lasted for months.
But what was so fascinating was All of the conspiratorial thinking was predominantly from people who weren't there and didn't live there.
And there are two things that I picked out from your book that are very current, but they have older roots, which is former New York Senator Roscoe Conkling in 1882 saying corporations are people.
And then in 1893, this blew my mind, the fact that J.P.
Morgan loaned the U.S.
government $65 million or else the country would have went under.
And the question I'm getting at here is, is there a possibility that as a nation we band together to understand that the vested interests are the real problem, and that all of us, the 99%, however you want to phrase it, are really the ones suffering, and why aren't we putting our focus and efforts at what the real problem is?
Well, so, let's go back to history, right?
So, I was raised by... By the way, real fast, I'm so glad that you weren't there.
I'm so glad that you're here talking with me today.
That makes me very happy that you are, so that's good.
I was raised by survivors of the Great Depression.
Right.
I was raised by grandparents who, you know, had, I mean, my grandmother was thrown out of the same house like three times in one day.
They barely ate, you know, they were emaciated for, you know, months at a time.
And even that, they taught me about the Great Depression, they taught me about American politics and American society around the Great Depression.
But even they didn't prepare me to understand that these market crashes were a pretty semi-regular occurrence.
If you actually look at the American stock market, it just accelerates and accelerates and accelerates, and then self-implodes.
And then all of a sudden, every American is just like, what the hell?
We're in trouble here, right?
And it has a really negative effect on your life.
I mean, not only does it cost you your job, it actually takes years off your life.
It worsens your ability to live your life.
It leads to unbelievable social suffering, all these things.
The fact that that isn't something that we study, that our stock market and our economy are inherently not just rigged against us, but that they are constructed to not be stable, right?
This entire system is constructed to sort of like explode like a bomb and then you pick up the pieces afterwards and you do it again.
It's these boom and bust periods.
The fact that we're not taught that is a major problem, right?
That the cycles of American history show us it's, you know, what's the old thing?
It's like history rhymes, right?
If you want to understand America in 2020, you have to understand the Gilded Age.
You have to understand that all of these, you know, so-called robber barons, who, by the way, have been held up for years and years as heroes and titans of American industry, Well, you need to understand that these people not only controlled monopolies, they monopolized American politics.
They bought and sold politicians left and right and in the open.
And as a Didn't serve the American people.
And do you know what happened to the American people?
They lived in squalor.
It was like, these people literally, and this is a really sad thing, but it's true.
We don't have child labor now in America.
We don't necessarily have people in tenement houses or whatever.
And by the way, some places we do.
We have people squatting in old derelict hotels and stuff, right?
Those same companies are doing it to other people, right?
Where they have child labor, they have slave labor, they have sweatshops, they have all this stuff.
So what we need to understand from the Robert Barrett age is that the only reason that they don't have all those things here right now is because they haven't got there yet, right?
They're not going to stop it, and they're exploiting people over here who are much, much cheaper, and they're going to drive down labor and all this stuff.
When we start actually piecing that stuff together, That's why that's happening.
And when we can start, you know, connecting those dots, we actually understand this is the important thing.
To understand where we are and where we're going, we have to understand where we've been.
But that antiseptic, weaponized history that I was talking about keeps us from doing that.
It keeps us in that cave that I was talking about.
And it keeps us guessing at why things could possibly happen.
And that's where these conspiracy theories show up.
They come into the vacuum of real information and all of a sudden we start wondering why people do the things they do and why this system is rigged against us.
And the only thing we have is, you know, superstition, you know, paranoia.
But if we have actual information, we can arm ourselves with that and we can start to make a difference.
My wife came home from the co-op yesterday.
She occasionally brings home a new soda she's trying.
I don't really drink soda.
But it was called Lenin Aid.
L-E-N-I-N.
And it's by a Russian company who's using their platform as this lemonade manufacturer.
And, you know, Lenin's not Stalin, but he has a pretty sordid history.
And I'm like, what if you saw Hitler Aid in the Shelf's there.
And again, it brings up that distance question.
And I feel like the way that, you know, the Washington Post is what track 22,000 lies that Trump is.
It's just we've come to expect that at this point.
So you see something and now it's like, yeah, what else do you expect?
How how do we regain a sense of empathy?
Do we have any historical precedent for coming out of this cult in any capacity?
Well, I'm really glad, actually, that you brought up the Soviet Union, because one thing Not understanding the Cold War through a better lens, right?
