Matthew debriefs after the Mike Rothschild interview, looking at QAnon’s “Conspiracy Theory of Everything” as a hyperobject and spiritual dilemma.Show Notes‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the AnthropoceneConversations with Cornel West | Glenn Loury, Cornel West & Teodros Kiros | The Glenn Show
-- -- --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
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
A conspiracy theory of everything.
Hey everybody.
This isn't a big new research bonus episode, but rather a taking stock or reflection type episode that marks what I think is a significant moment in the history of this podcast.
As you know, our guest this week was Mike Rothschild, and you heard us enthusiastically gush over his book.
I hope you consider getting it.
It's really good.
And I wanted to take the time to explore some of the larger questions that we couldn't quite get to, but I think are pertinent to the project of this podcast.
These are large questions.
Some of them may even transcend journalism, maybe even the podcast form.
Specifically, I'm going to look at Mike's framing of QAnon as a conspiracy theory of everything, as something that has a totalizing or spiritual dimension to it.
I'm going to read some quotes from his book that we didn't have time to address in the episode, and I'll also look at some of the linguistic issues within QAnon that reinforce that spiritual dimension.
But first, I just want to mark this moment as a book writer myself.
QAnon is no longer a breathless news story that beat reporters and disinformation experts are staying up all night and taxing their mental health to try to grasp.
Now we have a solid book by a solid journalist featuring hundreds of citations.
QAnon is now part of the solid public record, whatever the public record means at this point.
And it's only barely six months after Q stopped posting.
And here we have a book where the timeline and the contours of the movement are clear, and its main figures are unmasked.
We don't have to ride the Twitter scroller coaster anymore to try to piece it all together.
And I find a lot of relief with that.
I actually found talking with Mike strangely comforting, as if he had passed through this cultural storm with his brain intact and the basic tools of journalism still functional.
You see a new thread.
You take your time to find out where it comes from.
You make sure it's not an anomaly.
Talk to a lot of people.
Corroborate what they say.
Widen your lens to interview experts for context and analysis.
And gradually but steadily draw back the curtain on how something insane could have happened, so that everyone can see that it's not insane at all, it's just what people do.
Now, Colin Hoback's Cue into the Storm documentary on HBO had the same demystifying effect.
He stood to the side and really empathetically allowed the Anons to disclose key things about their inner lives.
In the case of the Watkins father and son duo, he also let them wallow in their hubris and reveal themselves as very pathetic characters with access to a technology that made them feel powerful.
In several comments that I've seen Hoback make on Twitter, and I hope we can interview him at some point as well, He talks about sunlight as the disinfectant, and in that ultimate FaceTime call with Ron Watkins, you can feel Hoback's sunlight.
He's calm and still, and he lets Ron just tip his hand and reveal, most likely, that he's been posting his cue.
So just a personal digression here, I don't think I'm cut out for this kind of journalism, at least not full-time.
I'm just too invested in outcomes.
I'm too much of an activist.
At the end of our interview with Mike Rothschild, he said that to protect his mental health, he really firmly boundaried the content off as his job, leaving open space for family and relaxation.
Now, I admire and envy that, and I'm sure I could take small steps towards adopting more of this healthy position, but I think it would have limits.
Because from childhood, writing for me has always been driven by a combination of three things.
The attempt to self-soothe, the desire to explore new worlds, and also a craving for justice.
So I can do mainstream journalism if and when I have editors and support to keep those things in check and sublimate them into style.
But I can't really live there, I don't think.
I don't like the precarity of freelancing, but I also don't think I could normalize a 9-to-5 attitude towards writing.
And at the same time I'm really grateful for those who can do the grind and then shut the grinder off.
But it gives me pause when I think that my inability to completely shut this material out mirrors the unboundaried quality of the lives that our subjects lead.
Because QAnons and conspiritualists are also completely absorbed in their content, in their stories and campaigns.
