It was inevitable: QAnon has stormed HBO. Less inevitably, Conspirituality Podcast has been invited to an academic conference Down Under. In this episode, we’ll review how the first two episodes of Cullen Hoback’s “Into the Storm” lands, and wonder about what happens when conspiracy movements come under big-screen and academic scrutiny.Cullen embedded within the labyrinthine Q-world for almost four years. He globetrotted, gaining incredible access to a network of social avoidants and keyboard warriors. His sympathy is both touching and problematic. Our own embedding in the wellness world — sixty years between the three of us — hasn’t been quite so weird or dangerous. But it does raise a similar question: how clearly can we see the conspirituality of the world we’ve worked in for so long? As Cullen tries to draw out the humanity and intentionality of the QAnons, how are we understanding — or missing — our own subjects? Then there’s the question of impact. Will America understand itself more clearly after Cullen’s work? And where will the scholarship on conspirituality go after we dump our research on that conference table?In the Ticker this week, we review the new Lululemon mat, report on how Imran Ahmed’s team at the CCDH identified the social media Disinformation Dozen and succeeded in partially deplatforming conspiritualist power-couple Sayer Ji and Kelly Brogan. In the Jab, we’ll be looking at the woes of Astrazeneca Covid vaccine as they approach applying for FDA approval.Show NotesLululemon gives the yoga mat a clever makeoverLavrence and Lozanski on Lululemon’s neoliberal schtickWorkers making £88 Lululemon leggings claim they are beatenCCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” ReportMatthew’s thread on Zen and the Art of the Q-dropOn Psychological & Influence Ops in the Info Age: Q in the Crosshairs (CW: disinformation site)Hyperobjects: ‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the AnthropoceneFirst we take Deakin, then we take Berlin
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Conspirituality 44, Netflix and pill.
It was inevitable.
QAnon has stormed HBO.
Less inevitably, Conspiratuality Podcast has been invited to an academic conference down under.
In this episode, we'll review how the first two episodes of Cullen Hoback's Into the Storm lands, and wonder about what happens when conspiracy movements come under big screen and academic scrutiny.
Cullen, embedded with the labyrinthine Q-World for almost four years.
He globetrotted, gaining incredible access to a network of social avoidance and keyboard warriors.
His sympathy is both touching and problematic.
Our own embedding in the wellness world, 60 years between the three of us, hasn't been quite so weird or dangerous, but it does raise a similar question.
How clearly can we see the conspirituality of the world we've worked in for so long?
As Cullen tries to draw out the humanity and intentionality of the QAnons, how are we understanding or missing our own subjects?
Then there's the question of impact.
Will America understand itself more clearly after Cullen's work?
And where will the scholarship on conspirituality go after we dump our research on that conference table?
In the ticker this week, we review the new Lululemon mat, report on how Imran Ahmed's team at the CCDH identified the social media disinformation dozen, and succeeded in partially deplatforming conspiritualist power couple Sayurji and Kelly Brogan.
In the jab, we'll be looking at the woes of AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine as they approach applying for FDA approval.
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.
Well, first up in the ticker this week, it is about iterations in retail.
And I'll just start by saying that before recording, I noticed that Pepsi and Peep have teamed up to create marshmallow soda this spring, which might be the most disgusting example of anything you could possibly put into your body.
But also really shows how something that disgusting can get marketing traction, which brings us to Lululemon.
Now, we seem doomed to repeat this story ad infinitum, yet capitalism isn't as dynamic as we thought, Pepsi and Peeps aside.
And the business operating inside of it are not as resilient as sometimes we perceive.
And so we come to Lululemon, which has actually been surprisingly resilient, especially over the last year.
Their stock price rose roughly 50% in 2020.
So that means even during lockdown, overpriced yoga pants seem to sell pretty well.
Now, of course, they pivoted into the broader athleisure world years ago.
Still, you have to keep it fresh to compete, and now we arrive at their latest offering.
A revolutionary yoga mat, or as Fast Company puts it, in a manner that I'm pretty sure is paid content placement, though I can't be certain about that, Lululemon has given the yoga mat a clever makeover.
The new $118 mat is filled with 3D ripples that are purportedly designed to, quote, guide you through the most common yoga poses, end quote.
Their concept is that by having the ripples underneath your feet, you no longer have to look around to orient yourself spatially, which they're somehow presenting as a deeper form of meditation.
Now the ripples are carved into the map though, right?
They're not moving underneath you?
No, it's 3D, not 5D, it's 3D.
So it's an old paradigm.
Otherwise they would be sort of creating, you know, ley lines and crop circles for you in the air.
Okay, good.
Yeah, for the $300 version, you get your own crop circles.
It's pretty fantastic.
Now, the idea of a deeper form of meditation in yoga isn't a new concept, of course.
One marketed benefit of, say, Bhikramana Ashtanga is that since you know the sequence in advance, you can meditate the entire time since there are no surprises.
Personally, I take no issue with repetition as a form of hypnotic contemplation.
But this strange article presents a paradox that it never solves or I don't think it even understands.
You're being sold a product that claims to do the annoying work of limb placement for you, though you're instead searching for ripples the entire time.
And, I should add, you're specifically told to not overthink the ripples.
Wow.
I kid you not, here's the actual prescription of this mat.
Quote, users should just practice as they normally would, and over time they'll find that their hands and feet naturally feel more comfortable in specific circles.
The idea is that eventually this positioning will become second nature.
Kind of like on a yoga mat?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, the first studio I taught at ever was at the Hoboken YMCA, and I really appreciated that dark carpeted basement room.
It was lit only by a cheap table lamp placed in the corner, and sometimes the light bulb didn't even work.
In my class, people wore sweatpants, t-shirts, whatever was comfortable, and while most yogis used mats, since it was carpeted, you didn't need to, and some didn't.
Everyone knew everyone else, they focused during class, and they communed before and after.
And I'm not trying to romanticize the past, because I'm sure spaces like this still exist, which is just a simple room filled with yoga void of pretension and fashion.
Yoga that's part of life, not a lifestyle.
And it's not really marketable or scalable, and it's certainly not sexy, but it outlasts trends and it doesn't worry about appeasing shareholders.
And everything about this new mat is not that.
And back in the aughts, I was a Lululemon ambassador for two stores in Manhattan.
And I have to be honest, the staff was amazing.
They actually offered me space to hold charity events a few times and they took no cut at the door so we were able to give all the money to the charities we were working with.
So I understand that within the conglomerate, real people do incredible work.
And I also take no issue with earning a living selling products that bring value to your life.
But when the best you have is a yoga mat with ripples, it's really time to rethink your existence.
Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the Hoboken YMCA.
I'm wondering, how did it smell in there that it was carpeted?
It smelled like, it didn't smell as bad as the Soho Bikram studio that I started my Bikram practice at.
I'll say that.
But, um, you know, they vacuumed it, but yeah, it was, it was a YMCA.
I'm realizing that between the three of us, I'd be interested to hear from you, Julian, but like.
