Santa Barbara surf coach Matthew Coleman murdered his two young children in Mexico nearly two weeks ago. He told the FBI that he was “enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories and was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.”Beneath the peak chaos of this story lies a social fabric torn to shreds by QAnon and related conspiracy theories. Marriages are ending, custody battles are raging, and parents and children are negotiating painful silences or estrangements.Joining us today as a co-host is Jitarth Jadeya, one of the few ex-QAnon followers so far who has been willing and able to discuss what this fever dream did to him and his family. Marriage and Family therapist Rachel Bernstein, the host of the brilliant IndoctriNation Podcast, also joins to discuss her experiences working with cult survivors and providing recovery resources. In this week’s closer, Derek examines the scientific hipsterism of Zach Bush, who has recently co-opted Malcolm X as a posthumous endorser, when Malcolm would have probably hated his gut biome.Show NotesSurf Instructor Killed His Children and Claimed QAnon Made Him Do It, F.B.I. SaysQAnon: a timeline of violence linked to the conspiracy theoryFormer QAnon follower Jitarth Jadeja on “The Takeout” — 2/12/2021Former QAnon believer says following the conspiracy “was absolutely a drug”He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here’s how he got outHow Ex-QAnon Followers Escaped The Cultish Conspiracy TheoryHe’s a former QAnon believer. He doesn’t want to tell his story, but thinks it might help.Rachel Bernstein’s excellent IndoctriNation PodcastQAnon Casualties on Reddit
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Conspirituality 65, long-haul QAnon.
Santa Barbara surf coach Matthew Coleman murdered his two very young children in Mexico almost two weeks ago.
He told the FBI that he was enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories and was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.
Beneath the peak chaos of this story lies a social fabric torn to shreds by QAnon and related conspiracy theories.
Marriages are ending, custody battles are raging, and parents and children are negotiating painful silences or estrangements.
Joining us today as a co-host is Jitarth Jadeja, one of the few QAnon followers so far who's been willing and able to discuss what this fever dream did to him and his family.
Our other co-host is marriage and family therapist Rachel Bernstein, host of the brilliant Indoctrination podcast where she interviews cult survivors and provides recovery resources.
In a closer for this week, Derek examines the scientific hipsterism of Zach Bush, who has recently co-opted Malcolm X as a posthumous endorser when Malcolm would have probably hated his gut biome.
Jitartha and Rachel, welcome to you both.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, since I'm co-host, I should actually thank you for being here.
So thank you, Patrick and Julian, for joining me.
You're more than welcome.
Jatarth, we're going to get to your backstory in a bit, but to start, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this harrowing news from Santa Barbara from the past week.
It appears that without any detectable prior fixation upon QAnon, Matthew Coleman entered a days-long altered state in which he was able to drive his children over 200 miles south over the Mexican border to murder them and leave them in a ditch.
From the statement he made to the FBI, he seems to recognize that what he was doing was wrong, but that he couldn't stop himself.
Now, this isn't the only act of gruesome violence linked with QAnon fixations.
There have been other murders, but also kidnappings of children.
And of course, children are at the symbolic center of QAnon mythology.
So, as an ex-QAnon, somebody who is indoctrinated, were you surprised to hear this story?
Not at all.
I thought that it was only a matter of time.
I think it's only a matter of time before we see more of this, much more.
There's a pattern that's been evolving over the last few, say, months, especially, and escalating.
And I'll be honest, when I saw this, I didn't even click the article.
I was like, oh yeah, obviously that happened.
I'll read it later.
And it took me like a day to get to it because it wasn't a priority because I was not surprised at all.
Do you feel that coverage like this, what does it do?
I mean, it was very alarming for many people.
Our feeds filled up with it.
For you, it was entirely expectable.
But Do you see a story like this bringing the dangerous impacts of QAnon more deeply to public awareness?
I mean, absolutely.
Any story where someone does something violent and then attributes it to a particular cause is going to create concern about that particular cause.
But I don't think on a broader level that I mean, I don't think, it doesn't matter.
It actually doesn't matter whether this is good or bad, whether the media should do this or do that, because they have to.
There's way too many Q followers these days.
There's way too many actions by Q followers.
It permeates through every aspect of our society.
And I remember when I was in the cult with the Q, we, for the first couple of years, the media very rarely reported on QAnon.
And you know they were aware of it because I remember Time Magazine named Q as one of their People of the Year in 2018.
So I'm just guessing, I would say that they probably didn't want to talk about it too much in order to not escalated and aided by spreading the message and creating awareness, but we're way past the Rubicon at this point.
It's metastasized, it's metamorphosed, so it doesn't matter whether it's good or bad, it is what it is.
Rachel, you have treated and interviewed countless former cult members, and in many of these stories violence is a real and present danger, but I'm wondering if you can lay out some basics for how cult indoctrination crosses the line into extreme criminal acts.
What are the conditions there?
Or is the Santa Barbara story as much a mental health story as it is a cult story?
It's a great question.
Sometimes it's a little bit of both.
In the Santa Barbara tragedy, It could be and I don't know his mental health history.
It could be that he does have or did have the ability to or was prone to kind of paranoid thinking.
What can also be true is that you don't need a mental health history per se or a diagnosis per se to be driven to that point.
And what you do need is you need a very compelling argument that lets you feel or makes you feel that there are no other good options.
And it also has a power around it because of the social psychology.
So you have the people around you feeding you, feeding that message, pushing you to that extreme where you feel that you are being actually benevolent
By killing and to get to that point there has to be a lot of indoctrination and usually there is sort of a step to it where you start by being confrontative or you start by maybe pushing people by crossing those kinds of boundaries but
Really, I think the leaders of groups, whether or not anyone has a mental health, you know, history or problem, need to take responsibility for working people up into a froth in this way.
It's not unlike honor killings or suicide bombings, genocides, Holocaust, and that's on a larger scale, but here we see it on a single scale.
It's the same indoctrination.
And Jatharth, one thing that has become clear in the coverage of QAnon is how The online phenomenon takes this life of its own, right?
Where the current events, the obscure predictions, the random coincidences, all sort of get folded into validating the belief system.
And so I'm curious how, as an insider, Previous Q-related violent events were collectively explained, right?
Like Anthony Camello, who murdered Frank Kelly in March 2019, and then in November 2020, the Kentucky woman, Nellie Petrie Blanchard, killing Christopher Hallett, who was actually trying to help her regain custody of her two twin daughters.
Of course, prior to all of this, sort of a prelude to QAnon is Edgar Welch storming into Comic Ping Pong and firing shots as he tried to free the supposedly sex traffic kids from a basement that he then found was not actually even there.
When you were involved in the QAnon belief system, how did you and those who shared your beliefs make sense of those violent incidents?
So, I'll explain what the general belief was and then I'll explain my belief.
So, in regards to the mob boss who got killed, that was looked at as a good thing.
That this did happen and that's a good thing and good on him.