So, we like to hold up in our mythology as history that we won the Cold War and, you know, we vanquished this enemy.
No, we dealt each other mortal blows.
It just so happens that the Soviet Union went down and we're still bleeding internally, right?
Like, we're sort of staggering away from the Cold War.
But if you actually look at what happened in the Soviet Union, it actually reflects a lot of what's happening in America right now.
They became, as a people and a culture, incredibly depressed and incredibly oppressed, right?
And they reached a point where they knew that the Communist Party and that their leaders and officials were lying to them.
They knew it.
They were incredibly aware that they were being We met with a big shrug.
What do you do about it, right?
And eventually that apathy and powerlessness breeds more apathy and powerlessness.
I keep trying to tell people, so like for instance, one of the more frustrating things in the past couple of weeks was when it came out that Bob Woodward had Trump on tape saying that he knew the coronavirus was deadly, and Woodward sat on it for seven months.
Right, as more and more Americans died and as Trump constantly lied and completely flooded the, you know, the zone with all this misinformation and disinformation.
And I was like, okay, listen, would it have helped?
I don't know, but you have an ethical obligation to try.
And everyone was like, well, what's it matter?
Trump lies and nobody cares.
And it's like, that is the perfect recipe for an authoritarian society.
When all of a sudden you have a leader who lies, obviously, and everyone shrugs and says, well, who's going to do anything about it?
We have to resist that.
Because one of the problems, and this has to do with the mythologized history of America.
When you actually look at American history, you realize that power is a pendulum.
It goes from the state and the wealthy and the elite holding almost all of the cards and Americans feeling powerless and powerlessness and apathy.
And then suddenly remembering, oh yeah, we have power.
Suddenly you start to realize it's like the social contract.
And if we come together and we find solidarity and we find organization, we can like move mountains, right?
So the entire point is that modern politics is built around the idea of spectacle.
It's something we watch on the TV.
It's like a soap opera, right?
With villains and heroes and messiahs and devils.
And so we watch it, but my God, never think for a second that you could possibly do anything besides maybe vote once every four years, right?
The truth of it is, is the answer to all of this is gathering together and healing that social atomization.
We have to start remembering that my neighbor is my neighbor, this is a community, we do better when we're not fighting the battles of like a Trump or a Gingrich or something like that.
We do better when we realize that we can take care of each other and we're not engaged in a trench warfare, right?
A zero-sum game against one another.
And we have to, because the pendulum at this point is very, very tilted towards the wealthy and the powerful, but it's also assisted by things like expedited technology.
If you want to know what could possibly happen, look at Putin's Russia, look at China.
Look at what happens with what their technology affords those dictatorial powers.
If we lose it now, the pendulum might not swing back simply because it's aided by things like the internet and surveillance and all of that.
But if we come together and we reform our common bonds and we work beyond this weaponized mythology and we find something real and human, there's definitely hope.
But do not mistake me, we're on the precipice of something really, really great or something really, really terrible and people need to get some skin in the game and realize that we gotta push it in the right direction.
A few weeks ago, I talked to a technology specialist, Imran Ahmed, who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate in the UK, and he did a huge report on the anti-vax movement and how Facebook, predominantly Facebook, but also Instagram and YouTube, have made almost a billion dollars off of anti-vaccination propaganda.
And his argument was that the best and most effective way is deplatforming.
And I wonder if you have any thoughts on de-platforming to help to combat some of these conspiracy theories.
Well, so here's the big problem here.
And again, I didn't realize this until I wrote American Rule.
Before I wrote this, I definitely saw the world through the left-right paradigm.
The Republican-Democrat, who did this, who did that, who's in the right, who's in the left, whatever.
What you come to realize when you actually look at history is you realize that at a certain point, that left, right, red, blue, Democrat, Republican paradigm, at some point you rise above it.
For instance, I always say that people like Donald Trump or Putin or Mark Zuckerberg or Bezos or something like that, they're actually what I would call post-political, right?
They're people who, they're not really left or right, they're just whatever gets past, you know, impediment of profit and power, right?
They would much rather get past the point of democratic representation, which is one of the main projects of all of these people.
It's something that they share.
But if you look at somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has turned into one of the biggest weapons of the extreme right around the world, right?
It is not only disinformation and conspiracy theories, but it's organization and radicalization.
Mark Zuckerberg is not an extreme right-wing person.