I think we're almost all at the age where we can remember this kind of C-shift from a kind of do-it-yourself yoga space that might have been in a church hall or the YMCA and then the upscale studio space.
I didn't actually feel I had that because the first yoga studio I ever went to was Yoga Zone in New York and they already looked like they were wearing Star Trek clothes.
And also it was run by Alan Finger, and he was a fashion photographer.
Did you guys know that?
No.
I know the history of fashion, yeah.
Yeah, and actually the upstairs, it was in this old warehouse building in lower Manhattan, and I can't remember the address, but upstairs, the owner from Bumble and Bumble had made his start.
And my understanding was that in the off hours of the studio, they actually rolled out like a, a backdrop in the studio itself and did photo shoots, uh, in the yoga space.
So there was this crossover between high fashion and like hair and, you know, like athleisure and yoga.
And that was, so that was part of my experience right from the beginning.
You had a little bit of that with the inception of Jiva Mukti with Sharon and David coming from the punk world.
It was a different aesthetic, but you still had a sort of crossover between disciplines that existed from the 80s in New York.
From the West Coast, my first awareness of Jeeva Mukti was of their advertising aesthetic.
What was it, the wild child of yoga, right?
It was definitely coming out of a different mindset and even though it was punk rock, it was still like, it had an aesthetic, right?
Even if that aesthetic was like gold spray paint on plywood so that, you know, Sharon could be on a throne or something.
Or a dais.
Alan Finger is South African, yeah?
He is, right.
And he claims some South African lineage, too.
I think his father taught him yoga, but his father learned yoga from some Indian master who happened to be in Johannesburg.
I don't know.
Yeah, and he strikes me as kind of the Paul Ferber of yoga works, right?
He's really like the guy behind the people who you think actually started it.
Right.
Well, I love the quote in this article that you're citing, Derek, where they say the point of the mat is not to overthink the ripples.
Although I would appreciate it.
It sounds like the designers at Lululemon have overthought the ripples and I would appreciate the opportunity to overthink the ripples at times because I think it would distract me from thinking about climate collapse or about the labor rights abuses in Lululemon contractors.
Other factories in Bangladesh.
I mean, this is a company that still isn't vetting its factories.
There's like this horrible story from 1999.
I mean, the whole sort of outsourcing labor story is demonic to begin with.
But I mean, as late, as early as two years ago, we've got stories of workers being beaten by their supervisors in factories making Lululemon products in Bangladesh.
They had so much bad press for several years.
I'm surprised they're still around.
Well, why, Derek?
Did you get a sense of why their stock price has actually risen?
Because they've had to keep all of their high-end retail spaces open during lockdown.
How does that work?
This is, I think, the first time we've covered Lulu on this podcast, and I only did it because of the ridiculousness of it.
The only thing I will say is I do know that a couple years ago they pivoted to Try to expand outside of yoga into athleisure.
Yeah, right.
That could be part of the reason, but the resiliency and the increase, I really don't have an answer for that.
I mean, they came out with clothes with like functional cashmere or something like that, whatever it was called.
Next up on the ticker, did you say dirty dozen?
The Center for Countering Digital Hate just published a snappy report titled The Disinformation Dozen.
Now, the report analyzes a sample of 812,000 anti-vax posts on Facebook and Twitter between February 1st and March 16th of this year, and it shows that 65% of that content originates from just 12 accounts.
That's amazing.
That's, can we just pause there?
12 accounts.
Yeah.
65%.
Yeah.
812,000 posts in six weeks from 12 accounts.
Joseph Mercola tops the list with RFK Jr.
in second place.
Our familiar trio of Sayer G, Kelly Brogan, and Christiane Northrup rate in positions 8, 9, and 10, respectively.
The organization, headed up by Imran Ahmed, who listeners may remember from Derek's interview for episode 10, is calling on social media platforms to do better.
The report said that 9 of the disinformation dozen are still active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, while only 3 have been removed from just one platform each.
As of Monday, though, a tweet from the CCDH celebrated that Sayerji's GreenMed info has been removed from both Twitter and Instagram, but his 500,000-strong page on Facebook is still standing.
The report cites data from previous research showing that platforms fail to act on 95% of COVID and vaccine misinformation reported to them, and that the Instagram algorithm still actively recommends similar misinformation to users.
59.2 million people follow anti-vaccine accounts across the platforms, and just 20 of those accounts make up two-thirds of that number.
On Facebook alone, 73% of 689,000 anti-vaccine posts originated from the disinformation dozen.
Now, the study goes on to point out that Facebook fails to address the sources of anti-vaccine content.
And I think this is the really big takeaway here that they've tracked it down.
It's like it's not just the people spreading it.
This is where it comes from.
And the Facebook algorithms struggle to correctly identify the content.
Before providing what are really good and actually quite Funny and engaging profiles of the prominent offenders.
The report makes the following recommendations.
They say de-platform the disinformation dozen.
De-platform key anti-vax organizations.
Establish a clear threshold for enforcement action.
Display corrective posts to users exposed to misinformation.
Add warning screens when users click links to misinformation sites.
And just on cue, I received a newsletter from GreenMedInfo addressed to my pseudonym for which I applied for it.
I really do recommend people go check out this report.
It's very savvy and very engaging, and there'll be a link in the show notes.
And just on cue, I received a newsletter from GreenMedInfo addressed to my pseudonym for which I applied for it.
So I'm registered under Andy.
Dear Andy, this is from Sayer G, and the subject line actually is, They're attacking me!
Who will be next?
First they came for Sayer.
Yes, and I did nothing.
And then they came for Kelly.
Anyway, I'm reaching out to you personally because I'm undergoing a very personal kind of attack right now that may also affect you in the future, in which I need your help with.
And they've found their own kind of propagandists to publish blog posts on how Imran Ahmed is actually running what they're now calling the uh, commission, wait, wait, wait, what do they call it here?
They, something about digital hypocrisy or something like that.
They're calling hate extremists.
Right.
So, so, um, so they're calling Ahmed, uh, you know, they're saying that he's running a digital hate group because, um, uh, you know, they've, they've targeted, uh, these people and unfairly called Sayer and his colleagues anti-vaxxers because of course they're just asking questions. these people and unfairly called Sayer and his colleagues anti-vaxxers Yeah.
Nothing is as it appears.
Right.
You know, just sourcing through the site after you shared that newsletter, I can't believe this needs to be repeated.
But if you're going to relate anyone today to the Stasi and you're going to put up Pictures of gold.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, If you're going to use that as an example of how you're being targeted, you've not only lost the argument, you just really have a poor understanding of history and the people who are actually affected by movements such as that.
And given all of the gravity of the problems we're actually facing in the world today, to feel like if your skin is so thin, that every little bit of criticism, you end up doing like 10,000 word responses that just make shit up.
You really, you're in a poor spot at that point.
I think it's also really notable that Sayer is saying that Imran Ahmed's work is defamatory.
