39: How to Talk about Conspiracy Theories (w/Anna Merlan)
What are we learning about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and those who hold them? How are we maintaining our optimism that facts are real, that they can be discovered, and shared? How will we continue to communicate with those who are confused? In this episode, we continue our rich conversation on the proximity of conspiracism and spiritual paths and the ways in which we fall into and climb out of fever dreams. In the Jab, Julian looks at concerns about vaccines and pregnancy. In a Ticker segment, Matthew ponders the British Wheel of Yoga’s “neutral” stance towards the COVID vaccine, and how it unintentionally welcomes conspiratorial thinking. Republic of Lies author Anna Merlan sits down with Derek to discuss the process of embedding with conspiracy consumers and peddlers, and the challenges faced when reporting on them. Discussing the interview, Julian uses the ideas of George Lakoff to think about containment and reframing. Matthew looks at how yoga and wellness influencers can play both sides of the consumer/peddler coin through the paradoxical private spectacle of social media.Show Notes‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own ParentsBritish Wheel of Yoga indulges vaccine “neutrality”Dr. Victoria Male on vaccines and pregnancyAnna Merlan on the Austin Influencer MovementAnna Merlan on PBS’s Open MindYoga podcaster J. Brown expresses doubts about COVID and the vaccinesCharles Eisenstein is turning to fictionAbbie Richards and her Conspiracy Chart
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media feeds, including Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Clubhouse, where every Sunday I host a 1pm Pacific Time Clubhouse, where we talk about one of the themes from that week's podcast.
It's been great.
Julian finally tapped in last week.
And that was very enjoyable.
We had a good talk about traditional Chinese medicine, which also just proves what I've been saying for a long time.
We had a few listeners come on and challenge some of the things I said, and we went back and forth in a civil manner, which is wonderful.
That's why I like the Clubhouse format, because humans act like humans and not what you see on social media so often.
Now that said, we love our social media feeds and we love dialoguing with you, so you can Find the Clubhouse posting every weekend on our Instagram page where I post it so you can find out all the information.
Finally, we're on patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can get access to our Monday bonus content and our weekend content if you would like to support this podcast.
Episode 39, How to Talk About Conspiracy Theories with Anna Merlin.
So, how is this all going?
What are we learning about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and those who hold them?
How are we maintaining any optimism that facts are real, that they can be discovered, and that they can be shared?
How will we continue to communicate with those who are confused?
In this episode, we continue our rich conversation on the proximity of conspiracism and spiritual paths, and the ways in which we fall into and climb out of fever dreams.
In the jab, Julian looks at concerns about vaccines and pregnancy.
In a ticker segment, I look at how the British Wheel of Yoga announces a neutral stance towards the COVID vaccine, but unintentionally welcomes conspiratorial thinking.
Republic of Lies author Anna Merlin sits down with Derek to discuss the process of embedding with conspiracy consumers and peddlers and the challenges faced when reporting on them.
Discussing the interview, Julian uses the ideas of George Lakoff to think about containment and reframing.
Matthew looks at how yoga and wellness influencers can play both sides of the consumer peddler coin through the paradoxical private spectacle of social media.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
There's a heartbreaking article published on Huffington Post last week called, I Miss My Mom.
Children of QAnon believers are desperately trying to de-radicalize their own parents.
For this article, they profiled nine adult children between 19 and 46 who are struggling with their parents having been red-pilled.
I reported last week on Instagram that CNN has also been covering stories like this.
Typically, we're more familiar with tales of parents distraught about their teenage or young adult child who's been sucked into a cult.
That's sort of the standard trope, right?
But this unique inversion makes me think about how Facebook has gradually skewed not only more conservative and conspiratorial, but also more towards being used by an older demographic, as other platforms like Instagram and TikTok have appealed to younger users.
And reading this article, it's especially painful to read accounts of Watching one's own parents descend into an evangelical commitment to false and terrifying beliefs that are so destructive both to the family relationships but in these stories too to those parents' mental health.
The article also debunks the common perception that it is only uneducated or low IQ people who get sucked into QAnon And warns us that if we overplay making these people the butt of our jokes, we may miss the very real violent extremist danger it still represents, as well as the importance of looking into the circumstantial vulnerability that it has exploited.
So things like stress and disorientation during the pandemic or life events that are inevitable, deaths in the family, financial loss, maybe due to the pandemic, maybe not, illness, as well as a climate of social and political upheaval and change, which we know from the research usually correlates with the uptick in conspiracy belief.
Especially since Joe Biden's inauguration, these Q kids are desperate for help in de-radicalizing their parents, but that is in such short supply that some of them have even stepped away from the relationships altogether.
So far, and this goes back to some reporting of Matthew's way early on, the most helpful resource still appears to be the subreddit called QAnon Casualties, which now has over 128,000 members.
I think the last time I looked, it was like 62 or something like that, and that must be over the last month or so that it's doubled.
The most sort of poignant, painful thing was seeing this snapshot that they included of the type of Christmas cards that one mom has been sending out for the last three years, filled with these handwritten QAnon propaganda messages and prophecies.
What an incredible, like, reversal, as you say, of that generational tendency to worry about the children going wayward into cultic territory, but to have one's parents kind of disappear as a source of protection.
And ironically, as they're probably, you know, becoming more and more activated by the notion that they are being protective, that they are going to, quote unquote, save the children.
Yeah.
What an incredible irony.
Yeah, to hear these accounts of like, I come home and all my mother wants to talk about is these Things she's been learning about on Facebook.
All my, you know, retired mother wants to talk about is her Facebook information and sort of conspiracy memes and these endless videos she wants me to watch.
And then the other thing too is how one description in particular of a mother who would just, her wide eyes and her sheet white face would reveal how terrifying she was finding the Q prophecies she was reading about.
So today, the British Wheel of Yoga, which is a trade organization with history going back several decades in the UK that represents the yoga industry, it's a charitable organization, it offers educational programs, and it's a membership-based group that yoga teachers can belong to, to
in this unregulated industry kind of express a way in which they have attained to some kind of shared values together with regard to teaching.
They came out with a statement today that was quite odd on Facebook.
It reads, A message to our members and followers.
Following a number of comments and inquiries, we have been asked for the formal position of the BWY regarding the COVID vaccine.
As a charity and membership organization, the mission of the BWI is to promote a greater understanding of yoga through education and training, and to support its members in their practice and teaching.
BWI adopts no political position and offers no view or guidance on other matters.
Therefore, In the interest of clarity, we invite you, our members and followers, to make a decision over the COVID vaccine that sits comfortably with your own views and your own conscience, and we request that the choices and opinions of others, whether they accord with your own or not, are respected.
In the spirit of yoga, we must all make our own assessment and give everyone else the space to do the same.
In that same spirit, we also respect that not all members will agree with us, but we nonetheless do not align ourselves with any particular viewpoint.
It is not within our remit as an organization and as members showing respect for the individual journey and, quote, truth, unquote, of others.
is paramount.
In yoga, Gillian Osborne, the vice chair of the British Wheel of Yoga.
So, a really terrible, dangerous, short-sighted statement by the British Wheel of Yoga that I can only imagine was prompted by a kind of awareness of the politicization short-sighted statement by the British Wheel of Yoga that I can only imagine was prompted by a kind of awareness of
And it seems that this, perhaps with good intentions, they've chosen to stake out this position of neutrality by But by doing so, they really endorse vaccination as being a political rather than a public health issue.
And to my eye, this can only really support conspiracism as a kind of consumer choice.
So, I mean, we talk a lot on the podcast about how, you know, modern yoga really aligns with a lot of the political economies, especially if they're neoliberal in our present day, where, you know, even the truth of something like public health is somehow a personal choice.
I don't know, are you guys surprised by this statement?
I think that given how much yogis tend to be territorial, and I know not all of them, but a lot of yoga organizations and yoga styles, there's always that, well, this isn't yoga, it's really about this.
If an outsider says something or criticizes their yoga, how they say, well you just don't know, you have to be inside of it, for them to come out and make a public health statement when none of them are, at least that I know, epidemiologists or have anything to do with science, is quite a bit of a stretch for me.
But they're doing the old switcheroo there too, right?
Because they're saying, well, it's not within our remit to talk about these kinds of things or to have an opinion either way, so we're going to create this false equivalency where, you know, in the spirit of yoga, we should respect everyone's different beliefs and quote-unquote truth.
And if I have a dime for every time I've heard someone use the spirit of yoga to justify whatever next move they're about to make in a completely, you know, meaningless way, I'd be a wealthy man.
Well, also, I think we should note that, you know, in general, the industry has often grandiose
Aspirations towards being more legitimized in terms of providing healthcare or therapeutic services and so this doesn't make sense because you know if you want your practices whatever they consist of to be conceived of as therapeutic and to be respected by insurance companies and you know health services
Then turning around and saying, oh, but actually we're going to make our own choices when it comes to this actual life and death decision.
It's a real sort of thumbing of the nose at public health workers.
Well, I wonder too how much of it is them Being ill-informed enough or sort of red-pilled enough that they want to hedge their bets and there's some pressure on them to make the kind of statement that actually we would probably applaud and instead they're saying, well, you should respect, you know, it's kind of like an all lives matter moment, isn't it?
Kind of, right.
But I mean, it just would have been safest to not say anything at all.
I mean, they're not a public health organization, it's not really within their remit, as they say, but what they've done by staking out this fake neutrality, actually, is to endorse this politicization, which, of course, is going to be seized upon by people who think that vaccination is kind of like supplements or something like that, that you take it because it'll make you feel better or it'll improve your personal health.
And why is anyone turning to them for public health advice in the first place?
So either they were getting a lot of inquiries and comments and felt that they had some standing to make this argument, or they're just lying about it and just wanted to put this out there.
It has to be one of those two, because why would this be an agency you turn to for that type of advice?
The other, I mean I think the last thing we should say is that I can't see, I don't know about you guys, but I can't see any brick-and-mortar yoga business returning to any kind of viability before there's full vaccination or at least adequate vaccination coverage.
I mean, with the new variants, we're talking about double masking, up to 70% more transmissibility, aerosolization is more clearly understood, and we all know that ventilation isn't good enough in most places.
And so, really, it's like, why hedge in any way with the NHS?
in the UK with their advice with regard to promoting vaccination.
I have no idea why that would be the case.