He's not And where he's making the most money, if you actually look at the biggest post on Facebook every day, like the top 20, I want to say, are far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists.
He's not doing it because he's pushing an agenda.
He's doing it because that's where the money's coming from.
If it was the left that was doing it, it would make a giant difference, right?
So then the question is this.
When will we get to the point where people like Zuckerberg or Bezos or any of these people, will they start to recognize that what they're doing is corrosive to society?
Well, we reached that in 2016, right?
When we realized what they did to the election and how that entire thing occurred.
Well, all they've done since then, like every other corporate CEO and corporate PR team, is they've said the right things, but then they don't do anything, right?
It's just a smokescreen.
It's just a bunch of publicity memos and lies that they don't really stand behind.
I don't know if de-platforming can happen when these people know where the money comes from.
Do you know what I mean?
Like when they know where their meal ticket is made, I don't think that we can trust them.
And that's one of the reasons, and going back to this idea of how the economy works and how our businesses work, We have to protect those people from themselves.
It's one of the reasons why we need anti-monopoly crusades.
It's one of the reasons why we need to take government back for the people, which is something that you see, again, after the robber baron age.
People start realizing that they need to organize and take back the machinery of government and the economy for themselves.
And when they do that, they start reining in these monopolies, right?
And they start gaining power back from them.
It wasn't complete before World War II happened, but it started.
Right?
We have to save ourselves from these people because the way the market works is it tells them to continue pushing this stuff.
So de-platforming is one thing, but I also think that we have to tell people it's not okay to profit off of it.
It needs to be met with societal shame and pressure.
It is not okay to continue down this road because it makes you money.
And that also, by the way, that goes for our mainstream media.
They're addicted to Donald Trump.
They just are.
He speaks their language.
He gives them the things that they need.
There's a reason why subscriptions are up, clicks are up, views are up.
Ratings are up, and he's honest about it.
He tells everyone, he's like, they love me, they actually love me.
And they do, because he creates a spectacle.
And we have to wean them off of it, but the way that we do that, and it always goes back to this, we have to wean ourselves off of it.
We have to say, we're rejecting this.
We're not going to engage in this spectacle any longer, this palace intrigue, this tabloid journalism, whatever you want to call it.
We need to tell them there's no money in it, there's no power in it, and we have to force them to make better decisions.
I don't know if you saw The Social Dilemma on Netflix yet.
Not yet.
How is it?
It's excellent.
I mean, all of this information has been out there.
Since I work in media, a lot of the people, Roger McNamee and Jaron Lanier and Kathleen O'Neill, I've read all their books and they're fantastic.
But what it does so well is it just puts it all together so you can see how it happened.
And that's a really great documentary.
It does that like a great history book, right?
It takes all these pieces and like, hey, this is how it formed it.
So I highly recommend it.
And I've seen a lot of people on social media say they're leaving social media.
But, you know, unfortunately, well, I mean, you don't know if it's a left right thing, but I tend to run in more liberal circles.
Personally, use the term weaponized nostalgia, which I'll probably steal because that's a great term.
But you You write about how Reagan had said, make America great again, which I knew, but I didn't know Bill Clinton said it too.
And so we have this constant desire to return to a time that never really existed, right?
That's the concept of utopia as a no place.
And everything you're saying right now, you know, we're talking about all this historical context and we're talking about making better decisions.
What do you see instead of making us great again, actually moving forward and making better sustainable choices?
Do you think we can be proactive or is it going to be like climate change where we're just constantly putting out fires and not making decisions until we're forced to?
Well, one of the great misunderstood parts of modern American history is post Post-Nixon, there's this moment, and it's characterized very much by Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, right?
The idea that Americans don't feel powerful, or they feel like America has lost its way or whatever.
Ronald Reagan was not the Ronald Reagan that everyone sees him as.
He was an actor who came along and sold American revival.
He came along and he was like, no, there's nothing wrong with America.
We're perfect.
We're God's chosen nation.
He revived the idea of American exceptionalism.
He did so well.
He was so good at selling the denial of reality to Americans.
Because, I mean, that's a lot better than being like, you know, eat your vegetables, right?
That's a lot better than we have a lot of real problems that we need to face.
It sounds a lot better to be like, no, don't worry about it, buy stuff, it's fine.
He did so well at that, that the Democratic Party, and Bill Clinton was a big part of this, the Democratic Party in the late 80s said, we will never win another election unless we become like the Republican Party.