In regards to Comet Ping Pong and Edgar Welch, he was looked upon as like a bit of a useful idiot, that he had somehow been sort of taken over by the CIA and, you know, like the Oklahoma City Bomber or something, and had his mind warped in order to make people look bad.
And in terms of the mother, she was looked up as, it was a bit, people just thought that was a bit of a beat up.
They just thought, ah, this is just fake news, fake news.
Um, there was another one as well.
There was a mother in April who killed her two children because she was concerned and thought the town was part of a gigantic pedophile ring.
There was, um, the Nashville bomber.
He actually, he was diagnosed with cancer, but he also believed in the same thing that this recent guy did about reptilians and conspiracy theories and whatnot.
So I think it, That's generally kind of how it was looked by the community.
For me, personally...
I mean, I didn't have any reason to think that these weren't legitimate, authentic events.
I didn't ascribe them to being false flags or some, you know, whatever, like, oh, this is fake news or whatnot.
Yeah.
Only because I thought that that's, I mean, it's pretty low stakes for a PSYOP.
I mean, you'd probably need a lot of effort.
There'd be a big budget.
You'd have to hire a lot of consultants and, you know, that's all you could come up with.
Like, no one even died.
So you were being reasonable about that?
That one narrow aspect.
But the way I was being unreasonable is I just thought they were misguided sheep.
I just thought, oh look, some people are bound to go crazy, some people just can't handle the truth.
Q did say that the truth would put 99% of people in a hospital, so that just means that I'm extra special.
That's kind of how I looked at it.
How do you imagine, I mean you may not have thoughts but I'm curious, how do you imagine people who are still involved will react to this new event?
I had a look at it, they just said it was fake news.
Okay.
The guy obviously just said QAnon as an excuse because he wanted to get back at his wife and it was sensational.
Which, I mean, look, I think it goes back to something that Rachel said.
It's almost like QAnon and conspiracy theories are kind of like a catalyst.
Like, he was probably very angry with his wife and he probably was looking for a way to hurt her.
And then when he fell down this rabbit hole and he realized his children were, you know, reptilians or nephilim or whatever, he, like Rachel said, he would have, he was trying to save them, ironically.
Yeah.
And I think that's the biggest problem is that The worst evil is done by people who think they're doing the highest good.
And that's why, that's why we have those sayings, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
You know, like the ends don't justify the means.
I think that that's really what it means.
I mean, I don't want to, okay, I'm not gonna use the classic example, but I look at Pol Pot.
I mean, when he was committing the genocide, he didn't think he was doing a bad thing.
He thought he was doing a good thing.
Yes.
No one does evil thinking they're doing a bad thing unless it's like the 1% sadomachistic sociopaths who just want to, you know, terrify people, whatever.
That's like 1%.
Everyone else thinks they're doing good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, I think that, uh, to your point, Gisartha, that Rachel, you put it really well, this idea that you're killing out of benevolence, right?
That there is a, there is some sort of higher purpose.
Is that how you would understand this level of extreme fixation on protecting or saving children that then somehow flips into endangering and being willing to kill them?
Right.
Yes, that is how I would understand that.
That I do think that sometimes when people are convinced that their children, for example, or other children are being sex trafficked or chips are going to be implanted in them, Then they do think they're protecting them sometimes by hurting them.
And the hurting them isn't what they're thinking about, it's how we see it.
I think it falls under this sort of heading of better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
And the devil that you're imagining is so much more horrific or the devil that as it's been presented to you by the group is so much more horrific.
And you want to save the children from further suffering because you know for a fact, according to this logic, that they're going to have a lifetime of even more suffering.
So you're doing something for them, not against them.
I think what happens so often when I work with people who have gotten involved in these movements to save the children, is when I ask them, how many children have you saved?
They have no idea.
Because there isn't one child who's been saved by QAnon.
Not one.
There have been a lot who have been abandoned and neglected and hurt and scared of their parents, left at school because their parents were caught up in something.
So there's real wreckage and damage right in front of these people that's happening with the children, but they're kind of looking around them, looking beyond them, tearing their families apart to save the children.
But what children?
How many numbers of kids have they saved?
There is no way to define that, because it's not happening.
Well, they are, through a process of projection, perhaps, and self-objecting, they're talking about themselves.
Exactly.
The children that they are saving are them, it would seem to me.
Yeah, this has nothing to do with children.
This has nothing to do with saving the world.
This has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
These people don't get off the internet and don't barely leave their house and are just obsessed with this.
This is about their projection of the absolute disconnect they feel between where they are in life and where they could be or where they should be.
The depth of that disconnect, the magnitude of that disconnect, that has to be covered by some psychological method.
Because you can't exist in life and go wake up every day with this abject opinion that you're a complete and utter failure, socially, economically, whatever.
So this is how they regain some of that.
And I just really think that the lower you perceive your station to be, The higher you think of yourself and the further you are willing to go and the most outlandish things you are willing to believe in order to make up the difference.
Beautifully said.
Rachel, you've been researching and helping to heal the fallout from cults for a very long time.
And there's a lot of researchers and commentators, you know, including myself, Who have used cult theory to help understand what's happening with QAnon followers.
And at the same time, there are holes in our theories, and I think we have to admit that we haven't quite seen anything like this.
What is your general impression at this point of how cultic dynamics play out in QAnon, both from what you know already and from what you're hearing from Jatharth?
Right, so to take from what Tarth just said perfectly, beautifully, and then I'll talk more about the question.
I do think that people feel entirely energized and sometimes alive by having a cause.
By having a cause that they feel is the ultimate cause.
And so while they're talking about saving the children, they are trying to save themselves.
They are trying to feel relevant and important and that they matter.
And that is sometimes why people get involved in cultic groups in general.
They want to be able to make a difference.
So, the group promises that this is the only way, right?
The whole idea of scarcity.
We are the only path towards your enlightenment or towards being able to clear the planet or whatever the phrase might be.
But I think that there is a lot to understand about these cult dynamics.
I mean, what you have that is similar in QAnon to other cultic groups is you have the phraseology, its own language.
And a way of unifying people through a unified belief system, a unified cause, unified secrets.
You know, we're going to keep these secrets and you don't have to tell other people and also the same kind of language.
I think you also, similar to being in a cult, you get a fix, like an addictive fix.
By checking in with other people going on the internet, very similar to going to that large group awareness training meeting or chanting for a period of time.
Also, you had for a while this idea that the leader is beyond Humanity is above human and that's something that's also very cult-like and that also means you can't argue with that person if you've deified them because it would be wrong of you and you would be wrong.
There's also something in things being presented in kind of puzzles because it makes people lean in to decipher what did that person mean and because so much of what cult leaders teach doesn't make sense.
But people want to make sense of things that don't make sense.
So I think people spend countless hours trying to decipher.
Right.
And because it's coming from a God-like figure, whatever they're saying, and it has to be put together, it's sort of like piecing together the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It has that much importance.