It's like shooting yourself in the foot.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
Children and babies are such a potent emotional focus for fears about vaccines.
And for routine safety reasons, pregnant mothers were excluded from COVID vaccine trials.
Yes.
Now that some vaccines are being widely distributed, there's an understandable concern about whether they are safe for pregnant women, and there's also been a rumor circulating that the vaccines might cause infertility.
As it turns out, both of these topics can be addressed by looking at the available data.
Anytime large-scale vaccine trials happen, the standard distribution of parallel life events will occur for participants.
This includes unplanned pregnancies.
According to reproductive immunologist Dr. Vicky Male, between the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca trials in England, for example, 53 women unexpectedly got pregnant.
The pregnancies were evenly divided between the vaccinated groups and those who had received a placebo.
So far, the follow-up data is showing that all of these pregnancies are proceeding normally.
Outside of the trials, frontline workers who've been vaccinated are also getting pregnant shortly thereafter and showing no red flags so far in terms of the progress of their pregnancies.
The infertility rumor started when a former Pfizer employee suggested in an interview that similarities between the structure of the COVID spike protein used in the vaccines and a protein in the placenta might cause some kind of disruption.
But research showed this not to be an issue.
Of course, this hasn't stopped it from being circulated as a conspiracy meme.
As is so often the case with vaccines, there are greater risks for both mother and baby from COVID-19 infection, especially later on during pregnancy, than there are from being vaccinated.
There's also some hopeful preliminary evidence that pregnant mothers may pass on COVID-19 immunity to their babies if they've been vaccinated, and perhaps less so through breast milk.
As always, more research will keep giving us a clearer picture.
2019's Republic of Lies is a comprehensive overview of conspiracy theories in America.
It starts with author Anna Merlin kind of hilariously going on a bizarre sounding conspiracy cruise ship and continues like a fantastic series of feature articles with each chapter covering a different facet of the American conspiracy psyche.
It's immersive storytelling but also really well-researched, showing how the history of ideas that influence and infect current events intersect and evolve.
Topics covered include everything from anti-vaxxers to JFK to UFOs, sovereign citizens and neo-Nazis, Pizzagate and what would turn into QAnon.
Also, claims of false flag operations behind tragic school shootings and gruesome terror attacks like those in Oklahoma City and Boston and 9-11, and of course that the government is actually run by a shadowy deep state.
Merlin leaves no stone unturned.
She also gives thoughtful treatment to medical conspiracies and their roots in government atrocities that have impacted the disenfranchised, reminding us that in many cases conspiracy theories have strong correlations with real conspiracies and real abuses of power.
This of course includes Tuskegee, MKUltra, and forced non-consensual sterilizations of minorities and prisoners, as well as covert CIA operations abroad.
She also repeatedly shows how conspiracy communities themselves are usually paranoid and fractious power structures with competing charismatic figures, each accusing one another of being double agents.
Quite fascinating.
While so much of what Republic of Lies covers undeniably makes a home in far-right enclaves, she also does hold the left to account with a closing chapter on the excesses of Russiagate in 2017, which she then balances out with accounts of the very real disinformation campaigns that emanate from the Kremlin.
You know, reading this, guys, I felt at times that for some of our episode topics we could have just gone to her book as a fantastic shortcut to the research we were doing, but at the same time it's really validating to find congruity between what we researched and the contents of her book.
She also introduced me to a great phrase from Michael Barcoon's 2013 book, A Culture of Conspiracy, and that phrase is, the realm of stigmatized knowledge, which I thought is really good shorthand for what we think of as the red-pilled journey of crossing the threshold into territory where different types of stigmatized knowledge claims have a kind of parity or a shared currency.
Now Julian, given that Merlin was embedded for a lot of this reporting, did you get a sense of empathy from how she's covering these figures?
I don't know if I would necessarily say empathy.
I feel like for the most part she maintains a certain sense of neutrality.
She's genuinely curious and maintains an objective sort of angle on things, although there are some characters that she represents with a sympathetic eye because of their origins and what they've gone through.
She's also immediately honest with everyone she talks to in every one of these settings she goes into, some of them quite hair-raising, that she is a journalist, who she works for, and that she's Jewish.
I'll add, I don't want to give away too much of the interview, but one point she brings up is as a journalist, there is some neutrality because you're trying to find out information and have conversations, but at the same time, there are figures in this world so abhorrent She doesn't feel necessary to even talk to them to give them more oxygen.
It's like she already knows their views, and why would she want to continue along those lines and just give them more press?
So, she does have some ethical boundaries she discusses, but for the most part, she has a great anecdote from a friend of hers about Milo Yiannopoulos that you'll hear during the interview that kind of speaks to this as well.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Alex Jones, too, is an interesting interaction that she has.
You know, in addition to her book, I was really fascinated.
I watched a few interviews with her, and most noteworthy for me, she appeared on a PBS show called Open Mind, and the date is important, it's January 31st, 2019.
And I wanted to reference a quote here from that interview because of its prescience regarding 2020.
She says, we've always had this anxiety that there's going to be some tipping point where conspiracy culture overwhelms us as a nation.
But we're more in danger of reaching a point where we are able to be convinced that truth is not knowable, that there's no empirical truth or reality.
Conspiracy peddlers in power want us to be confused about what is true and what is real and give up looking for it.
You know, there's the political sense in which we can give up on looking for truth, but this notion of empirical truth that she references as well in terms of evidence, in terms of the kinds of claims that can be made, perhaps on a spiritual or on an alternative health level, I think are very important to kind of end up giving up looking for it and instead just believing whichever charismatic figure you like.
She made a great distinction between conspiracy peddlers and conspiracy consumers.
And Matthew, you did a great Twitter thread a couple days ago exploring this distinction and how the lines get blurred in our conspirituality subculture.
Yeah, through the mechanics of influencer technology.
Yeah, I'll talk about that in a bit.
For our conversation today, I wanted to think about the question of how we address or engage with each of those categories.
So following Merlin's With regard to conspiracy peddlers, I was put in mind again of Imran Ahmed and his recognition that deplatforming, disengaging and not signal boosting via inadvertent stimulating of the algorithm to perpetuate lies or conspiracy theories is really the way to go, which is why last week, I believe it was, we applauded RFK being booted from Instagram.
A quote from this article.
We sure did.
Yeah.
And a quote from Imran Ahmed, who did an op-ed piece for Huffington Post.
He says, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.
And he references that research that the Center for Countering Digital Hate has done, his organization, shows that engaging with a claim in order to refute it can often help amplify and entrench it, both as the result of the technology, meaning the algorithms, right, and how they function, and human psychology.
He talks about how research done on deplatforming prevented the reach of both extremist Islamist groups and Islamophobic anti-immigrant groups, and this supported his decision to recommend deplatforming David Icke, who in the beginnings of the pandemic was adding over 20,000 followers to his social media accounts every week.
And what happened is that forcing him onto smaller, less well-regulated platforms like BitChute has meant his reach shrunk to around 5% across the board of what it was on major social media channels.
So this is a very strong argument for how deplatforming and, you know, sort of Robustly managing the concerns we have around freedom of speech with regards to this kind of disinformation is probably really the way to go.
We'll have a test case of that with Pete Evans being deplatformed from Instagram now that he's running for the government in Australia.
That will also be interesting to see.
Like where he finds access to his media outlets.
Yeah, how much reach will he still have?
Was he just booted off Instagram or other places too?
I've only seen Instagram.
Yeah, and so along these same lines with regard to conspiracy peddlers, There's a cognitive linguist and philosopher named George Lakoff who I really like and he says when public figures are distorting, lying, and trying to reframe things in an utterly false way, as you can imagine George Lakoff had a lot to say about Trump but he's been talking about and researching this stuff for a long time, he says journalists inadvertently can help
Those who are spreading misinformation by repeating the lies even when they deny the words that they are quoting.
So he suggests that instead journalists and perhaps the rest of us too use something he calls the truth sandwich.
And the way the truth sandwich works is you tell the truth and then you debunk the lie And then tell the truth again.
But he has an additional caveat here, which is that when you're debunking the lie, try to avoid repeating the exact language of the lie in ways that strengthen the impression that it already creates.
Instead of leading with Trump's words, for example, the Trump campaign alleges a rigged election, right?
Trump would use this very highly charged term, rigged election.
So instead of leading with that and then debunking it, or telling the truth and then using those exact words, here's an example of what we might do instead.
For the truth sandwich.
So the first part of it would be the 2020 election had the highest voter turnout and was by all measures one of the most secure in American history.
Joe Biden won a decisive victory both in the Electoral College with a 74 vote margin and even more so in the popular vote where he won by 4.4% or roughly 7 million votes.
So that's part one, and then part two, despite having all 86 court cases alleging voter fraud being dismissed, in most cases very quickly, at every level of the judicial system, the former president and many of his loyalists still refuse to concede the loss.
Right, so instead of Trump alleges a rigged election, actually debunk it by telling the story behind it, which is there were 86 court cases.
All of them were thrown out of the judicial system.
Nonetheless, they continue holding on to their lie.
And then the third piece in the truth sandwich would be, though the election was still very close in the swing states, the swing was in Biden's favor and peaceful transfer of power eventually via certified election results remains central to our democracy.
It's fantastic, because as I interrupted, I was sold after point one, and I understand that there's something very particular about not using the inflammatory term, because... Well, what does he say?
I mean, even for the audience that understands that the election was fair and legitimate, When they hear the word rigged, does that put me, let's say, on my back foot?
Does it put me in a defensive position?
Whereas, to paraphrase, as you did in part two, doesn't.
And I'm not sort of working my way back from, you know, this very kind of aggressive accusation up front.
Yeah, I think it's that.
And I think, too, he's making a really specific critique about how news outlets will have as their headline the sensationalist, controversial, highly charged thing.
And with someone like Trump, it's easy to just repeat what he says.
And then you always have this sort of attitude of like, well, yeah, that's what he said, but now we're going to tell you how it's not true.
But by repeating the thing that he's saying that's not true, It's that old adage, right?
That a lie repeated enough times becomes true in people's consciousness.
It seems to add legitimacy to it by following his framing.
There might be a more effective framework, which I talked about on the Monday bonus episode this week, based on a study from Yale University that was conducted a few weeks ago.
Which is, they showed four groups information, headlines.
And the headline, they either preempted the headline saying that it was false, they showed that it was false during the headline, or they showed the headline and then showed whether it was true or false.
