Conspiracy theories flourish during uncertain times. They're always with us, passed down through generations like alternate histories, yet they’re constantly reinvented when collective stress levels peak. Julian reports on the QAnon spin-off group that’s been camped out in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza for two weeks, hoping to catch a glimpse of a pantheon of resurrected dead celebrities. In light of the Astroworld concert tragedy, which killed 10 people, being interpreted as a ritual Satanic sacrifice on social media, Derek wonders if conspiracies are just how we process everything now. Matthew points out the legitimate reasons conspiracy theorists have for their paranoia while warning against the media's tendency to titillate by misusing the terminology of cult research. And he also reads a bit from Paradise Lost. A conversational recap week as we’re working on some Big Shows in the next few weeks.Show NotesRiots, deaths, sexual assault: Maybe Woodstock was always a nightmareThe Bizarre Travis Scott Claims Show That Conspiracies Are Just How We Process ThingsTikTok and QAnon Panic Over ‘Satanism’ Conspiracies at Deadly Travis Scott ConcertQAnon’s Refuse to Leave Dallas After JFK Jr. Fails to AppearInside The QAnon Cult Waiting for JFK Jr.On The Ground At Dealey PlazaTwitter videos/thread on Michael Brian ProtzmanWhat Biden is keeping secret in the JFK files QAnon Influencer Recruiting Secretary of State Candidates Academic Research on Conspiracy Theories in Times of Social CrisisKaren Douglas PhD on The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories
-- -- --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
You can find us on all of our social media handles.
Maybe YouTube is letting us back.
We'll find out.
TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, of course.
And we're also on Patreon.
We're at Patreon.com slash Conspiratuality.
You can support us for five dollars a month and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspiratuality 78, Society of the Conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories flourish during uncertain times.
They're always with us, passed down through generations like alternate histories, yet they're constantly reinvented when collective stress levels peak.
I'll be reporting today on the QAnon spinoff group that's been camped out in Dallas's Dealey Plaza for two weeks, hoping to catch a glimpse of a pantheon of resurrected dead celebrities.
In light of the Astroworld concert tragedy which killed 10 people, being interpreted as a ritual satanic sacrifice on social media, Derek wonders if conspiracies are just how we process everything now.
Matthew points out the legitimate reasons conspiracy theorists have for their paranoia while warning against the media's tendency to titillate by misusing the terminology of cult research.
He'll also read a bit from Paradise Lost.
This is a conversational recap week as we're working on some big shows coming up.
This is a wild one, guys.
You know, we had thought that the flagship conspiritualist cult headquarters might be centered in Austin, right?
With Mickey Willis, J.P.
Sears, Del Bigtree, and someone named Joyous Hearts' involvement in the planned Gold Star Oasis commune there, and their proximity to Aubrey Marcus and Joe Rogan, who seem to be sort of the the the suns around which all of these satellites rotate but another texas city perhaps has had its cowboy hat thrown into the ring and that city is dallas
well also to be fair though austin got another bump over the last couple of weeks with university of austin at texas oh god you had to bring it up right right so so barry weiss's scam um and And it's kind of like another area in which culture war bullshit is finding fertile ground next to conspiracism and conspirituality.
I think of it like the three sisters.
It's like, you know, you grow corn beside the squash.
Maybe the tech bros are the beans.
But yeah, by all means, tell us about Dallas.
Hold on, I'm sorry.
I thought we were announcing our classes at the University of Austin, Texas as Conspiratuality.
Those are the big shows coming up, actually.
Shit.
Sorry.
In terms of the culture war nonsense, this is about as bad as it gets.
Oy.
But back to Dallas.
You know this is not breaking news.
It's been widely reported and some of that reporting is speculative.
It's in Vice, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, etc.
But here's the deal.
November 2nd, a group of sort of a QAnon spinoff gathered in Dallas at Dealey Plaza and Vice says they're refusing to leave.
They may have land nearby and they have a sort of aspiring cult leader.
We'll talk more about him later.
I didn't hear about the land thing.