And he's not asking, however, as he asks for money, a one-time donation so we can continue to serve you with information that will educate and empower you, as one of his bullet points suggests.
He's...
He's not asking for money for, like, a legal challenge or to launch a cease and desist or for any kind of legal work.
He's not going to challenge any of what's actually being said about him.
The play here is to whip up a kind of sentiment around censorship and divert the audience to Telegram and wherever else he's asking people to go.
So I'd like to cover a fantastic article that appeared in First Draft News Association.
It's called Disinformation Goes to Hollywood, Four Lessons from Journalism.
And I think this will flow into the review that we're going to do of Colin Hoback's work on the HBO QAnon special.
The piece is written by Whitney Phillips and Claire Wardle.
And a couple of quotes off the top.
Journalists covering falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and white supremacy face enormous challenges.
The most immediate and vexing is that reporting on these problems can inadvertently spread false information to entirely new audiences.
They can normalize dangerous messages and incentivize future harms.
As Melanie C. Green, a social psychologist at the University of Buffalo has shown, the process of transportation is central to narrative persuasion.
I love this new language, at least new language for me, narrative persuasion and transport.
The more transported someone is by a story, the more likely they are to be persuaded by its messages.
Showrunners and writers are quite literally in the business of maximizing narrative transportation.
When they are considering stories that feature falsehoods, extremism, and identity-based violence, they must therefore proceed with extreme caution.
So they lay out four lessons, which I can really affirm from my own work in cult investigative journalism.
The first one is that the most obvious place to point the camera often narrows the story.
So So, what they're asking journalists and documentarians to really think about is, if you zero in on the hot spot of narrative, you're probably going to exclude context, you're probably going to bypass structural causes for what's unfolding in the story, and you might
You might also fall prey to something that I tend to call bad appleism, which is, you know, this notion that if the bad actor that is the focus of the sort of documentary prosecution is removed, that somehow things will be rectified.
Number two is that the more nuance you bring to white supremacist characters, the more risks there are.
And they describe these risks as being the risks of normalization, as in, you know, these are just normal people who get caught up with, you know, a bad crowd or who become Indoctrinated in ways that they wouldn't otherwise if circumstances were different.
But I think the point that they're making in this article is that there's a lot of people who brush up against white supremacist ideology or against QAnon and don't wind up becoming white supremacists themselves and they don't wind up becoming capital stormers.
And there's also this question of, well, who gets cut from the examination if you spend a lot of time on the bad actors?
They say here that in lesson three that light doesn't reliably disinfect.
The quote is, "When light successfully disinfects, it's typically because the storyteller and audience are in basic agreement about what's good for society and what's detrimental." But But when there's a lack of agreement, light isn't a disinfectant.
It's publicity helping spread the illuminated messages to wider audiences.
I think the three of us could basically paste that above our desks and contemplate that every day because it's a really that's a really sort of powerful and subtle statement, especially when we think at least when I think about how we bond or meld with our own audience and how we the fact that we're in basic agreement about what's good for society as the quote says.
We'll tend to feel like we're doing well in terms of disinfection, but for those of us who don't fundamentally agree with what we're saying from the outset, that blowback effects or boomerang effects can also be there.
The fourth lesson is that tragic personal narratives aren't automatic public services.
And the basic sort of calculus here is that the public service of any piece of journalism of reporting will rise as the sensationalism of the story falls.
Interesting.
I mean, there's a couple questions that come up for me.
One is, are you suggesting that there is some kind of essentialism At play with regard to, you know, who gets deep into white supremacy or QAnon or storming the Capitol?
That there's a problem with trying to figure out the external factors that may have gotten them there?
I think that narrative focus upon individuals tends towards a kind of essentializing set of questions, right?
Like, who is this person really?
What are they really about?
And that can't help but evoke a kind of empathetic response.
Which I don't necessarily see as a problem.
Is there a way that we can tease apart the person from the ideology they've become possessed by?
Well, the example that comes to mind for me is that when I was reporting on, you know, Patabi Joyce assaulting students every day of his career, people would say, people would automatically sort of turn to notions of his intention, people would automatically sort of turn to notions of his intention, Well, you know, what was he really feeling?
What was going on for him?
Was there domestic abuse in his own background?
Was he sexually abused as a child?
There's almost like a... That's a sleight of hand.
Yes, I know, but it's a cultural sleight of hand that seems to... I don't know, it's like a bug in the...
The structures of storytelling and journalism on the whole, where suddenly when a criminal is held up for examination, the focus just tends to provoke these questions about intentionality and inner nature, and is he really a bad guy?
And, you know, could he be mentally ill or could he be mistaken?
And those questions are all interesting.
but they can't be resolved by the narrative itself.
They can only draw people to it as points of interest.
Those questions are very pertinent right now in America with two mass shootings in a week because the motive story overrides the fact that we need gun control.
So it distracts.
And it distracts in a bunch of different ways because the gun control people can, you know, I don't know, they can focus on his character as being,
or the characters of the shooters as being outliers, or the problem was inherent to them rather than to the structure of gun availability. - Yeah.
Or it can go the other way, where there's all kinds of speculation made about the guy's mental illness, or how much he's hurting, or how many social services he needed and couldn't take advantage of.
You know, the more time that's spent on all of those questions, the less time, as Derek, you're suggesting is spent on the actual policy issue, right?
Which is, what are you going to do about, what are you going to do about there being more guns in America than there are people?
In 2020, 40 million guns were sold in America.
Yeah.
The year we were in lockdown, 40 million guns.
Well, it's also the year of people preparing for civil war.
For fuck's sake.
And this question around, like, just one more thing about Potabi Joyce, this question around his intentionality even got down to the point where people would talk about how, well, he couldn't be sexually assaulting people because nobody actually saw him have an erection, for example.
So, I mean, that's a total misunderstanding of what sexual assault would be anyway to begin with, but the focus on it was on his body so intently and what it wanted and what he might have been, you know, meaning in the context of his supposed ethics or his celibacy or whatever, that the actual bodies of the survivors were completely sidelined.
It wasn't about their needs or what actually happened to them or how their lives had been traumatized.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
AstraZeneca's woes continued this week with reports that the Independent Data Monitoring Committee flagged their recent widely reported statistics from American Phase 3 trials.
Now, only this committee, which is overseeing all American vaccine trials, can see behind the double-blind controls in place for these studies while they're being conducted, and they then share this data with the companies after the trials have concluded.
So, in this case, AstraZeneca failed to include that updated information in their press release, instead choosing data that showed a higher efficacy percentage.
Calling this an unforced error, Tony Fauci, who was cc'd on the scolding email to AstraZeneca, said the outdated data was just a little better, and that the more recent data wasn't bad, but it didn't make them look quite as good.
Now this comes, unfortunately for them, after several European countries halted distribution of AstraZeneca over concerns about blood clots.
Those turned out to be occurring at no higher than the population's background rate.
AstraZeneca immediately issued a public statement saying they would cooperate fully with the Data Monitoring Committee to correct the error, but this is really an example of how mistrust of medical science, especially vaccines, gets perpetuated.