And then there was a control group as the fourth cohort.
And then they had everyone come back in either a week or two weeks later and then tested them without showing them the true or false prompts.
And counterintuitively, what they found was, by far, it was the best method to show the headline and then show whether it was true or false.
And the reason was, if you show something as true or false before reading it, people will tend to forget about it.
They'll just kind of glaze over it knowing that it's not true.
And then you show it to them a week later and they're like, oh, I don't remember because they didn't ingest it.
But what the researchers speculate is that when they see the headline and they have a moment to decide for themselves, it's already stuck.
And then they see the true or false.
And this was three times more effective in helping people remember true and false information than if you showed them The way that Facebook and Twitter do, saying, hey, don't look at this, it could be in dispute.
Because human nature is like, oh, you're going to tell me that that's not true?
Let me decide for myself, and then they're going to look at it.
But it's, so, Lakoff's, it kind of works, but I don't know if it really will get to the point.
Although this Yale, it's only one study, so there still needs to be research.
Yeah, well, and the interesting thing about that, and I love that piece that you did, Derek, is that that's talking specifically about how to handle Misinformation on social media, yeah?
Like looking at strategies that people use for... Does it work, for example, to black it out and say, this has been fact-checked as false, and then people can click on it afterwards?
Well, I'm extrapolating and using that example.
The actual example was a prompt showing true or false before reading the headline.
So a little bit different.
When I added the Twitter and Facebook, I was just extrapolating current practices.
I wonder if anybody's remarking on yet is the psychological fallout from the shaming involved in the labeling of the posted article as being in dispute or false.
Because I don't know about you, but the first thing that I go to is if I see something has been blacked out like that, I kind of develop an instantaneous opinion of the poster.
And I, you know, it's probably merited, but it also might be, I just wonder about the impact upon them.
I mean, often I'll see somebody who has been tagged that way, they'll come back with the next post and they'll say, well, you know, the overlords of Facebook have done X, Y, and Z.
There's two things going on.
Did you stop the misinformation?
Well, maybe you did.
But what did you do to the poster?
How did you encourage them to think twice?
Or did you?
Or are they going to double down?
Is there going to be a blowback effect?
There is an excellent article I shared with you guys in Slack, and I'm going to talk about it this weekend as well in my piece, but it's from The Atlantic, and it's the first time that related to QAnon, and they actually mentioned conspirituality, not us, but the concept in this piece, where they talk about Librarians and media literacy and how you can actually educate.
It's the first time where, I'm sure there have been other pieces, but where someone said, okay, here's the situation, here's the landscape, let's try to instill this in our public education systems as a way to move forward.
I'll link to it in the show notes because I think it's important.
At least because what you asked, Matthew, I think that nobody knows the answer to, and I think people are trying to figure it out right now.
This actually provides a framework.
How effectively it can be implemented is another question, but it's starting to put forward possible solutions to the problems we're talking about.
And just one more question, if you know Julian about Lakoff, is when he proposes the truth sandwich, he's using some, you know, cognitive neuroscience metrics for figuring out, like, with regard to people's attention span and how messaging actually embeds itself, the difference between starting with the provocative claim versus, or the false claim,
Versus starting with a reality-based principle.
Because as you were going through that, the other thing that I felt was, oh, this is a much more relaxing statement, actually.
I mean, now, it happens to, like, accord with my sense of reality, so it's not going to really play out on the other side.
But, you know, we could have engaged in that truth sandwich kind of strategy and started off with a very, you know, a very strong statement of, like, this is what the truth is and these other people are lying, right?
And it wasn't that.
It's just the information.
It's creating a reality-based context for the topic.
I think the conversation we're having is so interesting because for me what it's showing is the overlapping kind of domains that this conversation needs to happen in, right?
It's like librarians, teachers, The whole question of how you handle this on social media, which is such a big topic right now in the world, and then traditional news media, you know, just 24-hour news cycle on CNN.
Because CNN is not necessarily like doing every story as if it's a fact-checking exercise, they're reporting the news.
So I think in that case, his advice is really good.
And then in the case of social media, the study that Derek was citing sounds better.
I'd really love to ask him how he thinks the truth sandwich could apply to headline writing, though, because you're absolutely right.
You state the event that is then to be described or to be covered, and that sort of sandwiching of context around it is not going to be represented in any headline I can imagine.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
I could imagine a headline like, uh, Biden election certified as, as decisive Trump loyalists hold on to fraud, uh, disinformation.
Right.
Maybe lengthy.
I mean, that's, that's see, see, am I right, Derek, that, that if, if you wanted to do the first two parts of the truth sandwich, you'd wind up with a long ass headline.
Right.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And as as I've argued before, when I started in newspaper reporting in the 90s, there was somebody at the newspaper whose only job was to write headlines.
Right.
And we have gone so far.
Now the headline is the story and people are very that's just how we consume media.
So there's there's a huge curve we're on here where I don't know how you get people to click past the headline and the lead to actually read the content at this point, since most people do not.
You do it through long-form podcasts is what you do.
I just wanted to add that there can be there can be a real confusion about this kind of vigilance and it's that whole false equivalency thing that we talked so much about when we covered every time we've covered Charles Eisenstein because I think he does it a lot I think it's very much on display in the in the yoga statement what was the what was the group again Matthew that we started with the British Wheel of Yoga yeah
Yeah, that the British Wheel of Yoga is making this very relativist kind of false equivalency sort of statement where all truths are somehow equally valid.
So, there's a real balance to be struck there between wanting to be self-critical around our own biases and the limits of our own knowledge and letting that motivate us to go in search of what is actually true as opposed to being lost in the fog of, well, truth is really not something we can ever really know.
So when I interviewed Dr. Dan Wilson on episode 29, he told this amazing story about having been a 9-11 truther in high school and slowly clawing his way out of that and
And in my review of the QAnon Anonymous podcast last week, I disclosed that for a few weeks I'd been taken in with this Blue Anon theory about there being central villains with a clear intention at the heart of QAnon.
I just wanted to ask you in a bit of an open round here, have either of you at any point felt yourselves sliding into conspiratorial mindset?
And if so, what brought it on?
Were there personal factors at play?
Did you find yourself hitting a threshold at some point that you either crossed over or turned back from?
Well, I'll just say that as a Rebellious, rock and roll musician, long-haired, conscientious objector, psychedelic explorer, yogi in my 20s.
I was definitely prone to all kinds of conspiracy theories and it's kind of what Marilyn said about being in the realm of stigmatized knowledge.
I definitely believed that the government was in league with big pharma and had a vested interest in keeping us sick and did not necessarily want us to be healthy.
One of the most common conspiracy claims that she talks about that a lot of people believe is that there are cures for things like cancer and AIDS but that the government is keeping them from us because they're in bed with Big Pharma or for whatever other reasons they may have.
I was open to a lot of those sorts of ideas that the government was trying to regulate supplements.
Because they couldn't make money off of them, and so they wanted to take supplements away from us.
But supplements was the way that we could be really healthy.
And I flirted with 9-11 conspiracy theories in the way I think a lot of people did in the beginning.
Because I hated George Bush II, I thought, well, I wouldn't put it past them.
Right?
I wouldn't put it past the neocons.
And there was that whole document from the Project for a New American Century, where they were talking about wanting some sort of large-scale theatrical moments that would give them permission to then enact their Middle East policy.
So I bought into some of that stuff, and I listened a lot to KPFK, which is a very sort of radical, progressive, but also sort of fringy radio station here.
I don't think they're around anymore here in LA.
And yeah, I think 9-11 was really the turning point for me because as I got interested in it, I consumed a lot of that material.
And what it did for me is at a certain point, I started to have my own analysis that said, you know what?
This doesn't add up.
This is filled with logical fallacies and the evidence doesn't convince me.
And I started becoming someone who got in a lot of debates with my friends trying to debunk 9-11 conspiracy theories.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I stumbled upon KPFK a few times and I was like, whoa, what's going on on this station?
But it did remind me, to answer that question from Matthew, during my psychedelic phase, the heavy psychedelic phase in my college years, I was definitely more prone to there are forces at work that are doing a lot of things that were probably just Errors in judgment, but it does bring up an interesting question to me in terms of, let's use 9-11 for example, because this is one of the most challenging aspects of discussing what we call conspiracy theories.
If you were to say that the Bush administration was continuing a lineage of International policies where the US government had its hand in things, trying to force other governments to do its bidding, that helped to lead to the conditions that created what would become 9-11, that's not really a conspiracy.
That's just political science.
But if you're thinking that they intentionally did that, that's another level.
It brings up the bigger point to me, which is that Americans are so arrogant because we think that we're infallible.
There's no way this group of brown people who live in the desert could possibly pull this off.
Right?
Without understanding, again, the conditions and the fact that we have so many holes in our social systems that are obvious now, but were obvious then too.
So, weighing out what is conspiratorial thinking and what is political science and history is sometimes a challenge that we're not really equipped to be able to manage emotionally or mentally.
I have this sense that because I never really flirted with any of these kind of, I don't know, public sector, not public sector, but like public knowledge conspiracy issues that, but I do still associate a number of periods and experiences in my life with conspiratorial thinking that I'm wondering if there's like two levels.
Like when I think about I think I ran into the 9-11 conspiracy material online fairly early on, and it just seemed so abstract to me.
It seemed so out there and beyond the realm of my own personal experience.
it was hard to imagine becoming really attached to it.
And I think I felt, I have felt the same way about area 51 and Roswell and, you know, just everything else that's kind of in the, in the common imagination.
But like when I think about being, becoming enmeshed in the notion that everything is not as it seems and and everything is connected and everything happens for a purpose, That has happened to me experientially in a number of different ways, usually through some kind of proximity to a spiritual community.
So, there's some difference there.
It's like I wouldn't, I don't think I ever had the temperament to move towards a kind of popular and externalized Alternative history, but I had private experiences that were like that.
Great example there that we can pull from right now.
You have the state of Texas, which is not on the power grid of the rest of the nation and claims energy independence, which is really that they're just dependent on fossil fuels and focusing on making sure businesses get power, but not really worrying about the residents because why would you want to spend more money on them?
And then you have climate change, which has forced this freak storm, which are becoming more common now because the generational storm is now once every 10 years, which is half a generation.
And you're watching the politicians in Texas on Fox News saying that Oh, it's the wind turbines that are causing the problems right now.