Where's their property?
Because I thought everybody was driving there from a long way away and they were putting themselves up in hotels and going broke.
No, that's exactly right, but one of the people who is fairly prominent in this fringe-within-a-fringe group has reportedly, through the social media channels, offered a piece of land that he has near to Dallas where they can have a kind of headquarters where they can then wait for What is supposed to happen, which I'll tell you about right now.
So reportedly, hundreds of these folks arrived in Dallas at Dealey Plaza to gather around the white X that marks the spot on the street where JFK was assassinated.
And there was a live stream the night before the big day, supposedly on November 2nd, so on that evening of November 1st.
Approximately 100,000 people were watching that live stream that showed the crowd waiting for this prophesied event.
What was supposed to happen?
JFK Jr.
was going to be revealed as not really being dead and as being the running mate for Trump now.
Not only in the 2024 election, but as many of the t-shirts said, Trump, JFK, 2020.
You know, I didn't know there was an X there on the concrete.
Did you guys know that?
Yeah, I've seen it before.
It's very spooky, right?
Yeah, I mean, this is a bizarre story, and I think there's some humor in it, but I just want to flag that as the child of boomers who pretty much watched that happen live, it's hard to think of a more charged X in the middle of some concrete in the whole US Imaginarium.
I saw it and I was like, what is this like?
It's so small and unassuming.
It looks like it's just done in traffic paint too, right?
Like, weirdly, it's like, not that the city did it, but that it's been sort of like a citizen memorial.
It doesn't look very special.
Yeah, it is fairly nondescript.
I mean, I described it as being quite large, but when I went and had a look at pictures of it, it's actually not that big.
It's sitting in the middle of the lane.
Of the traffic.
It's almost like, it's like, oh, am I not supposed to ride my bike there?
Or is this, is this where the traffic director guy goes when the lights are not working?
Yeah, something.
I mean, I just think that for, I'm thinking of my mother specifically, like for this generation watching this incredibly aspirational figure, um, so adored, so identifiable, so a seemingly approachable to have his scun blown out, skull blown out.
Um, I just don't think it goes away.
Like I, I know that into her seventies, she would get very quiet, uh, when she talked about it.
And, you know, I know that, I know that the dying hallucinate images from their lives.
And I would not be surprised if that was one of the images that came up for her when she was dying, because I know it had such an impact Or maybe the image of JFK Jr.
in his little sailor suit saluting the cortege.
I think that for that sector of that generation that goes on to then have their own brains splattered out by QAnon, there's so many things that start at that X. So, you know, we're going to talk about cultism and grifting, but I just want to point out upfront that I think it's important to recognize that this is an effort At some level, to turn this spot and piece of concrete into something meaningful, something that can't be forgotten, something where, like, anything can be resurrected.
Because I think we mentioned it already, they're not just expecting JFK Jr., right?
It's also like Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, like anybody, basically anybody famous and dead.
It's a grand bag of hopefuls who might be resurrected.
And I want to say, I think it's always been a kind of ground zero, you're flagging something Really important there.
My Boomer friends, some of whom have been prone to conspiracies, often talk about that whole period, right, between Vietnam, like the loss of faith in the American government around Vietnam, including the fact that there was footage often nightly on the news, that the television becoming so, that kind of footage becoming so available on TV had a big influence on the culture.
And then with all of the assassinations that happened, both of the Kennedys, MLK, etc., as well as the impeachment of Nixon, there's this loss of innocence that my boomer friends describe during that period.
And they'll often refer back to that when they are arguing for conspiracy theories like, say, 9-11 truth.
You know, something just occurred to me, which kind of blows my mind, which is I know that there's all kinds of historical wheels turning that create Fox News out of the conservative media landscape, but it almost feels as though Fox News itself is a kind of technicolor answer but it almost feels as though Fox News itself is a kind of technicolor answer to the black and white reality drudgery of Vietnam television, Vietnam era television coming back every single night saying, this is what is happening to not only Vietnam era television coming back every single
It's, It's almost like Fox News is trying to answer for that historical, I don't know, like sequence of, oh my God, we looked at a lot of newsreels and the ugliness of the world really came home and we couldn't do anything about it either.