There's also the dependency.
You're waiting for your orders.
You're waiting to find out what's going to be happening next.
And it's all consuming, because it isn't just something you do, it's something you are.
And I think that that's also why it's hard for people to break away, because it's permeated every part of their life.
You know, you referenced the mystery of the leader, the unapproachability, the fact that what they do has to be constantly interpreted.
The strangest aspect of QAnon In many ways, to me anyway, is its leaderlessness.
I mean, whether it's Ron Watkins or the people that came before him larping at the Q-drops, we don't really know, and there are many people who say that it doesn't matter who Q actually was.
And so, what does this do to cult theory, Rachel?
Can there be a leaderless cult in this sense?
What you have is, of course, people who will want to move up to the top and be sub-leaders of this leaderless group.
And so I think it gives people this opportunity or to feel that they have the opportunity to become a leader in the group.
Because they don't really feel in competition with the leader.
So I think people will propel themselves forward to then lead the other people who are listening to them.
I think when it's leaderless also, there is this added mystique, because people will then fill in the blanks with what they want to be true.
And they will then make assumptions about who the leader is.
Very often what happens when people really get to know the leader of their cult, They're not as charmed when they see them, right?
From behind the scenes and, right?
And so I think what it does is it keeps people in this sort of state of imagining and filling in the blanks because they don't know who is leading it or if someone is leading it.
They also don't have anyone to show themselves then and be a disappointment.
So it keeps people, I think, in suspended animation.
I've never thought of the vacuum at the top of QAnon as actually being a free market principle, actually.
That it creates a lot of competition and that can actually be a real advantage.
But for someone who started this work, Rachel, in like the age of early Scientology busting, there's this extreme online dimension now and I'm wondering how it changes How you think about your therapy, your interventions, how you talk to people.
Right.
So, it's much harder to prevent people from just going on their phones or their computers or their tablets than going away to a compound or to a weekend workshop because they have access all the time to all of it.
And a message that's sent out gets sent out to millions all at once.
And so it's very hard to stop the bleeding in that way.
The work then becomes how to decipher, how to teach people to decipher what's believable and what isn't, and how to know, what questions to ask to find out, like how many children have been saved through QAnon.
And learning how to be smart, kind of spiritual, political consumers, so that even if the messages are coming at you, you then, and through the help of therapy, develop an armor that you walk around with no matter how much is coming at you.
I think that's the only direction to go in.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm with you on that.
Very well said.
Thank you, Rachel.
Jatarth, you've referred to QAnon, and I've seen you sort of processing everything we've been saying for the last few minutes here.
You refer to it as being like a highly addictive drug.
What do you think the unique hooks were for you That may have been more appealing than a somewhat more conventional cult.
Like, was it the secret identity of Q as opposed to a real charismatic guru?
The puzzle-solving online group interaction?
What was intoxicating for you about this drug?
That was definitely an aspect of it, even though initially it was more of a barrier to entry.
However, for me personally, and at the time when I found Q, I was deep into conspiracies.
I had fallen down in the previous year a really steep conspiracy hole.
So I was already with the aliens and the reptilians and the blue avians and the baby eating and whatever.
Q just basically regurgitates all conspiracies.
He slapped the Trump sticker on it.
But the key difference, the key hook is that Almost every other single conspiracy, every single one, is always about the bad guys and the bad guys doing something and the bad guys being successful.
Every single one, whether it's your neighbor who's actually stealing your mail, whether it's the local council rigging the elections, whether it's interdimensional extraterrestrial aliens trying to suck out souls.
It's always about the bad people and the bad people winning, right?
But Q's hook was that, no, no, no, no, no.
The good guys are winning.
In fact, the good guys have already won.
And that was the biggest thing for me because it's so, it's so weird because just a couple of weeks before I found out about Q, I was just having this thought.
I'm like, okay, listen, I mean, we all know about this.
Everyone knows about this.
Enough people know about this.
Like, where are the good guys, man?
Like, isn't anyone doing anything?
I don't understand.
And then Q comes along and he's just like, you know, the military's in control.
It's all a movie.
You're watching a show.
Don't fret.
And it's very optimistic, ironically, and incredibly hopeful in that regard.
So that was the big hook for me.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's such a great observation.
I know you've talked publicly about being neurodivergent.
How common do you think that might be amongst those who got caught up in QAnon?
Like, is it a factor?
Look, I think in my personal case, It wasn't a coincidence.
I don't think it was a causal factor.
I don't think that it was a driving factor.
I think it was just an environmental factor, let's say.
However, I know I'm going to sound completely wrong, but I really don't think that there's more propensity or more for a group of a random segment of QAnon believers to have higher neurodivergence or rate of mental illness than the general population because in a sense it is just basically a doomsday cult and anyone can join a cult.
On top of that, if you look at, say, there was an article that was talking about how the QAnon believers who are at the capital right had a disproportionate amount of mental illness, which is fine.
Obviously, if you saw that, it's a very reasonable thing to believe that obviously there must be some sort of mental illness involved.
But that is not a random sampling of the QAnon population.
That is a very specific group of people who took action and when committed real world violence.
I think if you look at the people who commit real world violence who believe in QAnon, 100% you'll see a completely disproportionate amount of mental illness and Maybe not neurodivergence, because I don't think that's a mental illness.
But in regards to just a random sampling of QAnon followers, I don't think it'd be that much different than just the normal population.
Yeah, and then there's the other piece too, right?
That data skewing in the direction of more pronounced mental illness amongst the people at the Capitol, a lot of that is their defense.
Their legal defense is like, oh, I was not mentally well when I did that stuff.
And you would have to be, you can't just be mentally ill.
If you're going to go commit real world violence, right?
Of course there has to be more of an issue.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a difference between someone who does that and someone who just tweets on the internet and makes a butt out of themselves at parties, right?
There's a difference in that action.
So yeah, that's just what I think.
But look, I could be completely wrong.
I have known to be wrong before.
It does happen to the best of us, Jotaro.
Rachel, I'm curious what you think about this sort of, I don't know, a well-informed, a psychologically well-informed, a research-informed approach, as well as a sensitive way of talking about the potential intersections between, say, neurodiversity and then pronounced mental illness, as we may be seeing with the recent case that we started with, and vulnerability to cults.
How do you frame that stuff?
Right.
I think, you know, to take off from Jadarth, who is right, by the way, I think that what you are looking at when you look at people who get involved in cults is often you see wonderful qualities, people who are bright, people who want to make a difference, people who want to have direction.
They just happen to meet up with people who are taking advantage of those positives.
So you don't necessarily have more mental illness.
What can happen though and it's important to look at is that there can be more vulnerability with people who have other issues.
And so then it's important for people who have other issues to know that they have to be cautious about people kind of winding them up or controlling that or taking advantage of that.
You know, I've noticed a lot of people who feel that they got involved in something called a folia de, which is a shared psychosis.