So, everything is connected.
Yes, our fossil fuel dependence has created the conditions for climate change in the Arctic to dump ice storms in Texas.
That is not a conspiracy.
That is actually what's happening.
Wind turbines as the cause to cover up for your own inadequacies as governing bodies is a conspiracy that is in plain sight that we need to actually be discussing and that they're covering up.
Yeah, excellent point.
I think too, Matthew, just to respond to what you had said as well, it sort of goes to the difference between paranoia and pro-noia, right?
That there's the spiritual version of it tends to be, and this is part of why we were so shocked at the initial wave of conspirituality, the spiritual version tends to be everything happens for a reason and it's all perfectly orchestrated for my highest good.
Right.
Instead of being paranoid, it's this term pro-noia, which I think Rob Regni came up with.
Yeah, although my spiritual awakening experiences were actually kind of paranoid.
Oh, okay.
But not in the sense that something terrible was going to happen, but that I was being destabilized in some fundamental way that I couldn't understand.
So, there were two, I'll just describe two, both within the context of Tibetan Buddhism, One in a cult and one not in a cult.
The one not in a cult, I went to an initiation weekend with some, you know, traveling Lama who was coming to a retreat center in Vermont and he gave, you know, kind of coherent talks about basic Tibetan ethics and philosophy and compassion.
But then the, you know, the sort of, if you stay for Sunday, you can get an initiation into the bodhisattva's path or something like that.
It costs a little bit more money.
And I guess I didn't want to leave that social environment just then and so I went on the Sunday and part of the ritual of the initiation was, you know, a number of throat sung chants which were extremely sonorous and and and beautiful and entrancing uh and then you know he said a couple of sort of ritual blessings but then he snapped his finger uh and
I kid you not, for whatever reason, the snapping of his finger sounded like a thunderclap.
I felt like my chest was compressed as though there was some sort of air gun that had gone off.
Within, over the next couple of days, I had this sense that something had changed not only me, but also the way in which I was going to look at the entire world going forward.
And then that became, then the next sort of similar experience to that was Michael Roach teaching the group that I was in how to do a particular form of kind of colloquial death meditation in which, you know, as you're walking around in your daily life, you imagine that everybody's actually a skeleton.
Or everybody's in some kind of zombified form, some form of decay that will drive home for you the point that you try to ignore all the time, which is that you're fucking dying and your life is short and what are you doing with it?
And so, being given that So there was one ritual thing where I felt like everything was supposed to change and now I was going to see the world differently and I kind of felt like I did.
And then there was an entrainment that said, here's this meditation where you're going to turn reality inside out actually actively and train yourself to see things as they really are.
And those feel like they both stimulated a kind of Paranoid disposition towards my relationships, towards how I was thinking, towards my behavior.
And yeah, so I don't know, that would have been my doorway.
I don't think I would have taken that to 9-11 though, and I don't know why that is.
Those are such intense experiences, I mean I hear you in one example talking about sort of being in an altered state in which you're highly suggestible and your sense of how you're processing reality is just sort of in a new place and then the other just sounds like You know, being put into a sort of horrifying, scary sense that for your own good, your grasp on reality is being destabilized so that you can see a higher truth, right?
Right, right.
And yet, there's something resonant about it.
I mean, you know, you really can't...
Right, you just can't argue with Buddhist philosophy on the point and on how explicit it is up front about, you know, here are your problems, let's get real about things, and we're not going to promise you anything.
It's incredibly compelling, and speaking as somebody who, you know, I just was with my mother as she died, there is a reality principle at play that stops everything else from moving forward.
And what I felt Yeah.
happened to the people that were in our sphere that got red-pilled is they had something of that sensation as well that everything that the normal world had stopped and that the scales had fallen from their eyes and that they were going and that something finally was going to matter something finally was going to happen something finally was going to be real so that sounds like that was the bait on the hook in a way right that they're
That there was something insightful and experientially profound going on in those moments that was undeniable, but then you talked about how it brought a kind of paranoid quality to, I think you said your relationships?
I'm not sure what else.
Yeah, well because the fear around are you doing enough to manage your impending death is really about how are you managing your behaviors and your ethics and what kind of future are you creating for yourself, right?
Which is total mind-melting stuff.
I mean, it's the kind of thing that I think a lot of people would see as a very positive opportunity to be accountable and self-reflective, but it sounds like you're describing a level of unhealthy sort of obsession, maybe.
Well, the thing is, and maybe this is why I'm associating it with a conspiratorial gateway, is that it moves into an obsessive quality that is very Halls of Mirror-like, where Your imagination is completely occupied with the meditation or the mindset?
Yeah, you know, it reminds me of someone I was very close with who got really into muscle testing, you know, applied kinesiology, and she had a long-standing eczema issue that had been treated with
with cortisone for probably like over a decade and she decided to go off the cortisone so she could listen to the wisdom of her body and heal naturally and not be reliant on something toxic which you know is understandable but she got into this incredibly paranoid obsessive space where I remember going shopping with her once and she had to muscle test every single thing so she would go okay I'm gonna get cereal and then she would muscle test every single box of cereal on the shelf to figure out if her body wisdom said it was right for her or not
Well, there's also an application of pattern-seeking to that that's very apropos as well, but the person's body becomes the ultimate determiner of what the reality of the object is going to be and how it's going to impact them.
And then I think, I mean, going further, because I had all of this cult experience, my radar for cultic dynamics also has given me a kind of conspiratorial tendency where
You know, I hear a whiff of, you know, stories about a charismatic or toxic leader, and I can instantly form a very complex and networked story in my head about what they're probably doing, you know, and who they're connected to.
And so, I can create conspiracy theories about religious organizations, like, in about five seconds, and that's really dangerous.
The problem is, most of the time, I'm not wrong.
You're right!
Because the stories of institutional abuse are conspiracy stories.
Someone did some harm, they were enabled by others, people covered it up, they intended to cover it up because they wanted to protect the organization and their position in it.
But I guess the thing is, is that the stories never line up the way you think they will.
And this is maybe where a tendency, or at least my tendency towards conspiratorial thinking It has maybe a guardrail to it.
It has a buffer at a certain point because I've done enough of it, research-wise, to realize that I'm never actually entirely right about the details, and the details can really, really matter.
Well, it seems like it's about knowing the difference between following your hunches as a starting point for research and going, Since it might be like this, let's look into it, versus thinking that your intuition is always infallible and you just stop there, right?
Right, and I think the human aspect, which is so important, and I think Anna does such a great job with this, is that there's got to be a recognition That people change over time in any reporting around any social movement like this because, you know, as the investigator, the person that you first understood as being, you know, the aggrieved party, they will get more complex as you talk with them more and more over time.
And the same thing goes with for the aggressor.
I almost think that, you know, Investigative journalism starts out as Marvel comics, but then it gets really mature and it's much more like a Chekhov play where people have multiple motivations and very complex internal worlds.
So one thing I find super helpful about Merlin's peddler consumer category is that it really sort of clarifies that there are people who are passive in relation to this material and that there are people who end up monetizing it.
But the thing is that as I heard her speak more of it, I realized that we often work in this category with influencers where those Things are collapsed where the person can begin as a consumer or present themselves as a consumer, but then also end up being a producer or a peddler.
And I think that's because with influencer culture, you know, there's this tendency to monetize the collapse between personal and professional identities.
So, you know, there's a lot of really popular influencers who, you know, are making their Followings grow by pulling back their curtain on whatever it is.
It's like, here's my home, here's my food, here's what my kids are doing, here's how cool my kids are, what a great parent I am, what a terrible parent I am, here I am working out, here I am so good working out, here I am really badly working out, here I am with no makeup on, here I am with no makeup on, here I am with great makeup on i'm making a power shake look at my abs um you know look at this amazing sex that i'm having oh i'm not having enough sex
i love julian's posts with his makeup tutorials i know it's amazing uh i'm just i'm just waiting for the whole genre of bowel movement shares right where like they're there oh that's it oh for fuck's sake No, I'm not.
She's the huge, huge influencer who created B-School.
And she just has the perfect phrase for what you're talking about.
you're following okay so in a landscape matthew i just wanted to say i don't know if you're familiar with marie forleo no i'm not she's she's the she's the huge huge uh influencer who created b school and uh she she just has the perfect phrase for what you're talking about she calls it opening the kimono oh right exactly right
Yeah, so in the landscape in which the influencer's professional identity is wrapped up in their secret life, the spectacle of their secret quote-unquote private life, I think the conditions are really right for this Collapse between consumer and peddler of conspiracy theories.
So, the private person, the influencer, who is sort of whispering into their selfie video, they can have doubts, they can have feelings, they can wonder about things, but then how will that bleed over into the public sphere?
And doesn't it have to?
And so, we have a case in point this week where yoga podcaster Jay Brown released a podcast where within the first 15 minutes or so, He gave this monologue in which he hints at reaching for the red pill, really, by expressing doubts about COVID media coverage and vaccine safety.
Now, I think all three of us know Jay Brown.
I know Derek and I have both been on his podcast.
Have you too, Julian?
No.
No, I don't really know him.
I have multiple overlaps with him in terms of you guys and other people.
Right, right.
Yeah, so pretty central figure in yoga influencer culture.
But the main context of this, and I'll just go to the end of his monologue because he kind of says right at the end, quote, I think the thing that's setting me off most, and those who've been around you know I talk about this all the time, both of my daughters had some version of breakdown today Unquote.
And then he describes how it stems from the pressures of lockdown, not being able to see friends, wondering if masks and computer school is here to stay.
All very understandable, very relatable.
And then he says, quote, I'm not prepared to accept that.
You see those stories coming out now, right?
No more herd immunity.
No more herd immunity possible.
And we're just going to have to live like this.
We're all going to have to get the shot every 6 to 12 months.
And we're all going to have to have vaccine passports if you want to travel anywhere.
And yeah, just get used to it.
I don't know.
I'm not getting used to it." So, he has these very rich personal sentiments about family, and then a personal declaration of, I'm not going to tolerate this.
But then before he discloses that personal stuff, he kind of nervously presents his doubts about the New York Times.
Times reporting on the WHO trip to Wuhan to investigate the source of COVID.
And he points to two separate articles in which one New York Times article quotes WHO officials as concluding that the Wuhan lab escape theory is very unlikely to be true.