As an immigrant here, I just have to say too that the first year I lived in this country was the year of the first Gulf War.
And I remember just being really disoriented by the fact that CNN, which I think was fairly new at that time, was playing live footage, live footage of the bombing of Baghdad, you know, like at all times of the day.
That was shocking.
That was the first time that ever happened in America on national TV.
So that really set the stage for what came next in terms of how we understand and consume warfare from afar.
Yeah.
And in terms of this, this Dealey Plaza, you know, X marks the spot.
It's, it feels like it's already charged with, with a sense of sacred ground, right?
There's a, there is a, an overlap with religious activity there in terms of, you know, this being a site of pilgrimage for people who believe that the truth is out there waiting to be discovered in terms of their conspiracy, their conspiracy investigations.
It's also mundane though because as I was looking at Google Maps at the Street View, I don't, I mean, I know that there's a memorial park.
But also the street itself is this wide boulevard and you and the the cars are I mean it's like a it looks like a 40 mile an hour zone right?
Like people are just whizzing by and so it's it's also a place that's kind of run over all the time.
But isn't that just it right?
Yeah.
Isn't isn't the conspiracy sort of zeitgeist one in which the the The outlandish, the diabolical is always hidden just beneath what you think is actually mundane or what you think has been explained away.
Yeah.
And if you can stop traffic in kind of like a four lane highway that's otherwise nondescript, except for this white X, then that's really good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, let's back up here to unpack this for a moment, because I found myself going, OK, hold on.
Right.
These these folks are gathering at the site of JFK senior's death.
Yeah.
And they're expecting JFK Jr., who has himself been dead since 1999, to materialize somehow.
Either he rises from the dead or he turns out to have been in hiding all of this time.
And then JFK Jr.
is going to team up with Trump for last year's election.
Right.
Talk about crossover.
If you saw Mickey Willis's last newsletter, he opens by saying the Kennedys are the most important political family in the history of America as a way of setting up his relationship with RFK Jr.
Now, I do want to make a correction here because a couple weeks ago I had said that RFK was waiting for his uncle to return, or the people in Dilley Plaza, not RFK.
We're waiting for his uncle to return, but that would be his cousin.
So I apologize to all the hopefuls out there about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were talking.
You were.
Yes.
I mean, but there's another one.
I mean, my parents also remember clear as day Bobby getting shot in that kitchen.
After, I think, what was a pretty powerful speech, right?
Like, I can't remember the context, but it was during the campaign.
Here's the other thing that I was thinking about.
Like, is this a white people thing and their heroes?
Because I can't seem to recall ever seeing black people predicting dead civil rights leaders coming back from the dead.
That's a very interesting point.
Right?
Like MLK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton.
I mean, they probably know that the National Guard would be called out if they gathered to conjure.
Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis.
No doubt.
But I think it might be something deeper, which is that these figures are more people than symbols or icons.
They got stuff done rather than participated in the spectacle.
They're more materially here as opposed to celebrity here, and therefore maybe they're more gone when they're dead.
So, it feels like civil rights heroes have been allowed to die because they did more tangible things and not because we're still wishing that they could actually do something.
It just reminds me of when my friend Michael Stone died of fentanyl poisoning, there was a lot of obviously consternation over how that happened and what it meant and right and wrong and so on.
And there was a Zen priest who used to tutor him who gave the speech.
I think Pat O'Hara, I think her name is in New York.
Anyway, her point was when we sort of wonder about people's deaths, when they're unresolved, there's something when they're unresolved, there's something about us that we're not letting them die.
We're not letting them be human.
And so I was thinking about that too, is that there's something both unfulfilled but also just kind of It's like we get stuck in a supercharged version of the stages of denying death, right?
this wish for these people to come back so that they could continue being celebrities because they were never your friends, right?
It's like we get stuck in a supercharged version of the stages of denying death, right?