So they jumped into the group's psychosis or the leader psychosis.
It doesn't mean that they have a mental illness, but it was what they call situational psychosis.
There are people also who are on the spectrum who, from them telling me this, they said that they were not necessarily picking up on social cues as quickly as someone else, so they didn't know that that person was not trustworthy as quickly as the person standing next to them.
So they're having to learn how to notice certain facial cues and body cues and manipulative techniques when social interactions are not their forte.
You also have people who are just experiencing anxiety, depression.
This is why, you know, cult recruiters will often be on college campuses because people are away from home from the first time, you know, and they're not having a connection.
They might be having a hard transition.
You have cults going into the prison system, into hospitals, because they know when people are going through a hard time, not necessarily mentally ill, they're looking for, you know, what Jadarath was talking about, being able to feel positive and hopeful, feeling special also.
So the timing also plays an issue.
And when people get hooked into something...
They'll say, I was going through something then that made me open to it.
A year ago, even a month ago, I would not have been as open to it.
So there's so many factors.
But I do think if you know that you are prone to believing things, to believing people, to not having that kind of critical eye, it's good for you to learn what to watch out for.
Jatharth, I have a question about family stuff coming up, but I want to just backtrack for a moment to reflect on what you said about QAnon really offering the goodies right at the beginning and saying, actually, this is all resolved.
Sit back and watch the show.
Everything is under control, which must feel very relieving to many people.
But, at the same time, it's also a real liability in the long term because, as we saw on January 20th, the QAnon community, such as it was, really descended into a kind of chaotic betrayal crisis.
Like, how could this possibly be happening?
So, I guess the problem with hope and offering that at the beginning is that you really have to come through with it, but I suppose as Mike Rothschild and other analysts have pointed out, QAnon is very adept at changing the terms or moving the goalposts when one thing after another
For me, personally, it did wear after a while.
You gotta remember, when Q first came on the scene, it was, I think it was November, around November 2017.
So, at the time, Trump had been in office for about a year, and he had done nothing.
He had genuinely done nothing.
I mean, what did he do?
He passed some tax cuts that any cookie cutter Republican would have passed.
He hadn't, you know, investigated Hillary Clinton.
He hadn't built his wall.
He hadn't, you know, just he hadn't freed Julian Assange.
He hadn't passed his health care bill.
So my point is that at that time, you would have found a lot of disillusioned Trump supporters.
A lot of them.
And having to then admit that Trump is just basically like every other establishment person, at best case scenario, that has ever come along, and you were wrong to be a Trump supporter, given the negative, social negative and stigma around being a Trump supporter,
It's a very difficult thing to have to admit because you know you're going to get shit for it, and a lot, and rightly so on some level.
So when Q comes along and tells you, no, no, no, no, no, actually everything's great.
It's better than ever.
You latch onto it.
It's like, yes, yes, thank God.
I don't have to admit I'm wrong.
And the longer it goes on, the more just, the harder it is to admit you're wrong.
And when it comes to the prophecies, I mean, Q's very, he's very sly.
He's very slick.
He doesn't give dates.
He doesn't say, this will happen on then.
He gives vague numbers, vague phrases, stuff like, watch the water.
What the hell does that mean?
What water?
say stuff like you'll see there are no coincidences and it's like people will be like man there's no coincidences and it's like hello what the hell dude what do you mean of course there are coincidences what do you mean dude what do you mean there are no coincidences what are you talking about all right that like you can't use your like you can't prove your theory with a result like you have to prove it but this and people just get completely taken in by that so then
It's kind of like any apocalyptic or doomsday cult.
The failed predictions are invariably and ironically used to strengthen the will and belief of cult members.
Some may sort of drift off, but the overwhelming majority won't, because they will assume a few different things.
Say A, either they got the date wrong, B, the actions of them, their actions, sorry, somehow stopped the apocalypse or doomsday.
They saved the day.
Yeah, exactly.
Or, which is what I'm very worried about QAnon, that invariably they have to bring about the doomsday.
Which for QAnon is very specific.
Obviously, it's not one conspiracy theory.
Everyone believes something different, right?
We all know that.
One QAnon person does not have the same beliefs as another QAnon person.
But the one thing they all believe in is the concept of martial law and the Great Awakening and this storm.
That is what unites them.
That is their judgment date in inverted commas.
And what that specifically is, is an unsealing of sealed indictments, declaration of martial law, military tribunals for civilians, followed by public executions.
So, my concern is that they will invariably come to the conclusion that they need to bring about martial law.
That is not something that is beyond their grasp.
That is not, like, that's a very tangible thing that could happen, and that is my concern.
I don't want to digress too far, but it occurs to me that as we see, I don't know if you've been aware of the chaotic scenes unfolding in school board meetings and in town hall meetings across America.
In which many people who are speaking with the fervor of QAnon devotees, and I'm sure that's a running current through a lot of that discourse, seem to be doing just that in the sense of not forcing, obviously, mass executions, but certainly taking the law and the etiquette and the
The wheels of government into their own hand to completely disrupt proceedings and assault teachers and assault council members and so on.
And threaten them.
And threaten them.
And so it doesn't, like I've been astonished to watch it unfold, but against the context of a kind of fantasy of a culmination of violence, I guess it's not that surprising.
No, it's not.
And you got to remember that this, that is, that's just the beginning.
Like this stuff doesn't happen overnight.
I mean, Germany experienced a world war and a depression before the terrible things they even did.
That was a 20 year period.
These things happen over a long time.
And the scary thing is that, like you said, these people behave just like QAnon followers.
The behavioral change is very significant.
That's actually the biggest issue.
It's not even really their beliefs.
It's their behavioral change where they become more agitated.
They're more anxious.
They're more aggressive.
That is a concern.
And I think that I mean, in terms of just, say, bringing about martial law, I mean, look, it doesn't even, it doesn't have to be a civil war, right?
Look at, say, for example, the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
That was a, what, 20-year civil war that went on, that 30,000 people died in, and that only had about 1,000 combatants on the IRA side.
And obviously, Northern Ireland's great now.
This kind of, just imagine like a militia with a hundred people taking up arms somewhere, some kind of Waco situation.
I mean, I know it sounds ridiculous, right?
And remember where QAnon came from and when it came.
This is not something that's been around since the 1930s.
This started on 4chan, but it was really on 8chan.
So this started on 8chan four years ago.
8chan is the 4chan of 4chan.
It literally could not be any more niche.
It could not be any more niche.
On top of that, the beliefs could not be any more ridiculous.
They're not, like, they could not be more insane.
It's not like some conspiracy theory about, you know, the Democrats, or not just the Democrats, right?
It's not between political parties or between cultures or between nation states.
This is like a battle between good and evil, between God and the devil.
So, in four years, it has spread around the world to the point where different countries have different iterations of it.
On top of that, it is so permissible through society that it's almost impossible to keep track of the numbers.