You know, and this is just so tone deaf by the company, and it really, it's one of the things that makes me really understand why people are skeptical of pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry in general.
But especially right now, given the climate that we're in, and knowing the growing fervor of anti-vax devotees, to do this Is really irresponsible and it just it just this one gets me because the just be honest with the data and you're going to have more people have some faith in your institutions.
I want to get a better picture, though, of what it actually looked like.
So you're saying, Julian, that AstraZeneca failed to include the updated information in their press release.
Are we talking about a one-page presser?
Yeah, it's basically just listing, like, here are the results.
We had this much percent efficacy, this many side effects, etc.
So is it possible that it's like a communications error?
I mean, they do default to outdated data, which happens to make them look better.
But if they had the press release prepared with the prior data and simply didn't update it, is it possible that this is actually an honest mistake and somebody's gotten fired in a real hurry?
I think that's definitely possible.
Or there are so many layers of copy editing and controls over communications that that couldn't possibly happen.
Do you have any sense about that, Derek?
No, I'll just say that if that were the case, I mean, that's a potential argument, but it's still, to my eyes, not an excuse.
Oh, no, I'm not saying it's an excuse.
I'm just wondering, like, what does it actually look like?
I'm wondering about their intentionality.
I'm I'm wondering about well, because everybody else is wondering about their intentionality.
Right.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So it's so interesting.
It's a colossal fuck up.
And it's something that should, it's like the one thing as a vaccine company right now you should never do is make a mistake like this that makes it look like you're trying to hide something about the vaccine.
All right.
So we are going to take a look at Q into the storm.
This is Cullen Hoback's HBO documentary six part series.
There's been two episodes released so far.
I think they're going to dribble them out two at a time over the next two Sundays.
This guy was embedded for Three or four years with some of the main players at the center of the QAnon movement and the process of embedding and what it actually means and how that timeline plays out is really, really important for what we actually get and what we see in these opening episodes.
You know, one of the things that I'll say probably when we get to it is that, you know, We should really know what it means to follow QAnon in 2017 or 2018 and start compiling footage and not really know what's happening, but know that it's really, really weird and interesting.
But before we get there, what did you guys think?
What were your general impressions?
Well, my top line impression is that the documentary has really humanized the characters and what kept coming up for me is Nomadland, which is up for Best Picture this year, which is kind of a heartwarming tale of migrant workers, meaning Americans who have to travel around the country to find jobs and they live in their RVs.
Right.
And the film is a very like, look at how these people bond.
The book, though, goes hardcore into Amazon's terrible labor practices and how they've created the gig economy.
And none of that was in the film.
It's very whitewashed.
And in fact, in the film, in the very early part of it, they They film inside of an Amazon factory, and my wife was like, how did they get access to that?
And as the film unfolded, I realized it was like, oh, because Amazon probably read the script before, because there's no way that if they had read the book, they would have allowed it to be filmed there.
And I mention all of this just simply because as of now, and hey, we're a third in, so we have four more, but I'm seeing way too much humanization of the characters, which is fine, they are people and we should know their stories, but I'm seeing very little about the real world Damage that QAnon has done and the way it's being set up right now is just to, in a sense, glorify them in some capacity.
And that's the most problematic aspect to me.
There are some lines that I think they're trying to straddle in terms of how they've chosen to make this.
And so there's one stream that's going on, which is this very much like wanting to give you an immersive experience of online culture.
And I know you're going to talk about the opening credits, Matthew, the whole way that they've done that artwork.
The way that they show you the difference between 4chan and 8chan and the way the quick cuts, the whole production and editing style, I think really sucks you into this world where, to go along with what Derek was saying, there is a kind of heady, exciting sense of these underdogs participating in something that becomes very exciting and important-seeming.
So they're straddling that line and then they have this other thing, which I actually think is quite effective, which is in episode one, which is going back and forth between the experts and sort of explaining the history and then also interviewing the true believers and the bakers who are participating in that.
And it takes us into their world without having editorial commentary, and maybe that's part of what you guys are getting at in terms of the humanizing, like it just shows them.
But I do feel like there's something effective about going back and forth between, oh, here are the people who are involved, and then here's this sort of historical pulled-back expert analysis.
We do have, Derek, not an extensive, but I think a very impactful opening montage of Capital Storming, probably using footage that Cullen is taking himself because it is... I haven't seen it.
I mean, there's so much footage that I haven't seen, but it feels kind of like Saving Private Ryan, the opening of that.
It's very disjointed.
It's so Greek, though.
Right.
It's very brief, but we get this sort of explosive indication of where this is going.
Yeah.
I had a real problem with that.
I'm sorry.
I wanted to, I wanted to mention this because he says the storming of the Capitol.
And then he says the storm and he makes it see the storm that Q had had prophesied.
I think he says it makes it seem as if what happens at the Capitol was the coming true, even though, yes, it's the culmination of that part of the story that didn't sit well with me.
And then the fact that it was just Briefly mentioned and then we're off into all this other stuff for the next two hours.
Do you mean that and do you mean that because the capital storming is is kind of like a spectacular event in the timeline, but really the the full cultural effect is really shouldn't shouldn't be reduced to that?
Yeah, I mean that, but I also mean that all of Q's prophecies absolutely failed.
The fact that people who were captivated by QAnon were involved in storming the Capitol didn't mean that any aspect of Q's prophecy came true.
It failed.
But glorification, Derek, like, didn't you get this overwhelming feeling of nausea from all of the principal characters?
I mean, I don't know anybody who would be attracted or like...
We're not, we're not, I don't, I don't feel like we're being shown a club that anybody wants to belong to.
It really dives into them personally and maybe there is some way of that that's going to transform into understanding the conditions that led to the creation of this.
I mean, you do see that in parts, especially When you look at the origins of the, I forget what the name of it, the comedy platform that led to 2chan, that led to Anonymous, they had a very clear timeline.
But what I'm missing is any sense of the social conditions, the racism and xenophobia in America that underlie, you know, you see the people who've been indoctrinated into QAnon, and then you see this sort of
Orientalism of the people who are in the Philippines and Japan and they're the ones behind it and they're expats that have moved there but you're not really seeing any of the social conditions come out and that's really troublesome.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things one of the things in that montage history of, you know, something awful leads to 4chan leads and so on and so forth.
There are a number of really super ugly details that are left out and they're left out, I think,
To probably not complicate some of the story that Frederick Brennan brings to the table, because Wizard Jan, which was one of his first boards, was, yes, it was an incel board, but the incredible misogyny and rape-cultury material that was popular on it has been a major driver of the misogyny of those, or it's emblematic of the misogyny of those boards.
And, you know, there's some...
There's some flashes, I don't know whether it's in the second episode or not, of what the actual boards look like and how abject the imagery and the humor is, but I don't think we get a clear sense of how many lives were actually ruined by campaigns that emerged from that culture.