Right, right, exactly.
I would also guess part of being unresolved is the fact that I'm imagining a good amount of these people don't believe Trump lost the election.
Yeah.
So magical thinking is baked into this entire.
And also, not saying that everyone there is religious, but you already have precedent in the idea that your savior is coming back.
So there has to be some transference from that idea and then extrapolating from it.
It just makes sense that you would then put it onto other people.
If one person can come back, why can't others?
Especially during stressful times.
That might be a good way of thinking about why there winds up being two potential JFK Juniors in the QAnon lineup, but we're going to get to that, I think, right?
We'll get to that later, yeah.
Actually, more people on side cosplaying as Jesus is better, actually, because... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right, okay.
It's the JFK Junior sweepstakes.
Like, who will win?
Who will turn out to be the... It's like a talent show or something.
But what about, you know, Trump-Kennedy 2020?
I mean, time travel possibilities aside, as you're saying, it's probably a reference to the belief that Trump actually won and will eventually, the date keeps getting pushed back, be reinstated as the rightful supreme leader and savior of America.
But now with this resurrected JFK Jr.
by his side instead of that traitor, Mike Pence.
This is not a new idea, though.
This has been circulating since 2019, actually, which probably explains better why those T-shirts exist, because there was something going around the QAnon circles around those boards that at the July 4th Trump rally in 2019, JFK Jr., would be unveiled as his running mate.
And it turns out that this guy named Vincent Fusca, who is a short, messy, unshaven, fedora-wearing Pittsburgh man who often appears behind Trump, In photos at rallies, he's in the crowd behind Trump, that he must actually be JFK Jr.
And the reason he doesn't look like him at all, and he's quite a few inches shorter and obviously not as handsome, is all of the surgery he's had to hide his identity.
You know, I didn't clock that he was sort of chosen out of the backwash in the speeches.
I didn't know that part.
So he's kind of like, it makes me think of Zelig or something like that.
He's a bystander.
So he was a bystander who was anointed, what, online through memes or something like that?
Yeah.
He never said it.
He's never claimed it.
Well then, but you gotta hand it to him because he took it on, right?
Well, to some extent.
Oh no, he went, he was, he headlined at one of the recent QAnon conventions.
Oh, did he?
Oh yeah, yeah, he was on stage.
Along with the other guy, too.
Savio.
Yeah, he didn't go so far as to show up at D. Lee Plaza though.
I don't know if you saw this, but Tiger King has a season two and they're following all of the people who were involved with the first one and where they've gone since then.
And why I'm saying that right now is because When you're given an opportunity for your spot in the limelight, you don't know how you're going to react.
And when people all of a sudden have attention on them, then they'll just go with it.
They'll be like, okay, this is going to work.
This will make me money.
This will get me in front of people.
And that's what this seems like, at least in terms of the new JFKs.
I noticed something interesting along those lines this week, and I don't know if you guys heard this, and there may be more stories out there about it, but the lawyer for Kyle Rittenhouse has a documentary film crew along with him as he's- Wait a minute, but this is not Lin Wood.
No.
This is somebody different.
Did Lin sort of get- He was booted, but Marjorie Taylor Greene called Lin Wood a Democrat yesterday, which was a fascinating development.
Oh, okay, right.
Well, I mean, that brings us back around to how it is that Kennedy could be a Democrat, could be the running mate for Trump, who's like the far right lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.
Well, they've got to have ongoing purity rituals, right?
They're not going to settle because of that.
I'm thinking about this time loop thing where it also seems that gathering in Dealey Plaza is a way of reliving other protest moments with regard to the election because, I mean, it's like a more peaceful version or a more devotional or ritualized version of January 6th in some way.
You're storming Camelot in the clouds in a way, right?
In a way, right.
Like we want it back.
We want our innocent dream of royalty somehow back.
But what I'm wondering about that Kennedy obsession, and if it was new, and you might remember that where we go one, where we go all, that very widespread QAnon hashtag, probably the one they used the most in 2020.