And so what ends up happening is that Reagan was so And you actually start to realize that in 92, Bill Clinton actually ran to the right of George HW Bush at times.
that the Democratic Party moved far right.
And they started presenting what they called Republicanism or Reaganism with a human face, right?
And you actually start to realize that in '92, Bill Clinton actually ran to the right of George H.W. Bush at times.
Like he actually basically claimed that he was the honest heir to Ronald Reagan.
And by the way, like that is just sort of the political reality that we've been living in.
That's why left or right, blue or red, every politician has to talk about the American dream.
They have to talk about how good America is and what the potential is.
Barack Obama gets asked who his favorite presidents are.
I think the first president he always named was Ronald Reagan.
But that doesn't work in our traditional left-right Republican-Democrat paradigm, right?
Because how could possibly he be a part of that?
Because the Democratic Party moved right.
We actually have argued for years about issues that don't need to Black Lives Matter, right?
It's not even something that we should have to argue about.
We shouldn't have to argue about who uses bathrooms and which bathroom.
It's such a crazy paradigm that actually has nothing to do with reality, right?
So here's what I keep saying.
Because people have talked to me about the intent of American rule.
And I say this.
I understand that this sounds provocative.
I want to destroy the myth of American exceptionalism.
I want to eradicate it.
I want to implode it.
And here's the reason why.
I think it moors us to a fake reality, right?
Because if we're actually going to talk about how to make America a decent country with decent humanity and basic human decency, we can't say, well, America is perfect.
What do you intend to do?
Right?
Because in any reform that you ever talk about, it's like, well, why do you hate America?
Which, you know, that sounds pretty familiar, right?
Well, why do you hate America?
And then all of a sudden it's just used constantly as this sort of, like, cudgel.
I think that once we disabuse ourselves of the myth of American exceptionalism, and we start looking at American history and saying, it's really problematic and very inspirational at other times, it allows us to build something new.
I think we're actually at a moment of generational shift.
And, you know, we have another presidential election where we have two boomers who are running for it, right?
That they're still holding on to power.
And they're both well in their 70s.
We are at a place of generational shift.
Most Americans understand that America is not perfect, that we're not the country that, you know, we thought we were post-World War II.
I think that if we disabuse ourselves of something, that old mythology, we can build something new.
I actually think it could give us a new sense of purpose, this idea of what do we want to be as opposed to being chained to this concept of the past.
It fascinated me when you wrote about Jimmy Carter in the book and that speech and the fact that he was probably A great, he was a great example of Christian values and the Christians weren't interested in actually living out those values.
Yeah, the Reagan era, Reagan.
See, there's where the slip went, right?
Isn't that amazing?
You try and talk about Carter and Reagan just comes right in and blasts in.
Now, the funniest thing about this is, you know, everybody talks about like the evangelical right forming this relationship with Ronald Reagan.
Well, Jimmy Carter was like, not just an evangelical Christian, but he talked about it And you know, he's been hospitalized God knows how many times in the last, like, six months, and he still teaches Sunday school every morning.
figure if you look at him detached from um what i call sort of the normalizing history it's the type of thing that like cnn runs like seven parts of you know what i mean it just goes real fast and it's like then the berlin wall fell after reagan told it to and it's like that's not what happened well with with carter he and i would for anybody who has like a spare amount of time go and listen to the so-called malaise speech it is a crisis of confidence
it is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national world Thank you.
We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence That we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.
It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people.
Confidence in the future has supported everything else.
It's an adult conversation.
You know what I mean?
It's like a really mature adult conversation.
And it has just been crapped on for years as the absolute worst speech ever given by a president.
And the reason is because nobody wanted to hear it.
They wanted to be told that America was perfect and wonderful and chosen by God.
One thing that fascinated me as well is that you really point out that at least three of the last four Republican presidents were not only unqualified, but pretty disinterested or uninterested in being president, at least in governing.
Right, the power they liked, but the governing.
And I wonder if there's any possibility, I mean, I'm looking specifically at the Republican Party, but if we want to go past left and right, can, right before we started this conversation, the last tweet I saw was from Bloomberg saying that Donald Trump said he would do a four-hour debate with Joe Biden if Joe Rogan moderated it.
So that was just this morning, I guess.
And I'm wondering, like, can we get past the cult of personality and actually be interested in people who want to do the boring work of governing again?
You know, I was thinking about this, actually.