Including Gamergate, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That aspect of it almost seems like it substitutes for what Derek's talking about.
So that instead of the social conditions and trends and racism and things like that, you have just these moments of really shocking imagery of the kind of stuff that was posted on the boards.
That's more kind of lurid than any kind of social political analysis.
Right.
I mean, one of the things that really struck me, I don't know how this landed for you guys, was he opened with a sort of text slide, a typing text slide.
I don't even know how you... it's in that sort of green screen programming coder... Matrix.
right?
Where he, where he prints drop 885 on the screen.
And this comes from March of 2018.
And it was, everything has meaning.
This is not a game.
Learn to play the game.
And he left it up there for a long enough beat that I had this sense of like, oh, wow, all of these people who grew up, you know, on the chans and, you know, NASCAR and football and, and whatever they NASCAR and football and, and whatever they were doing in their Rust Belt towns were suddenly exposed to a kind of Zen poetry for the first time.
I had seen that in the Q drops before, but it, it, it hadn't really like struck me the same way in the gut that, oh, oh, there was something mystical about the diction here that I think made some of these people feel like they were gaining access, not just to the mysteries of the deep state, but the mysteries of their own deep psychology.
And I'd never really sort of, you know...
And maybe seeing some of the actual influencers and bakers gave me that sense as well that, oh, if I tried to get inside their bodies and think, what would it feel like to be James Craig or Craig James and come across this thing and be filled with a kind of thrill or excitement about mysteries unfolding somewhere.
And maybe that sensation just completely overrides the fact that, you know, in the underwash of all of this stuff is violent antisemitism and everything else.
I'm going to talk about this in the transition when we talk about academics, but specific to language, what you just referenced is that maybe for the first time, these people also felt that they suddenly had a semantics that was specific to them and and they understood a secret language.
I mean that whole the whole section one of the most revealing sections uh two actually revealing sections one was You know, the low-tech message boards, which you mentioned, and the fact that how many boomers they appeal to, whether you were talking about the actual chans or the aggregators.
But it kind of harkened to when the internet started in the 90s.
It's more of an internet that you can understand.
It doesn't have all this flashy technology.
So if you're of an older generation, It kind of speaks to that nostalgia.
And besides that, though, one thing we cover with all of the cults and conspiritualists we talk about is there's an insider language.
And everything about this, the other revealing part is when the moment a Q drop happens, how those QTubers immediately get online to try to translate it and how they go back and forth about that.
And the excitement of the translation seems to be a driving factor here.
Totally.
I mean, there's, there's a, there's, there's a really interesting back and forth here that, that I'm thinking about, you know, that, and I've, I've brought up this concept before.
I feel like the Q drops are a kind of slow form of digital cold reading, right?
Where the Barnum statements are put out there, and then they get interpreted, and then they get matched with current events that they happen to fit with.
And just like with psychics and astrologers, most of it actually misses the mark, but there seems to be this sense of escalating sense of uncanny accuracy for the ones that hit.
And that then in turn feeds back and informs what the next drops are going to be about, just as you would with cold reading.
In this case, it's the dark underbelly that predates today's social media and seemed to always almost kind of self-select for the anti-social, disenchanted, angry, lonely, perhaps perverse, not particularly smart, I hate to say it, or interesting people who found a sense of belonging via the skill set of trolling and ugly inside jokes.
And I just find this really interesting in terms of how it then overlaps with more contemporary social media.
And all of the stuff we cover where there's the same sort of thing of putting out, you know, channeled readings or predictions about what's going on in the world or a kind of Zen poetry, right?
And then responding to how your audience feeds into that and all these influencers who gained enormous followings as a result of getting red-pilled.
I mean, and it feels too like Derek was just saying, they found a secret language.
And Matthew, you were saying that for the first time, this demographic suddenly had those neural circuits activated that went, oh, there's hidden layers of deep meaning that are exciting somehow, right?
And they are cognitively scrambling in ways that Yes.
that the literature, even the most psychedelic literature that they might have been exposed to, if they were Christian, for example, would not have ignited.
What's the sort of, the most extreme literature that you can get into as an evangelical is Revelation.
And what is Revelation but the series of dreams that St. John...
John has that are going to predict the future.
But you know what they don't do?
You know what Revelation doesn't have?
It doesn't have this kind of meta-analysis of who the reader is.
Revelation does not use the second person address.
Suddenly, all of these guys are being introduced to the voice of Alan Watts or something like that.
And so they have to feel, I think, that they're getting something sage-like out of this process.
And there's even this moment where Craig James is talking to his wife about how these guys never go on the Chan boards, actually, or most of them don't.
And he says to her, or Colin asks him, you know, how do you feel about going on these boards that are filled with child pornography and all of this?
As a Christian.
he turns to his wife, he turns to his wife and he says, he says, well, I just, you know, I'm very grateful that I have the support of my partner who understands that I'm doing something, you know, that, uh, that, that has to be done.
And she kind of nods very demurely and, and obediently and a sense to not only the fact that, well, he has the nobility to be able to go into these dark places, but also the payoff is that he's becoming kind of a sage.
Yes!
He's becoming kind of a priest or something like that.
This is the other thing I wanted to say about that.
Even though the chans are this nihilistic trolling kind of domain, right?
Boiling underneath all of that is this childlike longing to be part of something noble and significant.
And these cryptic breadcrumbs spawn a movement that also relied on the capitalist enterprises that sprung up around it, these bakers all becoming very influential YouTubers.
But it made me think of how Obama's electoral process was in some ways driven by this younger campaign sensibility who knew how to use email marketing and do grassroots funding, and how Pop culture references and digital campaigns and rebellious counterculture activism around freedom and tyranny was co-opted from the left very successfully by the Trump campaign.
And to me, that's the real story of this early phase of what was going on with Pizzagate and the Chans and all of that.
You bring up childish though.
The one thing that jumped out at me and I will say, I mean, I am into the documentary.
I will finish it.
There's a lot of value in it.
So my criticisms are specific, but there is a lot to celebrate here.
And the one editing thing is just showing that it, If it does turn out that they're making the case that Jim Watkins is Q, which it seems that they're building toward, how just incredibly immature this man is.
I mean, he draws a penis tattoo on somebody's arm when he first meets them in order for him to work with him at one point.
He romanticizes Archie Bunker as a great time in America because he just said whatever he wanted.
He also- He doesn't realize that Archie Bunker was the fool of that show.
Yeah, and also just the fact that he's setting it up very well to show just how he lies, because Watkins says that he hasn't paid attention to politics in months, but he's wearing a MAGA hat as is his son, they show it off.
And just talk about peak conspirituality.
The man funds 8chan in part from his pig farm where he's planning to build a yoga studio.
I mean, it's just like everything about the definition of conspirituality is wrapped into this right now.
Well, I wanted to say, too, that episode two for me was very slow, and I think it kind of goes to some of what you're both saying.
It felt like a meditation on the Watkins pair, you know, and on Frederick Brennan.