It turns out this was a motto used by a group of college-aged boys while being initiated by Jeff Bridges into open sea sailing in this box office flop from 1996 called White Squall, in which they encounter a severe storm and then have to sort of prevail against in which they encounter a severe storm and then have to sort of prevail against all odds using what they've learned in their initiation And it's from that same movie that we get another one of the hashtags, the calm before the storm.
And then there's this false idea, I believe it's false, I haven't found any evidence that supports it, that where we go one, where we go all, is actually inscribed onto a bell that is on a boat that belonged to John F. Kennedy Sr. called the Honeyfits.
Right.
So, you know, the wheels keep on turning.
Everything is connected, Julian.
That's right, that's right.
None of this is really a surprise though, right?
We know that, like as I was saying before, My friends who became 9/11 truthers When you talk to them, the suspicious nature of the JFK assassination seems to always be about to pop its head around the corner, right?
Back and to the left, back and to the left, like Oliver Stone had Kevin Costner say in that movie.
When we really embrace one conspiracy theory, it seems that the system of logic it comes with makes others seem more plausible.
So 9-11, JFK, QAnon.
I wonder what else is on the bingo card.
Maybe the moon landing?
I mean, it all makes perfect sense if you think about it, right?
That this amoral, fortunate son, real estate tycoon sleazeball Donald Trump could be seen as a man of the people, a savior in this Republican religion, and that somehow the iconic assassinated Democrat president could be its patron saint, then why not this long-dead son, resurrected as a Pittsburgh superfan in a funky hat, who's come to join forces with Trump in this momentous reveal at the holy site of his father's tragic death?
It all sounds like a pro-wrestling plot, right?
Totally.
But hold on, we've talked a lot about the psych research on the transitive nature of conspiracy theories, how the susceptibility to one predicts susceptibility to more, but we have to be really careful about grouping as well, because in the same way that belief is transitive, I don't think that debunking can be.
You know, and my understanding of the JFK assassination is that it's not a closed book.
Like, there are a lot of people who aren't satisfied with the Warren Commission, and they're not some kooky fringe.
And Biden just delayed a huge document release again for another 25 years or something like that.
I mean, just going back to my mom, there's a gaping wound.
I don't think she ever... Would my mom have answered the question, was there a conspiracy to kill the president?
How would she have answered that?
I think she would have been ambivalent and she would have said, it's possible, but I don't know.
But she probably would have said the Warren Commission was trash and everybody knew it.
And this is not somebody with a conspiratorial bone in her body.
So we have this sort of institutional wound and I think we have to ask, like, To what extent is obfuscation of the JFK files, you know, part of the soil that QAnon grows in?
Because if the deep state didn't kill him, maybe if you stand on that X you'll get an answer as to why they've done nothing about resolving it.
You know, so we've got like this historical uncertainty.
Over generations now, plus time, plus bureaucracy, plus a tanking economy in the Great Recession, plus the immiseration of all of the political groups that would have been sort of bound together by some sort of class consciousness under Kennedy, like all of that is disintegrating.
And so the more Camelot fades, the clearer the deep state appears underneath it, I think.
And in a way, this is always the case with conspiracies, right?
You have to have some nuggets of truth in there.
Yeah.
And it's the same with cults, right?
You get indoctrinated into a cult to some extent because what they're offering has some truth to it.
It's meaningful in some way.
It meets some needs that you have.
It's the half truth that becomes so poisonous, not the outright obvious lies.
And so with conspiracies, you're going to have things in there that are valid and you're going to have always unsolved Mysteries or things that just would look fishy to anyone.
I remember Noam Chomsky being asked once at a public appearance by a 9-11 truther what he thought about 9-11.
And he said, look, with an event that big, there are going to be tons of loose ends.
It's just so logistically complicated.
And if you take every loose end, Here's one person that I don't believe any progressive is going to rally around hoping for their resurrection.
that that's how reality is.
It's often loose-ended and there are things that are just complex and overdetermined.