But then there's another New York Times article that quotes sources as saying that patient records from early on in the outbreak are not being released by the Chinese authorities.
And this leaves questions open.
And so if you dig around a little bit in this, there's a very complex and politicized picture that emerges.
But what Jay takes away from this is that because two New York Times stories on different days cover two angles of the same complex story, the New York Times can't be trusted.
Quote, he says, if we can't trust the New York Times, which everybody seems to be taking their cues from, we have to question all of it, Unquote.
So instead of, you know, here's a dynamic news service that has strengths and weaknesses covering different angles of an ongoing complex situation, kind of like science, that dynamism, that lack of a clear answer offered now makes everything untrustworthy.
And then he abruptly pivots to his doubts about the safety of the vaccines.
But then it comes back to the personal zone of the influencer in which he can disclaim and caveat, but not really caveat.
He says, quote, so I don't really know what I'm saying.
You know, I'm not.
I'm not telling anybody what to do.
I'm not asserting anything.
I don't fucking know.
But this kind of onslaught is, I think, designed to make us feel confused and afraid, unquote.
So we go from family stress, very personal, to layman research, also personal, to quote, the declaration the New York Times must be wrong, to we have to question all of it, to the complicated news is an onslaught that is designed to make us feel confused and afraid.
And I would say that it's a really short distance between that and talking about the cabal.
And the thing is, if, you know, personal Jay never takes that step as, you know, personal influencer, it doesn't really matter.
Because influencer Jay put it out there and pushed a certain percentage of followers in that direction.
So, it's weird because he can present himself as a consumer and then, intentionally or not, he ends up peddling a particular set of stories about COVID and the vaccine.
While he's monetizing the private space of the podcast, and his followers might vote with their feet, they might reject this, they might walk away from their subscriptions, but until they do, What he presents here as part of his content is also going to be driving and be part of his monetization.
And if he gains followers and income from, you know, the J.P.
Sears crowd, then what?
Like, what if this actually works for him?
What if he gains more followers?
What if more people tune into the podcast because, oh, he's finally seeing the truth?
Yeah, the word designed definitely, it goes back again to the 9-11 thing, and it broadens out to a broader point.
And let me preface this, two things, I like Jay a lot, I like talking to him, but I think this segment is problematic, and what I'm going to say is inspired by what he said, but it's something I've also said before, so we can broaden it out from there.
Which is, in the yoga and Buddhist worlds which we cover so much, what is one of the fundamental principles?
Life is transient.
Nothing ever stays the same.
And all I've noticed in this last year is this rebellion against the fact that life is transient.
Because people are effectively saying, I'm going to live this philosophy of yoga where I'm going to tell these stories before my group fitness classes.
Where I got caught on the 10 today in some traffic and I was late to class and I had an emotional time with that.
And I'm going to use that as an example of life's transience.
But then you buffer up against nature, which is pandemics.
Yeah.
And climate change and you're not willing to understand that this philosophy you've been espousing and studying for so long actually has real world consequences.
And so when I hear this get used to it, you know, it comes back to this from last week with this idea of natural.
We're looking so myopically at what natural is.
If we want to talk natural, we have to talk about family units that stick together in the same household or in the same community for their entire lifetimes that interbreed with each other.
Very often, women historically would have sex with numerous men in the tribe so there was no infanticide, right?
That children were tethered to you for their entire upbringing if you want to talk natural.
We've created conditions in our society, and that's not to say that this isn't an uncomfortable time.
It's extremely uncomfortable.
And not belittling the challenges that parents and people are having right now.
But, if you're going to look and use these philosophies, as Matthew says, as your form of monetization and you're going to espouse these things and then not be willing to actually grapple with what transience means and the adaptability necessary for change, you're always going to be frustrated and confused rather than finding the strength
to work with the communities that you talk about all the time, my yoga community, my community, these people, actually finding solutions to these problems.
Also, if we just transpose the problem to ecological crisis or the impacts of climate change, what kind of statements do we get?
Like, I'm not prepared to accept that.
You see these stories about, you know, extreme weather events.
You see these stories about food chain disruptions.
And we're all going to have to just get used to it.
I don't know.
I'm not getting used to it.
It wouldn't scan.
Nature doesn't care what we're ready or not for.
We're living the consequences of our luxuries and our privilege of what we've done to this planet.
And now we have to face the consequences.
And if we're not willing to adapt, if we're just going to keep rebelling against it as if it's an aberration, we're going to keep falling into conspiracy theories.
Yeah, as if the events of nature must somehow, we must be able to find some villain we can blame for them, or as if the confusing nature of unfolding news and science, as we try to understand as best we can the world around us, as if that is evidence as we try to understand as best we can the world around us, as if
Maybe as a last point before we get to this great interview that Derek does with Anna, Anna, I just want to talk about speed in publishing and speed in the information cycle that brings us into contact both with conspiracy theories and with their analysis.
One of the things that was just so refreshing listening to you interview Anna, Derek, is that it's so abundantly clear how deeply she's digested her material.
Along with her experiences, and I can imagine that that happens in several stages.
And I think that's a real accomplishment when it comes to the speed with which QAnon has moved and had political impact.
You remarked that her Vice article on the conspiritualists of Austin was a relief to read because it had that kind of grounding and depth.
It had background.
And, you know, what I think we're finding is that in most cases the various layers of reporting and analysis that we have established in our media platforms are really struggling to keep up.
And that's why it makes sense that the more sensational aspects of QAnon rise to the top in day-by-day reporting and maybe violate, you know, Lakoff's truth sandwich rule all the time.
It's like the inflammatory thing is most visible and it becomes the headline.
But this never really serves the story, especially when this particular social disaster has such deep impacts.
You know, we have beat reporting that comes to us through The Associated Press and The Wires, we have The New York Times that it does breaking news, but it's also able to throw some analytical weight behind unfolding events.
But then we have these longer form outlets, Rolling Stone, Harper's Bazaar, New York Magazine.
And then, like, I work for The Walrus where, you know, I've had one feature booked and in process for, like, 18 months.
And, you know, the thing that happens is that we have really fast developing news stories, a lot of social and emotional damage, but it takes time to understand it.
And, you know, Sometimes delays are frustrating, and sometimes moving from, you know, beat reporting to feature length to, you know, book length just feels like ages.
But I just have to say this, that every single time I've had a feature delayed by a fact-checking process, legal review, or just the general chaos of the publication schedule, it has always gotten better.
If you have to interview more sources, it gets better.
If you have to re-interview for clarification, it gets better.
If a lawyer comes along and says you have to hedge strong statements for more nuanced ones, it often gets better.
There's a couple of exceptions where, you know, Like an idea, you know, hasn't quite taken hold yet culturally and you might get, you know, the lawyer sort of dumbing something down.
For instance, you know, when I'm reporting on abuse in yoga schools You know, the proper term for what somebody like Patabi Joyce or Yogi Bhajan does to his devotees is clerical sexual abuse and most publications and lawyers want to use the term sexual misconduct, which sounds like fooling around in the backseat of the Car or something like that.
So, we have this paradox, though, which is that QAnon and conspirituality spreads at viral speed, but that speed is inversely proportional to our capacity to understand it.
And that's true of everything, I think.
Speed is like this great confounder of understanding, but, you know, maybe listeners will, I don't know, get a see some benefit in just the other side of the curtain a little bit
with regard to, you know, what it takes to understand, to develop, you know, empathy, to develop a broader view, which I think is going to be necessary as we, you know, welcome family members and loved ones back you know, welcome family members and loved ones back from things like QAnon.
Anna Merlin is a New Mexico born Los Angeles based journalist who specializes in subcultures, alternative communities, conspiracy theories, crime, belief, death, sexual violence, and women's lives.
She's currently a reporter on the features desk at Vice News.
Previously, she worked as an investigative reporter within Gizmodo Media Group.
She was also a senior reporter at Jezebel and a staff writer at The Village Voice and The Dallas Observer.
In 2018, she wrote Republic of Lies, American Conspiracy Theories and Their Surprising Rise to Power, which was about the growing influence of conspiracy theories in America.
It's a fantastic book, and she's an exceptional writer.
I highly recommend it.
When I recently read the book, I was struck by the brief mention of QAnon, which I brought up during our talk, when asking her if she could have guessed what a juggernaut that would become.
And in the book, she embeds with and interviews white nationalists, Pizzagate fanatics, 9-11 truthers, UFO trackers, and many more.
Now, to give you a taste of her approach, she writes, Conspiracy thinking isn't just for the politically disaffected, the powerless looking to make sense of their position on the social scale.
We're seeing conspiracy theories wielded by the strong against the weak, by those in power against those without any.
Now if any two sentences could define the Trump era, there we go.
I first chatted with Anna in December for her Vice article.
Leading New Age conspiracy influencers plan their retreat to Utopian Lagoon.
I love that title, and it's about the Austin commune that we've covered on this podcast in the past.
We've had the pleasure of doing a lot of press since the launch of Conspiratuality, and in most situations, I feel as though the reporters are just being introduced to a world through a few sets of eyes.
Which is ours, Jules Evans's, QAnon Anonymous, Marc-Andre Argentino, and a few others.
People I really respect and are doing good work, but they always seem to have a little bit of a 101 flavor to them.
Which is fine, because people have to know this information, but since Anna has lived and breathed this world for so many years, she brought insights and an implicit understanding to the story that I have not seen by any other outlet, and so I had to continue my conversation with her and find out what it's like being a journalist on the inside of conspiracies.
Let's start by moving back and looking big picture.
How did you get into reporting and writing on conspiracy theories in the first place?
I had written a little bit about conspiracy movements broadly.
I was a reporter in Dallas for a while, and I wrote about the architects and engineers for 9-11 Truth, which were a big, obviously, 9-11 Truth-er movement.
Like a lot of people, I started focusing on this more intently in 2016, in the lead-up to the election.
The thing that jump-started me writing about conspiracy stuff more regularly was I went on a cruise for conspiracy theorists and covered it for Jezebel, where I worked at the time.
And at that time, I believe that was one of the instances you ran into anti-Semitic thinkers, right?
Correct?
I don't think so, actually.
I mean, people accuse me of being in the CIA, but I don't know if that was anti-Semitic.
You write a little bit about this in Republic of Lies, but what is it like interfacing with people who are anti-Semites and then you tell them you're Jewish?