I was talking with somebody about this last night.
So, have you seen this documentary?
It's like McMillions.
It's about the McDonald's monopoly scandal.
Uh, no, I did not see it.
It's on my list, but I've not seen it yet.
So there's this moment where it's like at a charity event or something like that, right?
You have a bunch of McDonald's CEOs, which are a bunch of like white dudes in ties and suits, right?
And then you have an actor dressed up like Ronald McDonald, right?
And for the world, Ronald McDonald is like the head of McDonald's.
You know what I mean?
Like, Ronald McDonald is the one who, like, calls the shots at McDonald's.
That's what kids see, right?
But this actor, you can tell as, like, this actor starts ad-libbing at this event, all the CEOs are like, oh my god, what's this clown gonna say?
You know what I mean?
Like, what's he gonna do?
And suddenly I realized, Donald Trump wants to be the mascot of America, right?
He's not interested in actual legislation.
He's not interested in the hard parts of the job.
He actually hates the job.
You can tell that he hates the job.
What he enjoys is the ceremonial part of it, and sort of the attention that comes from it.
I actually, I tell people a lot that I think the perfect job for Donald Trump would be a post-president president, which is like a guy who goes into country clubs and people are like, hey, Mr. President!
And he comes in and he says, you know, this is what I think about what's going on and he BS's for a while and then he shuffles off and plays 18.
I don't think he actually has any interest whatsoever in the hard part of politics, which Is what we've been taught to do.
I'm glad you brought that up.
If you actually go back to Ronald Reagan, he had no idea what was going on.
And I'm not even talking about rumors of Alzheimer's or dementia.
He literally was not interested in being President of the United States outside of the ceremonial part of it.
He was given instructions by think tanks.
He was given instructions by Republican politicians and strategists.
And they had to create movies and cartoons to even tell him what was going on.
He read his daily briefings like a script for Hollywood.
We had been taught that the American president is supposed to be the mascot of America, and that's one of the reasons we have Donald Trump.
But now we're seeing the damage of when that clown starts speaking outside of the script.
When they start going into business for themselves and ad-libbing, all of a sudden the country falls into disrepair and ruin.
That was amazing.
I mean, I've known about the astrology connection with Reagan, but I didn't know Manly Hall was an influence, which kind of blew my mind that it was, that's pretty out there stuff.
I mean, you're talking about theosophy at that point, you're going pretty deep into metaphysics at that point, and that's how the government was being run, or at least being influenced.
That's, that's out there.
Oh man, that was another one of those moments where I found that in the book.
I had to go for a walk.
You know, there were all these tabloid reports about Nancy Reagan obviously being into astrology, which, you know, whatever.
But then all of a sudden when you start actually peeling back the layers, you start realizing that like, Her astrologer was being consulted on political matters, right?
And there are reports even from Reagan's own chief of staff that she was being told confidential classified information in order to figure out what Reagan was going to do and when he was going to do it.
And then I started peeling back more layers.
I was like, this is weird.
And this Shining City thing, which has actually become the slogan of the American right over the past few decades, right, since Reagan.
This idea that America is a shining city on the hill and we need to spread and become a leader of the world.
You start to realize that Manly P. Hall, who, by the way, for people who don't know, spend some time reading up on Manly P. Hall.
Because this was a guy who went around California in this New Age era, and he would give these sold-out lectures.
I mean, he was a huge superstar in this New Age, Hollywood sort of circle, which is how, of course, Ronald Reagan came across him.
And he would tell these stories about how America was a culmination of a divine plan that was carried out by secret societies of philosophers and heroes, and that they had all planned to create an America.
Which, by the way, in case you're wondering if Atlantis shows up in this story, Atlantis shows up in this story, right?
And this is a person that gave Ronald Reagan not just his idea about what America was, but it gave him the slogan of the He truly believed that America was this occultish destination that was supposed to lead the world against some sort of supernatural evil.
And if you actually start breaking that down, you realize this idea of Reagan that we had, which is funny.
The right likes to portray Reagan as this really, really Christian, God-fearing, conservative, fiscally conservative.
No.
He wasn't actually religious.
He was spiritual and he was really into the occult.
He also, like, ran up incredible deficits.
Incredible deficits!
And was he for small government?
Absolutely he was not.
He was for overreaching government.
So you start to realize the mythology of Reagan is completely the opposite of what has been sold.
And that is one of those things that when you start breaking that down, modern American history starts falling apart based on conventional understanding.