And they're kind of temporarily intriguing, but it did make me wonder how long an audience not already sort of really into this would stay tuned into that.
Because I found episode two really dragged.
I think, yeah, I hadn't really thought about the sort of initiate to QAnon.
I mean, I'm very fascinated by the Watkins, and so I'm kind of glued to it, especially to Ron, who has this strangely dissociative affect, and there's all of these long shots on his enigmatic, partially smiling face.
It's like we're staring into...
I don't know, internet culture itself and all of its irony.
But I'm constantly wondering what these guys' values are, what he loves, what impresses him.
But then we find out that, you know, he's actually a meditator as well.
He talks about, you know, doing practices to control his ego so that he doesn't get wrapped up in people criticizing him online.
And so there's this priest-like quality as well, or this kind of internet monk quality that he carries off that's super, super interesting.
And I also think lends more kind of drive to this notion that people involved in QAnon are actually seeking something that is ineffable or from another time and place.
Yeah, the other thing that I found moving through episode two was the free speech conversations, and this was really illustrative of how amoral and decontextualized the concept is on the right, and especially in this kind of online subculture.
Twice, that very famous Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote, which is usually attributed to Voltaire, Was evoked, right?
Though I detest what you say, I would die for your right to say it.
As if somehow hosting a cesspool of criminal, hateful, violent excreta is somehow linked to democracy and freedom from real tyranny in the world.
So in terms of early impacts from Hoback's documentary, here's something fascinating.
I follow a Twitter account called QOriginsProject.
I'm not sure who runs it, but it's pretty central within the QAnon research community.
And they posted a link to a blog post that was written by one of the founders of Patriot Soapbox.
Now, her name is Christina Erso.
She goes by the handle Radix.
And she, along with her husband, ran, his name was Pam Fladanon.
I can't remember his name at the moment.
But they ran together a 24-hour QTube channel for years before they got deplatformed.
And And here's what their blog post suggests is that they've actually now gone full Blueanon.
And what I mean by that is that they have started to endorse
The series of explanations put forward by people like Dave Troy and Jim Stewartson and Steve Hassan, who's been a guest on our show, but also Daniel Morrison, who have these emerging theories that Q is a PSYOP, an organized political PSYOP involving Russians and augmented reality game enthusiasts, and that the whole thing concretely tracks back to the Cold War.
And the comment, I think, from Q Origins Project is really salient here.
They say, if your way of thinking about QAnon is close enough to the conspiracy theorists' worldview that they can go, yeah, let's repurpose that.
It's because you are selling a conspiracy theory.
The emphasis is still on shadowy actors manipulating us from afar.
And they point out that Radix actually quotes Something like 15 paragraphs of Daniel Morrison's Medium story.
I think the title was QAnon is a PSYOP.
And we know who's behind it.
And we know who's behind it.
And I remember reading that and having it sent to me and being tagged in it over and over and over again.
And I could never make head nor tail of that article.
And then there was a follow-up article that said, resources, and it was supposed to be the footnotes for the article, and basically it was just this sort of wall of disconnected screenshots that basically looked like the Q map, but made by a Bernie Sanders person or something like that.
So, to me, it brings up this problem of mimesis, right?
Because when you look at the Blue Anon stuff, when you look at the meticulous and very impressive work that people like Dave Troyes have put together, it feels like There's the same urgency at uncovering a very specific and nefarious plot that QAnon itself embodies, and this makes sense because QAnon is destroying lives and provoking domestic terrorism, and so the response to it is going to have this drive to it.
But what I notice is that these parallel or opposing research streams are both embedded in the online world, and so the research that, you know, That now these QAnon supporters are now quoting to sort of let themselves off the hook is like an endless tracking of links.
There's lots of sharing around of URLs as if the heart of people's motivations and passions are like fully contained online.
But that's not how Hoback works.
That's not how this documentary came together.
It's not how I work when I'm doing investigative work on conspiritualists or cult abusers.
That's just not how slow media that, you know, has to really look into corroboration and who people are and what they're likely to do and not do.
That's not how that works.
So for me, I can just say that a story might start with a piece of online media, Somebody posts a blog post, Kelly Brogan releases her message to dispel fear, and I realize, oh, that's a conspiritualist message.
But then it really has to start with an interview.
Like, you've got to start, you've got to find a person to talk to, you've got to talk to them in real time about the content, you have to, who's associated with the content or making the content.
You have to feel out who they are, what they're about.
You have to figure out what they're willing to attach their names to.
But if you do just pure online research, people can be super split in terms of, you know, their persona and what's really going on.
Transparency is a big issue.
So, if I get a hit on a story that, you know, looks like it's promising or looks like it's worth pursuing, I book the interview, and you can't talk to the person without some fundamental trust.
But that's not required when you're viewing their online content.
And I don't know about you guys, but when I'm just looking at people's online content, I have an inherently skeptical vibe around it.
Especially when so much online content is just soul-destroying.
It's boring, there's so much of it.
And so yeah, there's just this big difference between embedding yourself, doing the interviews, and then kind of doing the internet searches that create a plausible picture, but don't really get to the depth of, well, you know, who's most likely to be involved, and who is really there when, and how can you actually corroborate it.
I'm just talking about a far smaller, a slower process.
And, you know, that's why I think Hoback is at this thing for four years now.
So much history has never been accessible to us before at any one time.
Exactly.
I mean, this has been growing, but I mean, now the amount of history, and I remember about a year and a half ago, I interviewed Dan Carlin of Hardcore History, and it was a great talk.
But the one thing I asked him was that his concerns over How does someone 100 years from now look back at today and suss out what actually happened?
And his argument was that, oh, it's just like all of history.
The cream will rise to the top and at some point the scholars will look at it and will say that this is the actual representation of history.
I just never agreed with that.
I'm like, how do you make heads or tails of all the information that's available right now and understand?
And I also wonder, to your point, Matthew, when people do do these online searches, how many people actually go past the first page of Google?
It's a great question.
I mean, I remember listening to, in the CBC podcast that covered MKUltra, I think it was called Ravenscrag, or maybe it was just called MKUltra, but anyway, they tracked down the Investigative journalist who, in the 1970s, through freedom of information requests, figured out who the doctors were who were working for the CIA.
Now, this is what they had to do.
When they got the documents, they were all redacted, but because the documents were typewritten on, you know, You know, old-school typewriters where the spacing was predictable, they could tell how many letters in each name there were that had been redacted.
And so they actually, they took the time to figure out how to match names to blanks in some process that I can't even imagine having the patience for.
And they did it One scrap of paper at a time.
And what I'm going to suggest is that the kind of dedication that you have to and the doubt and the skepticism towards your own success that you would have to apply to that process of making connections and the monumental and daily failures that you would encounter in trying to make those connections, those would all be very, very good
Humility factors and I would say like, supportives for you not jumping to conclusions.
But you're not allowed to fail anymore and that's part of the problem.
Even with what Julian referenced about AstraZeneca, it's just like one bad press release that they should have handled better is now going to stain the process for months or years to come.