Well, the main time that happened I was at a gathering for white supremacists that I was covering, so it was not surprising to run into anti-Semitic viewpoints.
It was mostly interesting because they spent so much time thinking about the Jews, but they have such a stereotyped view of Jewish people that it came as an enormous shock to the person that I was talking to.
That I was Jewish.
He was a white supremacist radio host and I think was very disquieted.
Maybe that he couldn't tell that I was Jewish.
I think these people pride themselves on having more of a radar for the Jewish people than they actually do.
It's interesting to see how much difficulty they have processing it.
It was instructive.
So you went on this cruise, and then something happened there shortly after that made you start focusing on conspiracy theorists.
What was that?
Trump had recently announced his candidacy, and people on board the cruise were really excited about Trump, even people who were kind of left-leaning.
And all this just new hope and energy had been awakened among all these different populations.
I had been covering the anti-vaccine movement for a while, and there was a bunch of anti-vax Stuff on the cruise, including Andrew Wakefield, was there, who's of course like the father of the modern anti-vax movement.
He was so excited.
What I later realized were sovereign citizen types were really enlivened by the idea of Trump being president.
People like Laura Eisenhower, who's more in the esoteric realm.
I was just thinking, what are these people going to do when he loses?
Where are they going to go?
Where are they going to put this energy?
I should really keep following what happens when these folks get pushed further to the margins, and then of course that is completely not what happened.
For me, I think covering conspiracy movements was a way to understand the country a little bit better, and understand these elements and forces that were clearly much more powerful than I had thought, and that as a journalist I clearly didn't understand, so I set myself to understanding them.
One thing that I love that you pointed out is it's a very common trope that people will say that conspiracy theories are a CIA operative, but you point out that Karl Popper had referenced it 10 times in his book, so it goes back at least to the 40s.
This idea had been around.
You also cite Glenn Greenwald, who talks about the fact that there are conspiracy theories, and that's obvious.
They do exist.
But we're in a place now where it's such a common and probably overused term.
Do you think that we need a new language for it?
How do you distinguish what an actual conspiracy theory is versus very real world misinformation and disinformation techniques?
Right.
Part of the issue too is that the term conspiracy theory has become so politicized that people automatically have a really negative reaction to it.
The point that I tried to make in the book and that we run into again and again is that it can be incredibly hard At first viewing of a story or a social event or a political event to understand what the forces are behind it, to understand whether this is a conspiracy theory, an actual conspiracy, whether there is misinformation at work, whether there is disinformation at work, which is more active and more directed.
And so it's hard to tell.
History is chaotic in the making.
I try really hard not to automatically dismiss anything or slot it into a box right away.
I try to withhold judgment as much as I can, though At the same time, some of the worlds that I write about, I hear the same ideas being repeated over and over again in slightly different forms.
And so it is somewhat easier for me to say, this is a conspiracy theory that is being repackaged.
And you actually write about the evolution of fluoride, for example, how every decade it was bad for you, but in a different way that kind of matched the times.
And I feel like my personal one that I've been tracking for a long time is the anti-vaxxers.
Do these ideas, do they have to change with the times in order to keep being valid for people or to keep indoctrinating other people into them?
Yeah, I mean, conspiracy theories are endlessly adaptable and we've seen that.
Primarily with QAnon.
I think that's been incredibly instructive for people to understand how it's continued to change forms to bring in new people.
The anti-vax movement is another great example of that.
There have been a bunch of different waves of anti-vaccine thinking, literally since the 17th century when vaccines were first created.
And in every sort of generation and iteration and cultural context, the reasons why you're not supposed to trust vaccines are a little bit different.
To make sure that they are appealing to a new audience.
It's really kind of incredible how creative we are with our thinking.
Speaking of anti-vaxxers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
just lost his Instagram feed.
We discussed it this week on the pod, but immediately my social media feed was filled with pro and con for different reasons.
What are your thoughts on that?
It was sort of inevitable that he was going to get kicked off of at least one of the major platforms because he is such a prolific user and his Instagram specifically was full of misinformation.
He was pretty unabashed about it.
As far as I know, his Facebook is still active.
I'd have to check.
That could change by the time this goes live.
The thing that happens here is that these folks are aware that they're going to get kicked off these platforms.
This has been happening for years.
And so they have this little window in between When they get kicked off of one major platform and another to try to be like, I am being censored.
The truths that I am sharing are too powerful for the establishment.
They're afraid, you know, please follow me on this new, whatever, this new platform.
So they have a little band of time to try to further monetize being censored.
And then it goes away.
We'll see how that works.
In RFK's case, he was doing live broadcasts with incredibly influential people with millions and millions of followers.
He was spending a lot of time promoting incredibly virulent anti-vax conspiracy theories.
It is just hard for me to see it as a public good for him to continue having the widest possible microphone.
If he wants to continue making those claims, that's great, but I'm not sure why Instagram or Facebook should necessarily be allowed to enable him.
So how do you feel when people say that it's a freedom of speech issue?
I agree that he has, in this country, he has an absolute right to freedom of speech, but does he have a right to an Instagram account?
You know, like to me, those two things seem different, but I do understand the concern over the fact that we are all having these public discussions and the public sphere on privately run platforms.
Like I get it.
I understand people's discomfort with that.
And I understand the fear that it's a slippery slope or that they're going to ban you next.
it's important to understand too, though, that this is a selling point.
You know what I mean?
This is something that he's going to be able to use to drive home some of his points about being censored because his information is simply too powerful.
It is somewhat beneficial in a way, though it is also... I mean, he's not wrong.
His audience is going to get smaller if he is permanently banned from Instagram.
It just is.
Near the end of the book, you write, social media aside, it is our job to counter bad speech with better speech, and you kind of make the case for education.
And I think this is a great example to talk about that, because one of the very first episodes of Conspirituality, I had interviewed Indiran Ahmed, who is from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and we talked about how anti-vaccination groups had made these platforms about a billion dollars from what they could track.
From various means.
So how do you educate people when you look at Dell BigTree or RFK who are monetizing this?
How do you educate people that the people that they put, or Andrew Wakefield is the greatest example, right?
They're taking advantage of this sentiment by making a lot of money from it.
Can you get that message across?
One of the most common accusations is that anybody who writes factually about vaccines, whether it's journalists, whether it's public health researchers, whether it's scientists, that we are making money.
I have been accused of being a big pharma shill more times than I can possibly count.
Like you can see into the room behind me while we are talking.
I'm not exactly living in the lab of luxury.
So I think it's important just to, for journalists anyway, to report really clearly on what people are trying to market and monetize.
In promoting anti-vaccine beliefs, one thing I talk about a lot is that the anti-vaccine movement is largely directed by personal injury lawyers and a desire to sue particularly vaccine manufacturers and civil court, which they can't currently do a lot of the time.
I've also written about things like Autism One, which is a big anti-vaccine conference that is literally marketed to parents as a scientific conference.
Parents get to this conference, they are fed Garbage and fear-mongering and lies.
And then they literally go from the lecture halls directly into a marketplace where they are sold stuff.
It could not possibly be more direct.
So as much as I think it's important for people to have a certain sense of what the actual arguments that people are making are, it's also really important to just be clear about what is being sold.
Like quite literally the products that are being marketed because all of these people have something to sell.
Yeah, and you also write about, obviously, Alex Jones and supplements and we can follow that down line.
JP Sears doing the same thing right now.
What are some of the other things that you found that conspiracy theorists are selling?
How are they monetizing There's a lot of anti-5G stuff, obviously.
One of the most expensive things I've seen for sale is an anti-5G tent that you get in.
There's also these things called Faraday cages, which people put around their Wi-Fi routers and then complain because their internet stops working because that's what happens when you put a metal box around your router.
Another big thing is hyperbaric oxygen chambers, which are promoted as a cure or treatment for autism.
They're incredibly dangerous.
One person has died from the use of at-home hyperbaric oxygen chambers.
Specifically, parents who have children with autism are marketed just an endless amount of garbage.
I wrote about this a few years ago.
You know, everything from like special lollipops that are supposed to treat symptoms of autism to, you know, mega doses of vitamins to all kinds of other nutritional and supplement regimens.
When you have an illness or a disorder, you have just an endless opportunity for profit and these people take advantage of it.
Yeah.
The one thing we were talking about this week, but I followed because my personal area of interest is psychedelic studies and therapy and the counter to that is the antidepressant industry and how part of the marketing, if you read the DSM 1 to 5, is the creation of diseases in order to be able to sell products to.
And one other one that came up when you were just talking was pendulums for 5G, right?
Jordan Sather is one of those that sells those sorts of things.
That's very true.
I had forgotten that he has some stuff to market.
Obviously, chlorine dioxide and MMS are another big one, which are both bleach fundamentally, but a lot of these people promote them.
As far as antidepressants go, I know many people who have Literally had their lives saved by using antidepressant drugs, but at the same time I understand the discomfort around the idea of medicating every feeling.
So for me that is a much trickier territory and it's not one that I'm really like, I am not an expert in and can't go into, but I definitely have been like following those discussions really closely and the idea of manufacturing disease versus naming it better to allow better treatments for it.
It's super interesting to me.
Absolutely.
And I suffered from anxiety disorder for 25 years and I was on a benzodiazepine.
So I have some personal history with it as well.
And it did help for that time, but they were created for short-term use.
And that's where the catch is.
And they work better with psychotherapy.
That's another, that's an aside.
I feel like, especially when you're talking about anti-vaxxers and autism, someone like Wakefield is just taking advantage of these people who are in pain.
And it's really, it's one of the It's one of the hardest things to watch, and that's why I've found Brian Deer's reporting so valuable, because he really drills in with that.
He does.
The last time I was at Autism One, Wakefield was one of the main speakers, and he lays out for this audience of desperate parents this incredibly apocalyptic worldview.
He's claimed many times that one in two boys will have autism by 2032, these very specific, very apocalyptic sentiments.
And then a parent in the audience was like, well, Andrew, what do we do?
And he said, we make a movie.
And switch directly into a very skillful fundraising appeal for his next film.
And it's like, again, it is about as clear as it could possibly be how it is being used to market.
Interestingly, related to that, as I just mentioned, whatever substance you're talking about when you're dealing with mental health, talking to someone is usually the most valuable thing for people.
And so as a reporter who is embedding with conspiracy theorists who would possibly be skeptical of you, it seems like you have good relationships, you're able to have good conversations with people.