So it's not actually that big of a step from Atlantis to the reptile people who are killing children right now.
It's a hop, skip, and a splash, is what it is.
I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on QAnon and how we've got there and how we get out of this situation.
Well, I've been studying QAnon for a while.
I'm actually, I was saying this last night, I, you know, in the beginning when the QAnon thing first emerged, everyone sort of like, I would, I would sort of talk to people about it.
And I was like, you need to pay attention to these people.
And everyone's just like, no, this is insane.
Like who cares if people think JFK Jr.
faked his death or time travel or, you know, secret astronauts or whatever.
And I was like, no, there's something to this.
Like there, there's a cultish aspect to this.
And on top of that, one of the things that has occurred, and I've been doing a lot of research lately on the history of Western civilization.
And here's a quick little fact that knocked me back with this as well.
So, when the Christians were like a persecuted group in ancient Rome, right?
They did their rituals like in the dark, in the catacombs and stuff away from the public eye.
So, every Roman was so suspicious of the Christians and what did they do?
They said that they were sacrificing children, they were drinking their blood, they were abusing them for power, for supernatural power, whatever.
So, the Christians They immediately started saying the same thing about Jewish people.
And what you end up seeing is a cycle of there's all these conspiracy theories and myths and libels that always occur and they never go away.
They are constantly used to create a situation that legitimizes fascistic behavior, right?
So if a group is evil, if they are legitimately evil and that they are coming for you, again, you should attack them first, right?
You should go ahead and hurt them before they hurt you.
So one of the things with QAnon that people need to get Is that they are a legitimate threat.
They've already carried out terrorist activities.
They're already planning other terrorist activities.
They're getting at least tacit approval from the American right.
Eventually, they'll merge with the American right.
Like, that's where this thing is going, if we're not careful.
Because you actually look at the history of the modern right.
They merged with the Tea Party in 2010.
They were either going to be overtaken by the Tea Party or merge with them.
They merged with them.
The QAnon crowd, they're either going to be overtaken by them or they will merge with them.
They'll merge with them.
What people need to know about QAnon is that it is the exact same conspiracy theory.
It's the Deep State, it's the New World Order, it's the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it's blood libel.
It's the exact same story and it brings people in for this reason and this reason alone.
We are alienated and we feel powerless.
And when we're alienated and feel powerless, we start looking for explanations of why we feel that way.
QAnon gives them not only an alternate reality, it gives them an alternate reality where they feel powerful.
Because you are a digital soldier.
You can find truth by looking through this movie or clicking through that.
You're always one click away from saving the world from evil forces.
So, it's a cult.
And what I would say, I've been working with a lot of people lately who have been trying to bring QAnon members back from the break.
Here's the problem, and this also Trump supporters as well.
Engage them as a person.
Talk to them as a human being first.
Don't go in and just immediately be like, hey, what you believe is false and here's the reason why.
You need to establish personal trust again.
They need to remember that you're an honest broker and that you're acting in good faith.
If you talk about QAnon, you talk about QAnon.
If you want to know how this works, go and look at people who deprogram cult members.
And it always has to do with do not directly attack them.
Do not directly go after their beliefs.
Re-establish trust and honest brokership and then eventually you can try and make some headway.
Yeah, we've had Steve Hassan on this podcast, who's a cult expert and one of my podcast partners is studying to be a therapist.
He was indoctrinated in two cults and now he's helping to bring people out and that's what he does.
And it's a tricky situation.
We actually, whenever, for example, one of the episodes we had, I have a friend who's worked with foster children for many years and She gave us a list of 10 organizations that do credible work helping trafficking victims.
And we publish this and a lot of people get a lot out of it and they know where to go.
But we've also had QAnon people come on our feed and being like, this is all deep state stuff.
That's not how you really help.
And that's a very challenge.
I mean, it's challenging in the moment, at least.
And you think about the indoctrination process of getting people out.
I actually think there's going to be a movement In psychiatry, of helping, in psychotherapy, of helping people deprogram from that.
Yeah, you saw that particularly, like, post-1960s, post-1970s, right?
You actually see, like, a group of people, you know, everyone always says Manson.
There were a lot more than Manson.
There were a lot of commune-type messiahs and commune-type cult leaders, particularly.
And I want to point out the parallels here.
It was a time where people felt like politics was beyond their control, where politics was beyond their grasp.
And so they start looking for that.