Totally.
Humility is a word that doesn't exist in everything we're talking about in the conspirituality circles.
That is like, humility is equal to evil to them.
Yeah, and it's weird because if we have so much access to information, why doesn't it make us more humble?
Is it because it blinks up in front of us and we can read it all?
Is it because we don't actually have to go to a library in a different city and look at microfilm?
It feels like the internet is serving us up our hubris moment by moment in real time and making us think that we know more than we do.
Because the thing that I've found in every single investigation that I've done is that the more interviews I do, The weaker the case gets, the more interviews I do.
This is just what happens.
If you think you know what's happening, if you really think you know what's happening, just interview somebody else.
If you really think you've got a clear line on how to corroborate some facts, just do another interview.
That's part of why we put timelines on things, right?
Now, Matthew, does that trend kind of start to go the other way once you've gone through the belly of the beast enough?
Yes, there is a turning point, but I would say that any good story is really ripe when you've had a sort of valley of disillusionment and losing the path.
I think the people who made the film Spotlight did a great job of that when they're talking about how hard it was for those journalists in Boston to put together their case against the Catholic Church, how many roadblocks they came up against, how many interview subjects turned them down, how many Uh, conflicting stories they got.
I'm just, what I would like to say to our listeners is the harder the journalist's job is and the slower they take at doing it, the better story you're going to get.
Because if they can last, if they can last it out, if they can stick it out to the end of that process, you know that they have been humbled.
You know that they've been on their knees and they have had all of their assumptions questioned.
Speaking of journalism, Matthew, if you're going to be a good journalist, I think you should define microfiche or microfilm for younger listeners.
Oh my gosh, do you know?
Julian, do you know microfiche?
Do you know microfilm?
Of course!
I grew up in an ass-backward colonial country.
Well, I had a microfiche machine in our house because my dad was, well he still is a Russian history scholar, and the only way that he would have these Stalin-era journals and newspapers was actually on microfilm and microfiche.
And it had this smell to it, and it was, like, haunting.
It was very early internet, actually, because there was so much data on those little cards and on those spools.
Yeah, it's what serious researchers turn to, right, before the internet.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, but I really appreciate what you're saying, Matthew, in terms of the, you're really drawing a very clear contrast between a kind of quick-fix, self-satisfied, confirmation-biased style of making connections that actually has more in common with conspiracy theorizing as opposed to real investigative journalism.
It does, because what it does is it wants to put together a series of puzzle pieces based upon themes, and human beings and their stories, they don't fucking fit together.
It's just not like that.
People are strange, they change over time, they change what they say.
And yeah, so if you can corroborate through all of that and not make assumptions about hidden people, like, okay, for instance, how many times has the figure of Thomas Schoenberger And Lisa Claypure been central to these sort of conspiratorial narratives around who's at the center of QAnon.
It's like all over the place.
And I have never, ever seen anybody interview any of those people.
I've never heard anybody directly quote them.
I haven't seen any sort of embedding.
I haven't seen the interviews.
I want to see the interviews.
All right, Derek, Julian, in a few hours, we'll be giving our first academic panel at Deakin University in Australia.
It is the Conspirituality in Australia project.
Derek is going to be covering, you're going to be covering bad science in conspirituality.
Julian, you're going to be looking at belief systems and I'm going to be covering social dynamics.
Is this your first academic conference?
I spoke at Harvard for a conference on hip-hop in Africa back in 2005.
Nice!
And I spoke at the University of Arizona on global music around the same time.
So I've done a few with music, and actually I'm going to talk a little.
That's more my wheelhouse.
But this will be my first on conspirituality, that's for sure.
It's my first on both counts.
Right.
Yeah, I have, because of some yoga reporting that I've done, I've done one of these before and it's kind of, it's an interesting environment to transition from what we do here to, okay, just the facts, just the facts, ma'am.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
But what do you think will happen with the work that we do as it moves into scholarship?
What do you imagine or hope people You know, researchers who have lots of time and really good methodology will dig into.
Well, I'm going to sort of mention a concern, and it's a valid one, and I think a lot of good will come out of it.
But really, when we were thinking about this week's episode, what really struck me was what happens when fringe cultures go to the mainstream, and then from the mainstream they get picked up by academia.
That's usually the process of what happens.
And so, for example, I always think back to early Nirvana, where the original fans of Bleach were mad when Smells Like Teen Spirit came out.
And then there's the Posers.
And it kind of happened with QAnon where when Pastel Q came out, the original Q people were like, Who are these people?
This isn't your conspiracy theory, but I'll get back to what I referenced before, which was language and how language works in subcultures and how some of that gets lost in the main culture.
Talk about it through a couple of different musical genres, because this is a repeating theme that happens with music.
For example, hip-hop is an extension of reggae music, which is an extension of Nyabinghi culture from Africa and Indian culture meeting in Jamaica.
through either slavery or indentured servitude.
You have other examples like flamenco, tango, creole, Afro-Cuban, Balkan music meeting with Indian marching band music, which is a thing.
And in every case, you have the clashing of cultures, which leads to a separation of identities in new territories, which is also usually expressed through language and music.
But the point of the relationship is that what I mentioned before about the Q drops and the translation, it's being used as a sort of a dialect that can then be in group and used by those people. it's being used as a sort of a dialect that
Now, the difference is, historically, musical genres have all been created because oppressed, either socially, politically, or economically oppressed and depressed communities would find a way to express their grievances.
And what resulted was hip-hop.
It was flamenco.
But let's look at flamenco, what happened when it came up through academia.
So flamenco was originally the gitano, or the cry of the voice, along with hand claps, the palmas, and body slaps.
A guitar got incorporated a little bit later.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't part of the original.
It was purely body.
And probably mid-19th century, I believe, is when the guitar was introduced.
Now, today, the castanets are used in flamenco, and that represents the transition from the poor communities into the cafes, where it was appealing to the wealthier communities.
And it also represents the transition from something folksy to academia.
You can also say the same thing of Bartók with Hungarian music and the peasant music that he helped to bring to the opera houses, which I think quite well.
But again, what is getting lost in that transition is the understanding of the culture that created and the social conditions.
And then all of a sudden it's being looked at through an entire different lens from a sort of privileged position.
Now the difference here though is that QAnon is rooted in a predominantly aggrieved and paranoid white culture.
Yeah.
So they are actually the oppressing culture that has now adapted this strategy, probably unconsciously.
But because of the media that we have today, they have taken this historical phenomenon of creating an in-group of language and they've They've taken it as if they were the ones who are being oppressed and using it in the paranoid style.
And so I think for any successful academic endeavor to understand the pipeline from the creation of artistic forms or languages to actually understanding how that language was created, you have to take into account the social and political conditions that created it, which is going to take a lot of unpacking of historical racism and xenophobia in America to properly understand QAnon.
And I think that's why I was a little more critical of this documentary because I haven't seen any evidence of that yet.