How has that process been reporting?
Do you think it's a high level of empathy or are there techniques that you use?
I mean, I was just talking about Autism One.
Like, I got kicked out of Autism One, which I knew I would.
They kick journalists out.
That's what they do.
It's fine.
That's up to them.
But at the same time, that weekend, after I got kicked out of the conference, I stayed.
I continued to have discussions with people who were there to attend, you know, in the lobby.
All of them knew that I was a journalist.
There are things that I don't do.
I never talk to somebody under false pretenses.
They always know who I am.
They always know what my personal beliefs are to the extent that it's appropriate.
They always know when I'm taking notes or planning to use it for an interview.
But I think the thing That has worked for me in a lot of different situations is that I have built an ability to actively and respectfully disagree with people because everyone can smell bullshit.
Everyone knows when you're just humoring them and pretending to disagree with them.
I think it is unethical to Sit there and agree with somebody and then go back and you know write a story Lighting them up or making them look foolish.
I have very candid conversations with people and it seems to work.
It seems to make people More willing to speak with me rather than less it sort of enables me to actually have a conversation And where it kind of like pushes pushes some boundaries that doesn't always work.
There are lots of people who They only want to talk to me to the extent that they can use it to make some kind of point about the perfidy of the mainstream media.
I've had lots of weird interactions with the InfoWars folks where they try to get me to go on just as some kind of trap so they can yell at me.
And it's like, no, I don't need to do that.
But I mean, in general, being able to, I don't know, have clear and open discussions with people where you tell them what you think and let them tell you what they think is surprisingly effective.
It sounds simple, but it is.
Yeah, I have this unique position of being an atheist who has a degree in religion and I kind of attract religious nuts, especially I lived in New York City.
The street people would pick me out a lot and I liked engaging with them because I could speak to it, I just didn't believe in it.
And I'm wondering if you've had situations like when you start talking to people and there's some disagreement, do you feel like they're trying to convert you?
I think that a lot of people who hold, you know, what we might call fringe beliefs are very used to being disagreed with or misunderstood.
And a lot of times people just kind of shut down and walk away from them.
So having any kind of discussion, I think, for them is exciting.
There's a lot of cases where I think people are trying to convert me, especially being a woman of childbearing age, talking to anti-vaxxers.
There's often a lot of direct appeal to me as, you're going to be a mother one day and you're going to have to make these decisions.
And I'm like, yes, and I'm going to choose to vaccinate my children because I believe vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective.
So I definitely have discussions like that.
But you know, some folks like white supremacists or Nazis who know that I'm Jewish, like they know that my viewpoints are my identity.
Is not going to change.
Everybody talks to you for their own reasons and if somebody who does not like media is talking to a reporter, they probably have a calculated reason for doing so and I try to be aware of that.
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt scared because of your beliefs?
No, I mean, you know, like when I went to this white supremacist gathering, it was two things.
It was a gathering on private land and then like a public rally the next day.
And it turned out that these groups who were there were a coalition of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who were trying to like band together to form a new, more powerful white nationalist movement.
And all of them, a few months later, went to Charlottesville.
One of the groups that was there, one of their members murdered Heather Heyer with a car.
When I was there, because of this specific situation, I did not feel unsafe.
For one thing, the gathering on private land, I was there with my partner, who's a photojournalist, Because he was there, someone knew where I was.
I don't sneak into things, which I think is sort of important.
I would feel very unsafe doing that.
I would say that there are times when I feel uncomfortable and unhappy.
I have not yet felt physically unsafe, but I have plenty of colleagues who have, who cover extremist movements, or the far right, or were in D.C.
on the 6th, and have been physically unsafe.
Luckily, I haven't yet.
That is one question I wanted to get to, which is the emotional toll of reporting on what you are.
How do you deal with that and does it weigh on you?
The things that I write about the most are conspiracy theories and sexual violence.
And I would say that writing about sexual violence is much more of a just grinding, wearing away, you know, drops of water on the stone until it wears away into nothing.
Like that is something that I have to take breaks from.
And that is more difficult for a lot of reasons.
Writing about conspiracy theories and the way that they influence public life or public policy, it feels really urgent.
It feels really important.
And it just doesn't have quite the same impact on me as other things do in part because I just find it so interesting.
So part of me is always able to keep it at a little bit of a remove and just find it endlessly fascinating.
If I was like more in touch with my feelings about it, I might find that it's more emotionally difficult for me than I realized, but I'm just going to keep pushing that down.
Well, that's impressive because I know sometimes some weeks I'm fine and some weeks we're doing this and I'm like, I can't believe that this is what we have to do right now.
Well, but also, like, you know, these are communities that you're, like, part of.
That's the other thing, too, is you're writing, or you're broadcasting about the dissolution and deforming of a community, you know, and it seems, yeah, that would be really difficult for me, too.
Well, speaking of the wellness community, sovereignty is a word that we identified very early on that was picked up by wellness influencers, but it's actually a political term that you've written about as well.
Have you noticed that term being used?
Yeah, it's interesting to me because it is a very weighted term.
I've written for many years about sovereign citizens who obviously, you know, hold that they are not citizens of the United States or whatever other country they live in and that they are able to, you know, free themselves from the tyranny of federal government or paying federal taxes.
And so it's interesting to me to hear that term being reworked in the wellness community, especially when it is used by people who are clearly taking a hard right turn.
Speaking of right turn, when did you notice that the right wing and the left wing weren't as far apart as we sometimes think they might be running in these conspiratorial Right.
Well, you know, that had been evident to me for a while from covering the anti-vax world because there are folks in that world who are extremely, you know, what you would call crunchy, left-leaning, whatever.
People who are fundamentalist Christians, you know, who have like, large families and believe it's religiously mandated to do so and everything in between.
And so there are a lot of communities where there is a high degree of overlap and where those ideas of right and left start to sort of dissolve much more quickly than you might think.
So would you attribute it to being just more tribal in nature?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Yeah, I think so.
I don't really know what else to attribute it to other than also to the fact that sometimes people have a really negative reaction when their beliefs are described as right or left and they sort of want to prove that that's not actually what they believe and they're much more independent freethinkers than that, which can sometimes lead to them taking on really contrarian positions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As I'm sure you've noticed.
I was just listening to a podcast about Nassim Taleb and where he was saying that he doesn't want to be labeled.
Labeling is part of language and how we understand.
It's why we can learn how to tie our shoelaces and then move on to other things.
Because if we didn't chunk information, then we'd always have to be relearning things.
So this constant idea of you can't label me, it's bullshit because it's not a bad thing.
We need to categorize in order to understand.
Yeah.
I mean, often when I hear that objection, it is that I am accurately describing someone's beliefs in an article and they do not want them described.
I will describe somebody's beliefs as anti-vaccine, for instance, which if you are claiming that all vaccines lead to illness or death or, you know, that every vaccine is produced because, you know, Bill Gates wants to microchip all of us or something like that, those are anti-vaccine beliefs.
Sometimes when you use descriptors or shorthand to describe someone, they object to that and they take it to being negatively or unfairly labeled.
But I'm just asking questions.
Right.
Yeah, that's very common.
Everybody says that as though they're the first person to ever ask a question, which Is always super interesting to me because, you know, a lot of people are working in traditions that are much longer than they might realize and are working with historical concepts that I don't know if they're aware of or not.
And that's just always interesting for me to see how often history repeats itself.
Yeah, if people had a better understanding of history, I think we'd actually make progress, but we just think that one of the biggest ones in wellness is this, well, not even wellness, but we can see it in the modern yoga incarnation, this idea that the Great Awakening, that we are the ones we've been waiting for, and we're finally here, we're about to reach that point.
This has been told over and over for as long as we have literature, and probably much longer than that.
Yeah, the Age of Aquarius, a final climactic battle between good and evil, or a day of judgment when the drowned and the saved will be divided.
These are very common stories that human beings tell each other across all kinds of traditions and beliefs.
Speaking of the final battle of good and evil, you do write about QAnon in your book.
Yeah.
But this is only a year into it.
Could you have foreseen what Q was going to become then?
You know, I should have.
You know, at the time that my book came out and at the time I was writing it, I was primarily thinking about QAnon as being an extension of Pizzagate and as sort of the next step of Pizzagate, which was to kind of broaden this conspiracy theory and set of beliefs a little bit wider from a basement of a pizza parlor in D.C.
to a much bigger sort of global cabal.
The thing that I didn't foresee, and I should have, is that Pizzagate, because it is a conspiracy theory that was born and created on the internet, came to try to encompass so many other conspiracy theories that came before it.
It came to be sort of this UR belief system that tried to chunk together all of these different things, which I did not see coming.
You know, the fact that QAnon people wouldn't suddenly be fixated on a guy that they believe is JFK Jr.
secretly bringing the messages from inside the global cabal, I did not see that coming.
And what do you think are the biggest dangers about QAnon in general?
The thing that I worry about primarily is when I see that it leads to what seems to me to be a worrisome demonization of individual people.
Like at the start, QAnon was basically saying, President Trump is doing a really good job, he's just doing it in secret, and all you need to do as the faithful is to wait.
And now I see, you know, a much greater sense of sort of Individual like anger and despair and this idea that you know these global this global cabal is getting away with things and we can't allow it.
And so I start to worry about people feeling empowered to take individual action that could be acts of violence or domestic terror.
We've already seen a guy derail a train.
In Southern California because he wanted to draw attention to the so-called global cabal.
Obviously some of the events on January 6th were driven by people with QAnon beliefs, though not all of them.
And we've also seen people who decide that the child welfare system is part of the cabal and so that they are justified in, you know, taking action against the court system that may have decided to remove their children from their homes.
These things worry me because I think they create a lot of Instability on an individual level.
And that is what I worry about primarily.
I don't know if you follow Parler Takes on Twitter.
It's now Patriot Takes.
They posted this week, they kind of did a roundup of a number of people who are getting agitated that the action hasn't happened yet and they're going to take it in their own hands.
And then we see Lin Wood doxing politicians now and to hundreds of thousands of QAnon believers.
That impatience is very common.
My telegram is all folks in the worlds that I cover.
And so I can see the impatience and the despair.
It's kind of divided between people saying, you know, you just need to hold the line and continue to be faithful.
And then people starting to say, well, we need to figure out how to, how to advance the cause of justice.
You know, we need to do what is required.