But I will say that a large part of it, and it goes back to the 1960s, 1970s, especially right now, it's a trench warfare mentality, right?
So like, for instance, if I talk to a Trump supporter and I say something critical of Donald Trump, they don't support Donald Trump immediately.
They say, well, what about Hillary Clinton?
What about Barack Obama?
Right.
And here's what I say to them.
And this is one of the reasons why I want American rule to get in as many hands as possible.
We need to stop the trench warfare tit for tat thing.
Right.
So, for instance, if somebody says to me, well, what about Hillary Clinton?
And I'm like, I have problems with Hillary Clinton.
She voted for the Iraq war.
Like she was like one of the main proponents for the Iraq war.
You know, there's like a ton of problems.
Actually, you want to go back to the health care bill.
It was like a pretty corporate thing that the Clinton administration was trying to do.
It wasn't crazy liberal.
It wasn't left wing.
She's not some sort of icon of the left.
Right.
There are problems.
The Clinton Foundation is something that uses money around the world for political purposes and enjoys tax breaks.
I have a problem with that.
Right?
So if I start talking about the problems that I have with Democrats, and I am not a registered Democrat, I gave up my registration because I did all this research.
I wish we had other options.
And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm not gonna break my hand voting for Joe Biden against Donald Trump, right?
But you have to live in a reality where it's not these two opposed opinions.
And if I come out and I'm like, yeah, I have this problem with this, and they're like, well, what about Barack Obama?
Yeah, he continued on the forever wars.
I mean, the drone strikes got worse and worse with Barack Obama.
I actually think he was a good president, but there were problems.
I don't hold him up as some sort of faultless messiah.
If I do that, then all of a sudden they're like, yeah, well, I do have some problems with Trump.
And all of a sudden, what you start finding is you start having a conversation because you're changing the environment.
It goes from a Trump versus Democrat fight into a, yeah, we're on this side, and the powerful and the elite are over here.
And all of a sudden, that dichotomy changes, and you can start comparing notes and realizing that those conspiracy theories are just shorthand for a larger, more complicated explanation that we need to find together.
Yeah, I'm as big of a fan of Obama as many people, but during his eight years, I went from being a registered Democrat to an independent for similar reasons, because I wanted more flexibility and for the very reasons you express.
As with any good writer, you end on a positive note, or at least an instructional note, on what could happen, and you write, We need a new appreciation for experts, for education, for human experiences that go beyond the pursuit of profit and power and emphasize humanity in all of its pluralistic forms.
So, we're gonna finish big picture here, and we've touched upon a lot in this hour, but taking that sentence, what do you think are the most pertinent things that people can do to help that happen?
I think that there's a couple things.
Obviously, everyone always just says vote.
Well, that's one thing, right?
And again, I don't think citizenship comes down to going out and voting once every four years.
We have to start taking an active role in not just government, but our communities and our lives.
I think that we need to rebuild these atomized bonds.
Like, if somebody's listening and wondering what to do, I'm not going to tell them to just go out and donate to a campaign.
And not even the big giant campaigns that obviously have a ton of money and most of it's used for administrative stuff.
I would say give to some food banks.
I would say start forming organizations in your community.
And I don't mean ones that are based on necessarily elections, although that's important too.
Say hello to your neighbor.
Call somebody you haven't talked to in forever.
Start rebuilding the bonds of society and community.
You know, start working within yourself to understand what you want.
It's not enough for your goal Well, what do you want to do afterwards?
Because I have to tell you, and I try and say this in every appearance I do, Donald Trump is a symptom.
He's not the disease.
A healthy sane country could not have possibly elected Donald Trump president.
This has been going on for a very long time, and there are three steps I think everybody should listen to.
One, get educated, because if you don't understand what's going on, if you don't know the real history, if you don't know the real explanations, if you don't know what's happened, you are completely impotent to face anything, right?
Number two, get pissed off, because The wealthy and the powerful have absolutely used misinformation and manipulation to keep you from leading a better life and the people you love from leading a better life.
They've been exploited.
They've been used.
They could have lived longer, happier, more fulfilling lives if they weren't manipulated.
Number three, get organized.
Find other people that you can talk to.
Find other people you can depend on.
Vote, but also form community bonds and also get involved in local elections.
Go to the school board meeting.
Go to the city council.
Make sure that you're actually applying pressure and politics everywhere that you can.
Okay, I want to talk about my daughter.