It honestly reminds me of coronavirus.
It's like a coronavirus of the mind.
It's highly infectious with a low mortality rate.
Different countries have different strains.
And it's a race to try and find a cure before it sort of mutates into something much more deadly.
You know, you've also been very forthcoming, coming back to a more personal level, about how your father was also enmeshed in QAnon.
And I'm wondering if you can just tell us a little bit about what the family impact has been for you, and also what you've heard about regarding impacts in other families.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, if you thought I was rambling before, I can ramble on this for ages.
For me, so just a bit of context, me and my dad have nothing in common.
Nothing.
We are like two completely different individuals.
I'm very much like my mom.
My sister is very much like my dad.
My dad is like a walking, talking contradiction.
This man has three degrees, electrical engineering, law, and an MBA.
No one thinks education is more useless than he does.
He thinks it's a waste of time.
On top of that, he worked for the government in Australia for like 25 years.
He's a public servant, right?
He hates the government.
He hates, defund them all, blah blah blah.
So it was funny, like he was just always kind of a contrarian.
One thing we do have in common is that we independently both have a interest in discussing like world events and economics and politics and whatnot.
So when I first found out about QAnon, I am I tried to talk about it to my family, tried to talk about it to my friends.
No one gave me the time of day.
It was like, of course not.
But my dad did.
And the thing was that my dad, when I told him about this, this was something that I knew that he didn't know.
And at that point in my life, I was like, I had, I was still living at home.
I still am, but I'll be moving out.
But anyway, I was still living at home.
I was unemployed.
I had yet to finish uni after 15 years.
I had never held down a job for more than six months that I hadn't got fired for.
And, you know, like it was, I was an absolute loser, basically.
I'd done nothing.
And when my dad was, the look that he used to give me when we talk about QAnon, we used to talk about it for hours, hours, just in the kitchen for four or five hours just talking.
And he used to look at me with a kind of respect that I had never seen him look at me with before.
Wow.
And I kind of liked that.
So I went out of my way to find new and interesting stuff to talk to him about.
So he got really into it really quickly.
And then I got out and he was It was so... That was the only thing I regret about all of this.
I don't regret falling into QAnon and all that stuff.
Not because I look at it like, oh, it was actually a good thing.
No, no, no.
Because that's just not the kind of guy I am.
I don't regret things.
Like, whatever.
I look to the future.
But this thing, this I regret very much.
It's one thing to waste my time and waste my own Like, potential or whatever.
But my dad is a self-funded retiree who spent almost $100,000 on a couple of patents, and he retired to work on these.
But he doesn't.
He's just consumed by QAnon for the last two, three years.
And like, I cannot get him out of it.
He's still in it.
And I have tried and tried and tried and he is still in it.
And it's the worst.
It is the worst.
Like, I...
I get so triggered whenever he even starts talking about it.
Like I was saying, the only thing we had in common was talking about politics and economics.
We can't do that anymore.
At the moment, it's a bit like I'm South Korea, my dad's North Korea, QAnon and politics is like the DMZ, and my mom and my sister are like the UN and the US.
So it's kind of sad because we just don't connect on that level.
I yeah that is that's it's my fault too because I also get like really I get so triggered every time even if I hear a hint of a conspiracy theory I'm like I don't want to hear this dad shut up I know more about this than you and he'll call me a sheep he'll say I'm asleep I'm not awake which I laugh at because I'm like dude I introduced you to this you can't just shut up don't tell me that but
To be honest, that is such a good outcome for this particular situation.
In fact, I don't know how much better it could be because we're still civil.
We still talk to each other.
There's probably about an 80% warmth of what it used to be, but it's still pretty warm.
My dad doesn't go out and scream and shout and rant about QAnon anymore.
I'm also a moderator of QAnon Casualties.
So it's a subreddit, in case for anyone who doesn't know, which has specifically a subreddit for a forum for people who have lost friends and family to QAnon.
It's not even like a general QAnon subreddit.
It's people who have lost people to QAnon and we have 200,000 Wow.
Jatharth, we actually interviewed Mike Raines several months ago, back when it was maybe 45 or 60,000 or something like that.
Yeah, man.
And even then it had grown.
Yeah, that was during a really exponential period.
I remember...
There was a thread, the creator of that particular subreddit had posted on the general Q subreddit about this new subreddit he had created called QAnon Casualties, right?
Three people commented, one of them was me.
I remember when it was 400 people.
I remember when we had 10,000 and I was like, that's a lot.
Then we went from 10,000 to 180,000 in one year.
For a period of like eight months, we essentially just doubled.
We went from 10 to 20 to 40 to 80.
And it was insane.
And just as a mod there, the stuff that you see is really bad.
I see people, like you said on the top of the show, divorces, lost friendships, like not being able to see family anymore.
That is, that's stock standard.
That's nothing.
We see people who, it gets worse because then we see people who have committed suicide, cultists who have committed suicide because of this.
We see parents refusing to get their children vaccinated.
We also see stuff, and I'm sure a lot of people have probably heard this, but we recently had someone who was a survivor of the Stoneman Douglas school shooting, and their dad was a QAnon follower, and he didn't believe him, he thought he was a crisis actor.
Right.
That was, and I, by the way, I confirmed that story as well, that it's true.
And that is, that's just some of the stuff.
And we have, we see it every day, constantly, constantly, constantly.
And if anyone doesn't think that this is some kind of, like Rachel said, Rachel indicated earlier, some kind of absolutely new phenomenon.
Like we can say, oh, it's kind of like a Doomsday Call.
It's kind of like a interactive game.
It's kind of like a, like a whatever.
That's all correct.
But that's not completely right.
Because I don't, there's, this is like, this is, there's never, I don't remember anything that's taken off like this to this level that is so ridiculous.
It's like, it's like Game of Thrones level popularity.
That's the last thing I can remember that was at least bigger than this.
And if anyone doesn't think it's an issue, come to the subreddit.
This is a subreddit with 200,000 people.
This is just on Reddit.
I shouldn't laugh, but yeah, it's, it's really, the mods are pretty, um, they're really good.
And just, I just want to shout them out.
I just want to say that these guys are great.
They are amazing.
And there's a lot of us, there's 20, but we, we, there's a very high attrition rate.
Um, there's only about four or five and we get like, they do so much work and we're all casualties in some way.
I think all of us, everyone listening on some level, like some have lost more, but we've all lost some.
Rachel, you know, so often the family plays a central role in helping a cult member reconnect with reality and normalcy.
What do you see as being the unique challenges in circumstances like this and what Githart is describing in which, you know, families might be split down the middle with some indoctrinated and extremely online, others begging them to stop, some of them trying to play the role of the UN.
Right, so these kinds of cases, and I don't mean to sound clinical by calling them cases because they're families, they're human beings, they're tortured souls on both sides.
They're wanting their family to believe them.
And they're wanting their family to be safe.