And that's, yeah, that, that terrifies me.
Earlier I mentioned Glenn Greenwald talking about the fact that there are real conspiracies and you spend an entire chapter in your book to UFOs and I don't think the idea that there is other life in this universe is a conspiracy.
I think humans sometimes People think very highly of themselves and the idea that there would be life elsewhere is obvious, but there is the level of conspiracy of whether or not the government is covering things up, which has always been a topic which you go into, and I'm wondering how it was going to those conferences and talking with people on that level and how you feel about that.
Well, I'm from New Mexico, so I obviously believe that UFOs are real and that aliens are real and I have no questions about that.
No, it was actually really great, and I write about this a little bit in the book, that UFO subcultures are kind of an example of how great quote-unquote conspiratorial thinking can be.
Not every corner of the UFO world, because there is some white supremacy in the UFO world, there are some really ugly racist and sexist beliefs in the UFO world, but there are also people who are genuinely just incredibly curious about life beyond this world.
Incredibly just I'm just excited about the possibilities of what alien civilizations could bring us.
You know, there's a pretty widespread belief in the UFO world that alien civilizations know about advanced anti-aging technologies or free energy or this other stuff that would make, you know, life on Earth much better if they were to come down and impart this wisdom to us.
My time with UFO folks was some of the easiest and most pleasurable because even the most out there stuff is sort of at its core less about demonization and more about the universe, which was refreshing.
My middle name is Martin, and when I look at my earliest journaling writing, I always wrote my middle name as Martian.
But yeah, I put that in the level of Loch Ness Monster, Yetis, Bigfoot.
They're harmless conspiracies to me, and I don't even put them in conspiracy.
It is a level of questioning, and it can get dangerous.
I didn't know about the white nationalist UFO cohort, though.
Can you talk a little about that?
This is not a huge group of people, but it does exist, this sort of claim that one of the, you know, more evolved races of alien beings are, you know, an Aryan race, that they're tall, that they're blue-eyed, that they're the one, yeah, you see where this is going.
I mean, the thing too, though, is that a lot of, a lot of UFO communities talk a lot about government secrecy, you know, like that's a big thing that comes up, is government spending, government secrecy, like how much we as citizens deserve to know.
about what our government is doing or what they're studying or what our practices of national defense look like.
So those are like important questions.
Those are super interesting.
And then at the other end, yeah, you have the people trying to prove through various machinations that all of the good aliens are white.
It's tied in with this thing called pseudo-history that like Jason Colavito is a great writer who writes about this stuff a lot which is sort of remaking history to make it sound like Aryan races are the only people who have ever been responsible for any kind of advancement.
Yeah.
Yeah, I came across that last week, somebody making that argument again, and you just, again, lack of understanding of history.
It's all you can say and really too much focus on your own history, I guess, or what you think your own history is.
Now, in your book you write that exposure to anti-government theories make people less likely to want to vote, and you also relate that to climate change, that there's a sense of powerlessness that comes.
And how do we get past that?
How do we talk about these things in a way that will not make people feel powerless?
Yeah, so the study that I was writing about there is this study from University of Kent.
Basically the idea is that exposure to certain kinds of conspiracy theories instills in people this idea that like everything is already predetermined or playing out or happening at a level above us that we can't control and that's a problem, right?
It encourages a lack of civic engagement that is just not good and it's not what we need especially right now.
Some of it is Again just this the work of creating a better society leads almost inevitably to reducing the grip that conspiracy theories have on people.
It just allows people to feel like they have more of a say in their own lives and in the institutions that govern their lives and they have a better understanding of how to actually impact those institutions that will lead them to feeling less hopeless and having less of a sense that there's nothing that they can possibly do.
Now, you mentioned Telegram a few moments ago.
We've talked a little bit about social media, but in the book you write that, ultimately, social media cannot be held directly responsible for the violence of conspiracy theories.
And again, this was 2018, so have you changed your mind about that, seeing what has happened in the last three years?
I mean, I think that what's changed for me is obviously, you know, watching a conspiracy theory like QAnon become totally formed and created and spread on social media, I obviously have to rework my idea that social media doesn't, like, produce a conspiracy theory because it clearly did.
Like that's where QAnon came from.
I guess the other thing that I have seen since 2018 is that, you know, as uncomfortable as it is for me to admit, like individual bad actors who have been deplatformed have lost a lot of their power.
Like Alex Jones is a really good example.
Alex Jones is harder to find than he used to be unless you deliberately go to Infowars.
And that has had a pretty direct, obvious sort of negative effect on his finances.
Yeah.
He's straight up fundraising on his website which he didn't used to do.
I know this directly because he got very angry about my book at one point.
His lawyer gave him a copy of my book and he read it and he really didn't like it and he did like a 20 minute segment about The book and about me individually and like, you know, put up a big photo of me and talked about how I was a witch and I hated America.
So usually when somebody does something like this, especially somebody with a platform like his, I have like a really bad day.
You know what I mean?
I get a lot of emails, I might get some phone calls, like it is somewhat disruptive and I didn't realize it was happening.
Because he had already been taken off of so many major platforms that I got a couple of weird emails and I started to think that somebody must have posted something somewhere, but I couldn't figure out what it was.
I didn't know it was Alex Jones for like two full days.
I had a very direct example of the ways that some of these major actors, if they are harder to find on social media, they are less effective at what they are trying to do.
When you write about him, I mean you're honest about him, but your interaction with him in the book when you met him was not that bad.
You got limited time, sure, but it seems like... How do you square that when you actually meet someone like that in person and maybe it's not such a bad exchange and you do make some headway or at least you find a little bit of common ground and then they turn around and do something like that to you?
Well, you know, first of all, I should say that our interaction was so brief.
I ran into him at a Mexican restaurant, tried to ask him some questions, realized that it was just not, it was not going to go anywhere and just kind of left.
But yeah, like one of the negative reviews in my book was like, why didn't she scream at Alex Jones?
Why didn't she like, you know, tell him what for?
And it's, it's kind of for me, it's like, what, what is that going to do?
How is screaming at Alex Jones really going to advance anybody's understanding of what he's doing in the world?
The fact that I had one, like, okay interaction with him where he didn't, like, throw a drink in my face did not make me more sympathetic to him or anything like that.
It did not humanize him to me.
Like, I know that he's a human being.
He's just a human being who makes bad choices.
This is something that happened a lot with coverage in 2016 and 2017 of white supremacists.
Like, Richard Spencer, he would have these pretty reasonable one-on-one interactions with reporters, and as a result, they would write much kinder pieces than they would have otherwise.
And so I think it's important not to be blinded by the fact that even people capable of doing serious harm can behave in more or less normal ways when you're interacting with them one-on-one.
It is not indicative of their ability or inability to do harm.
That brings us to the final questions, which has to do with reporting on these topics.
Two weeks ago on the pod, we had criticized Brett Weinstein about his appearance on Bill Maher, and then Eric, his brother, dropped into our clubhouse that Sunday that I was hosting.
And he was obviously there because we had criticized Brett.
For about 40 minutes, we just talked.
I turned to interviewer because that's my inclination is to talk and to be an interviewer, not to start yelling at someone.
Besides that incident with Alex Jones, have you come across that?
I don't think people understand the role of the journalist is not to always yell at someone, but to actually ask them what they're thinking.
Have you had other instances like that?
Yeah, I mean the thing that happens for me is that sometimes I will be offered access to someone and will not take it because I do not see any further journalistic value in interviewing them.
I've had a handful of people try to do that who are sort of trying to raise their profile or bring themselves back in the spotlight and often my logic is kind of like, you have had your say.
It is very clear what you believe And I am not sure that it serves anybody for me to talk to you, necessarily.
You know what I mean?
I don't often run into these people in my day-to-day life, so I don't often have to decide what I'm going to do about it.
A friend of mine, Brendan O'Connor, who's another journalist, had a funny experience where he was at a bar pre-COVID.
Milo Yiannopoulos and another person walked in.
some of the people that Brendan was with at the bar, like decided that it was not acceptable for Milo to be there and sort of started activating to get him out of the bar.
And so Milo Yiannopoulos was pushed out of the bar by these people, not physically, but was made to feel unwelcome until he left.
And so Brendan was in this weird position as a journalist where he's watching what's happening.
And so he watched what was going on and then he walked outside and interviewed Milo for a couple of minutes, which I think is about the best you can do in that situation.
It's not generally my role to yell at people and it's not my role to give them a friendly welcome either.
I don't know, it's somewhere in the middle.
Yeah, back in the aughts, I was a full-time music journalist before I turned to other writing, and occasionally I'd run into a musician who I'd given a bad review to.
That was always uncomfortable, but that's also the hard thing to explain, that the role of the critic is, first of all, subjective, but it's also, you need criticism in this world or else no one gets better.
You do.
That's something artists have trouble, anyone has trouble in their thought processes understanding.
As I've mentioned when we've talked elsewhere, your piece in Vice on the commune in Austin is the best piece I've read in the year covering all of this because a lot of the times I'm reading and people are just trying to figure out a conspiracy theory and try to explain it.
But you took the story, you knew it already, you knew what was going on and you pushed the story forward.
And I really appreciate that.
And I wonder if you have any advice to journalists or writers who are covering conspiracy theories who might be new to this world, but are trying to express what's going on.
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of people who are suddenly really interested in conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, like it's a hot, hot subject right now.
And there is a little bit of frustration among folks who have covered these things for a long time, you know, some people much, much longer than me, where there is a lot of journalism out there that seeks to explain the beliefs and then just kind of stops there, which is not Not necessarily super helpful.
Just another explainer about what QAnon is.
Not super helpful.
One thing that I always talk about is trying to focus on the alliances people are making.
Who is bankrolling them?
Who is funding stuff?
And the avenues by which they are trying to spread whatever it is that they're doing.
What technology are they using?
What are they shying away from?
That's part of the reason why people focus so much on things like Facebook and Twitter individual bad actors are misusing their terms of service is that it's like one of the only ways that we can really talk about like how these ideas are being communicated and perhaps how how those spaces could function better so that they weren't just outlets for misinformation.
So you know one thing I say to journalists who want to cover this stuff is to try to have A stronger sense of history to try to go farther back than just a couple of years to try to understand maybe what these people were promoting or doing 10 years ago or 15 or 20.
You know, not everything started in 2016 and also just to question whether an individual person Needs to be famous.