I want to be in the dark, Daddy.
I want to be a skeleton.
Turn off the light, says my toddler daughter.
And then when she hears I'm coming to read her bedtime story, she hides from me under a towel with her mother.
And they make silly sounds and giggle as I pretend to be scared and look for them.
And then she pulls off the towel and yells, surprise, through her tiny toothy grin.
In 1871, Charles Darwin published the third of his books on evolutionary theory.
It's called The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.
In a way, we could say this was, unintentionally, a seminal book in what would later become somatic psychology, in that, prior to Darwin's observations, Western thinkers had puzzled over where to locate human emotional life vis-a-vis the ever-present mind-body problem.
The wisdom of the day mused that surely emotions were the domain of an immaterial soul or mind.
It's like Darwin yelled back, it's biology, stupid!
As obvious as it might sound now, the groundbreaking nature of Darwin's heretical uncovering of humanity's intimate and complete embeddedness in the natural world also opened the door to his revolutionary ideas about human emotional architecture as riding on the foundation of the instincts we share with other animals, with our animal cousins.
All of this to say that like all other emotions, fear is in our very DNA, it's built into the most ancient layers of what we are, and fear ain't going nowhere.
Our patron saint on this podcast, at least Joseph Campbell, rather famously said that in mythic storytelling, the cave you fear to enter is the one that holds the treasure you seek.
In a way, I think Joe would agree with Ernest Becker, whose central idea is that all of human culture is a way of trying to manage our fear of death.
As the storytelling ape developed the capacity to imagine the future, remember the past, and put ourselves in the place of others, we've made the calculation and looked into the abyss of the certainty of our own demise, and then built countless altars, fingered an infinity of beads, and whispered innumerable prayers to try to convince ourselves that surely we, this time, can avoid it.
As a young outsider from another culture, still at that time less than 10 years in the country when it happened, I witnessed 9-11 as a catastrophic rupture in a cocksure American certainty that surely this is not a place where anything like that can happen.
Later on, my South African ears would hear Cornel West, in his inimitable way, refer to the attack as the N-word-izing, the N-word-izing of white America.
So a new quality of fear emerges out of the ashes of a realization that indeed, you too can be treated like that.
I wonder sometimes if to those preoccupied with the conspiracy theories ever since, the awful claim that government officials were involved in a convoluted plot to perpetrate this heinous inside job seems less terrifying, less scary, than the idea that a group of jihadis could succeed from a planning location in a cave in pulling off this grotesque spectacle that brought the mighty America to its knees.
So, too, for our Q-pilled lightworkers, perhaps make-believe 5G-powered vaccine-dispensing reptilian alien-serving vampire pedos are less scary than facing the grim and unglamorous reality of our vulnerability to a pandemic in an imperfect world with truths that simply none of us, not even as Americans, is exceptional enough to avoid.
My daughter is two and a half.
Amongst everything that fascinates her exponentially exploding synaptical multiplication right now, including Legos, Dora the Explorer, construction equipment, and performing self-choreographed dance numbers for us in front of the mirror, is fear.
She's fascinated with fear right now.
She's obsessed with skeletons and spiders and ghosts and spooky shadows.
Of course, her favorite cartoons have had Halloween episodes, and she's already greeted trick-or-treaters as an 18-month-old from a little table in our front yard, sitting with her nanny in a cute, simple tiger costume.
But it is fascinating to watch her experiment with being afraid.
And saying with a scrunched up face that she doesn't like scary skeletons, and then, as if Uncle Joseph has whispered in her ear that the demon is only a god who hasn't been honored yet, a smile crosses her little features and she switches to wanting to be a skeleton, and thinking they are friendly, and just need hugs after all.
She's becoming aware of her own mind.
I think of it as an interior mansion with a large room containing fear, but that has a connecting passageway into joy and a nearby skylight that is a portal into the wonder of the twinkling stars, the brightest visible only from the deepest darkness.
It's perfectly natural.
As her father, I want her to explore fear safely and learn its value, its true purpose, as well as where it is merely a substanceless specter sustained only by the electricity of the troubled imagination.
And as she keeps the family plugged into joy and wonder and unbounded love during this ominous time, I'm reminded that perhaps sanity Or at the very least, that sacred thing we call reason lies in knowing what to be afraid of and when to enter the dark and scary cave that holds the very treasure all of us seek.
The treasure that is revealed to me most clearly in her shining eyes.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality.
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