And they're so afraid that if their family doesn't believe what they're sharing with them, something horrible is going to happen.
And I think that that is some of the fomenting, some of the fervor, and the reason that they get in your face.
Because if someone's trying to save someone else's life, they will get in their face.
You know, there is something that happens that is so sad, you know, when we're talking about people going into these school board meetings.
I'm working with a lot of families who, the children will say, you know that mom who got into the principal's face and made that speech and was telling us that we were all stupid and we're morons and really lost composure?
Well, that was my mom.
And I need to go to school in two weeks and show my face in this place, and I am terrified.
So here again, I'm going back to this idea of saving the children.
They made their children feel so much shame and that they now don't know if they're going to be able to have friends at that school.
And now that they are able to go back to school, they don't want to.
Same thing with families now having an opportunity to get together again.
They don't want to.
So what I think families can do is the ones who are concerned about a family member, they have to give up this idea of needing to be right.
Because if it needs to be about someone being wrong and someone being right, then you're going to get nowhere.
It needs to be about taking a step back, having the person who has that belief teach you about why it matters to them, getting to the core.
Sort of, I think that when, you know, people are spouting the beliefs, then if you join them there, you get caught in the weeds.
It's important to go behind it.
What is it giving them?
Like Jadarth was saying at first, it was a connection to his father.
So that was, I think, that spoke to you, probably in a more powerful way than the beliefs at first.
And for other people, They're very fearful of their own safety, they don't trust the government and so let's get to the root and let's talk about the root and let's see if we can heal that or help you with that or let you know that that isn't the only way.
This isn't the only way to have a relationship with your father, you know, and that might free a person to say, oh, I actually don't need to get involved in this in order to have X, right?
So we want to be able to really understand the situation on a deeper level and have no fighting.
But it's also important with these cases to first have a conversation about the rules of engagement.
You need to talk about talking.
How are we going to talk?
How are we going to talk about this?
Because there's something so incendiary about the subject and people getting in each other's faces.
So having the rules of engagement set for both parties.
And sometimes it doesn't last more than a few minutes, but still give it a go.
And then you pick up the conversation later when everyone has cooled down.
Then once you have the rules of engagement, then you can possibly have the conversation, but you want to understand.
You want to, again, get behind it.
I wanted to ask Rachel, and you may have noticed earlier I kind of lit up a little bit because you and I have something in common here where, and I wanted to ask you about this, it seems like there's a piece here in your analysis that has to do with therapy and has to do with psychological awareness and as you were just describing so beautifully, the ability to relate to one another from a place that
goes behind what's being said into what it means and how it feels and that kind of sort of active listening approach.
But there's another piece that I seem to be hearing from you that is more educational and cognitive, right?
And I've heard you talk about this on your podcast.
You've talked about things like confirmation bias coming into play with cultish beliefs.
You know, we see things like logical fallacies or tendencies to sort of cherry pick the data with a lot of anti-vaxxers, right?
And I'm really curious just to hear anything you have to say about the intersection between psychology and sort of cognitive or logical fallacies in terms of how people get into cults, why they stay in cults, and perhaps how You hinted at this earlier, there might be a way to have a healthier, more intelligent sort of spiritual culture around how we think.
Right.
So, we see what we want to see so much of the time.
And we see what confirms our needs at the moment and what makes us feel a certain way, what our wishes are, what sort of proves a point that we want someone else to prove.
So it's not that we're the lone voice trying to make that point and trying to convince others of that point.
What is true is that people will ignore the red flags.
By their own admission later on when I asked, did you see problems with this?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I saw problems from the beginning.
I saw that there could be issues.
I saw that there was fallout.
I saw that people were getting harmed or whatever else.
I decided to not look at it because what I was getting from it was feeling so good.
What I was getting from it was feeling so uniquely wonderful and energizing and calming or making me feel Something that I hadn't felt before or connected.
That's the other piece that I think people really sometimes adhere to a belief so they can feel connected to other people and that pierces isolation that they're feeling.
So we ignore things to stay in a relationship and it doesn't have to be a cult and we've done, everyone has done that in our relationships.
And I think what's also important is for people to be able to see that it's natural to do this and there's nothing necessarily wrong.
But what you don't want to believe is that this is the only way to feel that.
Because as soon as you believe that, then you'll get dependent and you'll stay in something that's highly, highly unhealthy.
Great.
Thank you.
So Jatarth, you've been hearing Rachel sort of come at the question of how to work within families or within relationships with issues like these.
I'm curious to hear any advice you may have.
You know, you've shared about the difficult journey with your dad and how powerful the connection was and how difficult it is now.
Maybe with regard to him or with any other people in your life, what advice might you have based on your experience for someone who's trying to navigate this stuff?
Look, I would say that forget about the beliefs.
Just forget about them for a second.
Focus on their behavior.
How has their behaviour changed?
Are they spending more time online?
Are they not doing their chores?
Are they not spending enough time with your kids?
Are they neglecting their job?
They're obviously going to be doing something.
Now, bring that up to them.
And like I said, just focus on their behavior.
They'll come up and they'll say something like, oh, it's because blah, blah, blah.
You'd be like, listen, that's fine.
That's great.
Okay.
You know what?
I believe it.
Fine.
Q's real, man.
Cue's real.
Thank God.
We're saved.
Phew.
That was a close one, man.
All right.
That doesn't explain why you haven't mowed the lawn in like three weeks.
All right.
Why James is still waiting for you to help him with the crates.
Like, Focus on that.
Try and distract them.
I know it sounds so stupid, but it's like, buy them a console, right?
If you can get your hands on one.
Just take them out.
It's so hard during COVID.
Distract them.
Get them away from their screen and away from their phone just for a while.
Now, that is, that's kind of what I would say to like a, just a bit of a dysfunctional relationship, right?
But there are levels.
I mean, If someone's, for example, being abusive and aggressive and saying disgusting things, try and look at it and say... I know it's so hard because I don't even follow what I preach because, like I said, I get triggered when my dad says something.
So you just have to...
Draw their attention to what they're doing wrong.
Tell them, look, mum, I didn't appreciate what you said about me giving my child the vaccine.
I thought that was very offensive.
I'm not going to speak to you for a while.
However, should you want to apologize, I'll hear it.
Otherwise, I'll speak to you in about a month.
Going further than that, Some people, I would just say, men, run.
Run as fast as you can, as far away as you can.
The person you knew is dead.
They are gone, and they are never coming back.
So I like, I can't, it really depends on the person and the situation.
That's the problem because I haven't even found a way to convince my dad how to get out of QAnon and I got out and I got in me like, when I find it, I'll let you all know.
But yeah.
We'll have you back.
Rachel, you know, last week we had Janja Lalic on and I asked her at the end of our panel discussion about her long career and about how, you know, sometimes I imagine her as, you know, in her 70s now,
Having shouted about this material for decades, almost like a climate change scientist, you know, in 1975 saying, you know, this trouble is coming.