And if you want to present this information in academic settings, that has to be where you begin.
And that is my hope with conspirituality too, is I think you have to look at The for-profit healthcare system in America that led to so many of these wellness influencers who have created their own language around the immune system and terrain theory and all of these ideas.
You have to understand the capitalist structure that helped to inspire that, along with the sense of privilege that the cultures that helped to create wellness culture, in order to actually understand the paranoid conspiracy theories that have emerged, especially from this last year.
Yeah, that would be my hope, you know, along those lines.
The work that we've done and what we're going to present today and whatever else may happen down the line, that somehow there's a continuation of the analysis into how people might start to be educated about these phenomena that have just sort of sprung up in the wild in this perfect storm set of conditions that obviously it's been coming to a head for a while, right?
Especially with wellness culture and then what's been going on on the right wing.
Just the hope that there can grow to be a kind of field of study and a way that people are educated on this stuff.
And I'm always idealistic about this.
I don't know about you guys, but I have a sense that healthier Forms of community and spirituality and ways of thinking about awareness practice become possible the more this sort of material that we've been looking into gets fleshed out.
There's something about the psychology, there's something about probably the neuroscience, there's something about the social aspects of what it is to be human and what we find meaningful and what Self-development might look like in terms of maybe, for example, including healthy skepticism in your notion of what it means to develop your mind, right, in ways that we've previously thought of as quote-unquote spiritual.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you're reminding me, Julian, of one of the lessons from the article that I quoted earlier around whether or not light reliably disinfects.
And maybe that's where your optimism is.
I have that too, like I have this general sense that, you know, if you can articulate a problem really clearly that somehow everybody will catch on and they'll say, they'll say, wow, well, I shouldn't, I should recognize these red flags flying in the spiritual organization that I'm starting to hook up with and things will generally get better.
But I also wonder, and this is a general question I have around academic, I don't know, functionality really is at a certain point, there's got to be policy implications that come from all of this intellectual labor.
I mean, I think we've said, I've said over and over again from the beginning that if the U.S. has, had universal health care, I sincerely doubt that QAnon would have been as big of a phenomenon as it has been, because the actual medical distrust and the financial stress of the entire middle swath of the country would have been that much less.
And sure enough, it is an American export.
It's exploded like a virus from the heartland of America.
It is active in other countries, but We've got to say that QAnon is America's own, and so, like, a central... I believe, my gut is, I don't have the data to prove it, but I would hope that the academics could come up with it, or at least ask the question, is that a combination of UBI and universal healthcare would probably decrease people's vulnerability to conspiracism.
Do you have a sense that the other countries where it's taken hold have similar kinds of socioeconomic pressures around healthcare?
Yeah.
Oh, around health care?
No, no.
But where has it taken hold with such strength?
Australia, London, Canada.
I mean, predominantly white cultures.
I mean, that's one of the phenomenon that we've tracked.
Right.
But they also have socialized medicine in some of those places.
Yes, but I mean, we aren't seeing domestic terror attacks, we aren't seeing... Well, that's the 40 million guns.
That's part of it.
They're using boomerangs in Australia, right?
You hit upon a really important point, Matthew, which is that to go up to the levels of academia, it has to trickle back down in some way.
And that really does include policy.
I mean, that's why I am a fan of Elizabeth Warren, in a sense, because being an academic, she has written so intensely on policy change, which is so important.
But it's also a conversation we've kind of had offline about the nature of even academic publishing.
There's currently a move based in Europe called Coalition S, which is trying to make all academic papers free.
Yeah, right.
And this is so important because, I mean, not only do you need people to translate these articles for the general population, but you just simply need access.
And when access is behind a paywall, then you bring this information up, but then you can't let it get back down, then you're going to get caught.
And I think that's one of the main contentions that a lot of people have, especially on the right wing in America, the anti-intellectual movement with academia.
It's so interesting that we've just been talking about the internet providing instantaneous but also superficial access, apparently, to the entirety of history within an environment in which so much of legitimate scholarship is actually paywalled.
It's kind of absurd that you can do all kinds of quote-unquote research but actually be blocked out of journals that are asking you for $36 to look at a fucking paper.
For 24 hours, literally.
And to speak of that, actually, we were very kindly invited to work on our presentation notes that we're going to give today and turn them into a publishable paper for July.
But the paper's going to be behind a paywall.
And I mean, I guess we're going to have to tell people how to get it on Sci-Hub or something like that, because that doesn't make sense to me.
So what does it mean for us to go from a podcasting And our own listeners aren't gonna have access to it.
but then to have that data put behind a paywall, which is going to be reviewed by other people.
It's actually going to be verified.
They're not going to publish something that they don't feel we've supported.
So it's kind of like we have this opportunity to produce a piece of peer-reviewed research that comes out of the work that we've done over the past year, and our own listeners aren't going to have access to it.
It's very weird.
To this point about integration, because I've been wondering about the social integration or how this material will become palpable in everyday culture, I because I've been wondering about the social integration or how this material will become palpable in everyday I heard a great podcast from WNYC's On the Media on
It was called No Silver Bullets, and there was a guy named Kurt Braddock who was a guest interviewed about inoculating the public against conspiracy theories.
And this professor has been hired, actually, by the Department of Homeland Security, which I'm sure comes with its own problems, but I mean, that's really impactful.
And then we have somebody like Imran Ahmed, who looks like he turned away from an academic career to do what he does.
But then I was thinking, oh, we've interviewed scholars on our podcast.
I reached out to both of them and I asked, who should hire you?
For what, in terms of public policy, and what should they pay you?
And they sent me back these responses.
So, Wildcroft says, Theo says, public health bodies should hire me to help them implement research findings into actual pedagogy that will stick as part of a team of community health advisors drawn from marginalized populations.
We can tell them why all the public health campaigns for behavior change fail.
And they shouldn't pay me, they should fund me one-tenth of what they're already paying shiny consultants to fail to do the same thing.
She says, it's the journey from research tells us people should eat five types of vegetables a day into shiny public health campaign that is totally tone-deaf to food deserts, divergent bodies, and so on.
So, how you actually collaborate with communities to improve public health.
I should be hired for medical humanities, basically.
Which I thought was interesting, and I hope she gets hired.
And then I asked Susanna Crockford, who is currently researching, you know, people like Jake Angeli.
So she wrote back and she said, the field of new religious movement studies may seem fringed from a public policy perspective, but it has much to offer, especially in terms of education, religious freedom, and national security policy.
Conspiratuality currently presents a challenge to public health and national security in countries around the world.
For example, a thread of my current research addresses the Q Shaman and his role in the Capital Siege.
Public agencies concerned with these challenges should fund the work of individual researchers and research groups like INFORM, which he works for, to help understand the growing threat to public health and democracy posed by conspirituality in contextualized, nuanced rather than generalized and discriminatory ways.
How much they should pay is really up to them, she says, but I personally believe no worker should earn significantly less than or more than $75,000 per year.
So those are the answers from our scholars and I say hire them.