And I want to turn it to you.
You haven't been at it quite as long, but what can we do?
Is there a vaccine here against cults in general terms?
Right.
Yes.
So yes, I respect Janja very much.
I'm very happy she's on your show.
Right.
In my 30 years, I wish that I could find a vaccine that would work for everyone.
I think about a couple of things.
One is Just even working with people who have been involved in kind of cultic groups, sometimes there are the unexpected.
The unexpected pieces that will make a difference.
I know there's one woman I was working with doing an intervention for her and I had all my materials all laid out.
But the thing that made the biggest impact on her is that I offered her some tea.
And she realized that she had been a devotee for 20 years and had never been offered anything.
And she had never been taken care of.
And that moment, I mean, I pushed all the books out of the way after that moment because she started crying and she realized what she had been missing, what should have been there.
And same thing with another intervention I did where I don't know if it was the things I said that made a difference or just that there was no internet access.
That made a difference, truly, because there wasn't that ability for them to be reached and worked on and to get their fix.
But I do think that it's important.
To try to do something that is preventative.
This should be in schools.
This should be part of school curriculum.
It should start happening at young ages.
I think middle school, when people are starting to get into relationships, they need to know whom they can trust, how to define their boundaries, how to say no.
They need to know how to pick up on social cues.
They need also to continue with that through high school and college areas and they're going to be prone to being recruited and times in their life they're going to be prone to being recruited when they're starting out in their life.
So many people send their kids off to college only to have a cult group just kind of kidnap their child away from their life and away from their school.
I think people need to learn about coercion and that it exists and how to detect it.
They need to be able to engage and refine or build their critical thinking.
And even using examples of advertising.
Why is it that you bought that instead of that?
And how did it work on you?
And how did it play on your mind?
I think, you know, what's very hard is that people don't realize how much taxing this puts on our whole society when people get embroiled in this.
It taxes our medical system because people don't go for medical care.
People don't get vaccines.
People do get engaged in pseudoscience.
I hate to even call it science.
The word science shouldn't be in pseudoscience.
It's just pseudo something.
And also our legal system, right?
How do you get away from a malignant narcissist who is trying to steal your children away from you?
Could you have prevented that?
And our psychological services, because there's so much, there's so much anger, there's so much sense of loss of what it could have been or what your life should have been.
And I really want to prevent people from having to go through that.
I've written two curricula that have not been picked up.
They were actually Curricula I was asked to put together for different schools and then they decided to go in a different direction because they just didn't think it was a priority, which is I think crazy to me because it is so important.
I think they're going to be teaching people how to move forward in their lives and how to get a career and how to become adults in this world, but you can't do any of it if you don't have freedom.
Jatarth, we will eagerly await the day when Rachel becomes, gets a cabinet position in anti-cult education as part of the public health department in the United States.
Because she, I totally agree with what you're saying, Rachel.
If we could have some kind of middle school education on the basic framework of coercive social dynamics, that would be incredible.
But very briefly, Jitthar, to finish up here, what is something that someone you trusted could have said to you earlier in your life, or done for you, that might have inoculated you against QAnon?
It's ironic because exactly what Rachel said happened, and I'll try and be brief, but I had the fortune or misfortune of knowing a couple of sociopaths for the last 20 years.
I did not know there were sociopaths until very recently.
Most people, people say like, you know, Donald Trump's a sociopath, Nancy Pelosi's a sociopath, it's like, No, they're not.
They're just normal idiot people doing dumb stuff.
You have no idea the level of manipulation and coercion that sociopaths, for example, have.
You know the sociopaths, and I guarantee you think very highly of them.
So, because I had that experience with them, I then, when Q, I saw the manipulation that Q used in order to predict, predict in inverted commas, the phrase that Trump would say, tip top, tippy top shape, and how he didn't predict it, he just picked up on that Trump had said it, and then preempted that, and also did that the night before the State of the Union, so there was a chance Trump could have said it then.
So that level of Genius.
Because that's genius to pick up on, A, that he says that.
He only says that a few times a year.
You have to observe people very closely.
And then creativity to find that information and use it in this particular way.
You have to know people really well.
And that coerciveness, that deception, That was what got me out.
I didn't care about the failed prediction.
There are a million others.
It was the deception because I saw that and I was like, I've seen this before.
And if I've been deceived like this, in this way, then I have been deceived in a lot of other ways that I have no idea about.
And that is what caused me to get all the conspiracy stuff I had learned in the last couple of years, grab it out of my head and just chuck it straight in the bin.
So I think Rachel's completely on point and she's got my vote.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Well, that's not exactly true.
But as is the habit of Dr. Bush, a, quote, physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care, end quote, transforming a general sentiment into a declarative statement is quite on-brand.
For example, Bush believes mitochondria are responsible for all diseases, a distortion of the fact that this organelle has been associated with many diseases.
The distance between causation and correlation is a hard terrain for many conspiritualists to cross.
That's the painstakingly nuanced territory of science.
And for men like Bush, research that confirms pre-existing beliefs seems to be the only type worth paying attention to.
Speaking of terrain, let's get a little more specific.
Bush doesn't believe germs cause diseases.
He declares Anton Beauchamp's disproven terrain theory to be the root of all ailments, and Beauchamp was cancelled according to his fans, just as wellness disinformation specialists are being cancelled today.
But like Bush, Bouchamp wasn't out of his mind.
The environment, the terrain, or microsimian theory, plays an underappreciated role in our health.
I mean, how could it not?
Decades of research have shown the damaging effects of noise, light, chemicals, foodstuffs, and much more on our bodies.
But germs still matter.
The problem is, that's not marketable if you're Zach Bush.
You can't sell a host of unproven treatments at your clinic if germ theory is true.
So among Bush's mClinic offerings, we find Emotion Code, which is a quote, non-invasive approach to clearing trapped and suppressed emotions, end quote.
He also evaluates the human energy field with electrophonic imaging.
Then you have hydrogen respiration, one of the more outlandish water treatments I've ever come across.
And then we get to phase angle measurement, which is Never mind.
Julian talked about it in a recent episode, so I'll let you look for that.
Whatever training Bush lacks as a doctor, he exceeds as an orator, which has helped him swell a social media following into the hundreds of thousands.
Many are hypnotized by his poetic musings, a skill that McGill University's Jonathan Jarry sums up best when calling him the droning preacher of mitochondrial ecstasy.
The decisions we're going to make in the next few weeks around vaccination towards a virus that we've been told is a unique experience in human history, this pandemic, We are making some global health decisions that are going to radically change our relationship to the virome, this massive ecosystem of viruses that carry the genetic information that allows for adaptation in microbiology to do what it does best, which is
Adaptation and biodiversification at the cellular level, at the molecular level, at the macro level of ecosystems planet-wide.
The virome is literally the language of life on Earth.
Without the virome, we would have never adapted to any life forms on the planet.
And so it's with great excitement that we welcome in an opportunity to explore a relationship that is billions of years old, that of cellular life to the virome and the relationship between the two.
The narrative that's been told to us is that humanity is desperately awaiting some new technology to change our relationship to this one virus.
It's important for us to start to frame that in the relationship to the science of the last 30 years that has taught us something extraordinary.
Scientific revolutions of this scale have only happened a few times in human history.
The galvanic effects of droning have precedent.
Late medieval English prose was based on a rhetorical style called amplificatio, an oratorical form that Robert Graves calls the embroidering of a simple statement to the point where it almost ceased to make sense in his introduction to Le Morte d'Arthur.
The story is secondary to the hypnotic trance the listener is captured by.
Truly, the medium is the message.
Bush's appeal largely comes down to the stupor you find yourself in after being assaulted by his grandiose prose, spoken in rapid-fire bursts that boil down to, they're lying to you and I've discovered the truth, which I'm more than happy to sell to you.
And then of course, the dog whistle dominating many of his recent speeches.
Don't.
Take.
The.
Vaccine.
And so on Instagram, he writes, Over the last year, various pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies have unified behind the genetic engineering of a single protein.
The spike protein of CV origin that functions as a vascular toxin.
This N technology has targeted the hearts of our children, elders, and peers, creating a new epidemic of acute inflammatory injuries in young, healthy people and elders alike.
Get this man some data on who's being hospitalized in America right now.
But it's not surprising.
A number of disturbing trends have emerged in the modern incarnation of the anti-vax movement.
Protests date back to Edward Jenner's confirmation of the efficacy of vaccinations in 1796.
in 1796.
So anti-vaxxers really are not new.
Now, while the concept of vaccines goes all the way back to a fourth century Chinese text, and to be honest, likely further because written records do not comprise the totality of history, Jenner's experiments helped Louis Pasteur develop the germ theory of disease, which was of course Jenner's experiments helped Louis Pasteur develop the germ theory of disease, which was of course the final
Bush's rage against the vaccine is part of a larger agenda, one that is both laudable in its criticism of agricultural and pharmaceutical giants, and laughable in its scientific deception.
The man has proven to have no limits when blasting Gabriel's horn, using whatever means necessary, which brings us to what I wanted to discuss this week, his posts about Malcolm X.
Now on its face, his posts are about media censorship, an intriguing ploy by a man with 280,000 Instagram followers, 118,000 Facebook followers, and 53,000 YouTube followers.
Tally podcast appearances and Bush's reach is well into the millions.
But unfortunately, this tactic is effective.
Yell censorship even as you maintain more of a reach than many of the media outlets you decry.
Anti-vaxxers spreading fake statistics and confusing correlation for causation are not new techniques, though.
But this recent wading into culture war issues puts a spotlight on their limitless propaganda efforts.
I recently talked about and wrote about their sharing of anti-Semitic memes, suggesting the vaccinated are preparing to throw the unvaccinated into camps and strip them of civil liberties.
So Bush is only one of a crowded field using a similar tactic, aligning anti-vax sentiment with the plight of Black Americans.
And in his Malcolm X posts, Bush is in part referencing the deplatforming of disinformation activists and what he perceives as the media's refusal to discuss the real story, which for him is communing with the millions of viruses that live in the dirt that ultimately grant us perfect immunity.
Anything produced in a laboratory is antithetical to nature's harmony, a sermon he often delivers with religious fervor.
But just as Austin's right-wing comedian, J.P.
Sears, recently appropriated a Martin Luther King Jr.
speech in his anti-critical race theory, anti-trans rant, Bush features X on a feed filled with misinformation while suggesting he's part of a targeted censorship campaign.
And of course, this is a common anti-vax trope.
Cosplay the oppressed when you have no idea what actual oppression entails.
If you want a plane out of Kabul right now, we can probably find one for you.
Or maybe we can.
But, sadly, this all works, and that's the problem.
And the fear is much deeper than a vaccine.
As the latest census shows, the population of whites in America is shrinking for the first time in centuries.
And instead of celebrating the long-espoused dream of becoming a melting pot, white Americans declare their civil liberties are being infringed upon.
Ironically, this is the same set of tactics that have made them the richest and most powerful sect in this country.
But privilege is blind, and so any perceived slight is treated as an inevitable slide toward oppression or autocracy or whatever Orwell paragraph pulled from a book you didn't actually read and certainly don't understand.
This trend of cosplaying the oppressed has been especially apparent in the predominantly white wellness sector.
As Matthew recently noticed, pseudoscience profiteer Sayerji shared images featuring a Black Lives Matter logo and quoting anti-racist scholar Ibram X. Kendi while portraying young Black Americans unable to buy groceries because of vaccine discrimination.
The post states that only 30% of Blacks are vaccinated.
While this low number is factually correct, G makes no attempt to address the systemic conditions in America that led to their medical mistrust.
Instead, he feeds the fire of actual discrimination.
Black Americans are 2.8 times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than whites.
And as with many insidious propaganda efforts, this anti-vax rhetoric featuring racist imagery has at least one point of origin that has been identified.
4chan.
And so you have Black Lives Matter, Anti-Defamation League, and Human Rights Campaign logos on these images which are meant to invoke false solidarity with these movements and organizations.
Besides, real-world examples confirm what actually happens when anti-vax efforts infiltrate Black communities, such as a group of Somalian parents in Minneapolis.
In 2010-11, the disgraced and disbarred former physician, Andrew Wakefield, which is, of course, the grifter who attempted to link vaccines and autism, he began traveling to Minnesota to visit the Somali parents of autistic children.
Between 2004 and 2014, the rate of Somali American vaccination rates plummeted to 42% from over 90%, leading to a measles outbreak in their community.
While it wasn't the only outbreak during this time, the link to Wakefield's influence is irrefutable.
So the return of an eradicated disease was only an appetizer for the current crop of COVID disinformation campaigns.
Whereas Wakefield has a habit of warning communities he perceives to be open to his disinformation and that he can inevitably monetize, white wellness influencers are stealing a page from his manual by playing the oppressed, and they're unconcerned with the damage that they actually cause.
Now, to be clear, much has been written about how vaccine passports could discriminate against under-vaccinated populations.
Because vaccination rates are lower in Black and Latino communities, they will be disproportionately affected if mandates are enforced.
But that's not the point here.
Despite playing both the oppressed and the warrior hero sounding the alarm, conspiritualists are helping ensure that vaccination rates remain low in Black communities, then using those low rates to claim that vaccine policies are inherently racist.
The feedback loop of discrimination continues with wellness influencers doing the damage they claim to be undoing.
So, for as much credit as Zack Bush gives to the terrain, his understanding of the social environment is woefully inadequate.
Perhaps he should stop musing while walking barefoot on the sand and step into an actual city where most of the American population actually lives.
Oppression and censorship are chronic problems in America.
The tragedy is that these conspiritualists don't realize what side they're playing on.