Here's one person that I don't believe any progressive is going to rally around hoping for their resurrection.
I think that everybody is going to let Noam Chomsky die because he's been of wonderful service.
And when he's gone, I think we will just carry this melancholy in our hearts.
I think that's what I'm saying.
I don't think that we're going to show up at the New York Public Library and like pray for his return or something.
Have you seen him recently, by the way?
Yeah.
He looks like the Green Man or something like that.
He has not shaved his face in probably five years.
Is he 90 years old?
I mean, my God, he just, he will not stop.
I bet he would come on our podcast.
Absolutely.
I bet he would come.
I bet he's free right now.
We should probably text him.
He's going to be 93 in two weeks.
God damn it.
He does, he does multiple hour long podcasts on a channel that I follow, which is very, very sort of random, like half science, half actually half conspiracy theories.
And he appears on there just to talk about philosophy and politics.
So yeah, I bet we could get him.
The oldest marathon runner in the world was 107 in India, I believe.
So you can keep going.
It's the homeopathy.
Keeps them young.
But as I said before, not even Vincent Fusca would show up at Dealey Plaza.
Nonetheless, the crowd sang and chanted and waited in the street.
Some of them were hoping there would be a parade.
Others said that they thought maybe Lady Di would part the curtains and look down on them.
Rolling Stone's Stephen Monticelli captured video of some in the crowd doing a call-and-response chant and, you guessed it, did we go to the moon?
No.
Okay, this is the one that doesn't track, right?
Especially if they're sitting there waiting for JFK Jr.
Because, I mean, the moon landing is a cornerstone of the whole Cold War space program.
So if you love JFK, I don't know how you disbelieve in the moon landing, right?
But do you know something about real history or not, right?
Oh, gosh.
Maybe.
I guess it's hard to believe that you'd miss that bit when there's so many other bits of ephemera that you're clinging on to so hard and so many details that people have memorized like, oh, we're going to hear about Gematria now, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also, you know, we choose to go to them to do these other things and go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is difficult.
I mean, it's part of an iconic speech.
I know.
How would you forget that?
Yeah.
But wait, there's more.
The fringe of the fringe that had gathered here in Dallas have what appears to be a new prophet.
This guy's name is Michael Brian Protzman, and he uses a form of numerology called Gematria.
A bastardized form.
A bastardized form, please, because there would be real Gematrians out there.
Yes, as opposed to the legitimate Gematria that uses numbers to decode the Bible.
Yes, exactly.
And has nothing to do with discredited conspiracy theories, right?
Right, yeah.
Yeah, totally legit.
He claims that he's directly in contact with the Kennedys, and he believes they are descendants of Jesus Christ, which he proves via numerology.
If everything adds up to the same number, then everything proves everything else.
He believes his prophecy will bring in a thousand years of peace, and bingo, ascension into 5D reality.
So look, some commentators like BBC's extremism reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh, and a friend of the pod Mike Rothschild, who wrote Q Into the Storm, Are commenting on Twitter that Protzman and his negative 48 telegram channel are potentially more dangerous as a kind of cult spinoff from QAnon to some extent because there's an identified leader and the way he's interacting with people on the ground.
Yeah, I've got some thoughts about that.
But I mean, first of all, this guy, where does he come from?
He's got, I think somebody mentioned that he has a car theft conviction.
Yeah, I saw that as well.
My understanding of Gamatri is that you have to know the Hebrew to be able to really do it.
So I wonder if he's got that on board.
Probably not.
I did hear some of his glossolalia in numbers, and it reminded me of kids doing timetables, and sort of nodding along, like, yeah, that's the answer.
5 times 5 is 25.
But it's also, like, extremely easy to fake, right?
Oh, yeah.
As is glossolalia itself, I imagine.
But with the number thing, there's only nine digits to remember, and then you just sort of free associate, because, you know, anything adds up to anything.
Yeah, I didn't I didn't want to find clips of him because it's it's it's incredibly boring and and I don't think there's any value there because essentially anytime I've seen him speaking there there's a little group of people around him looking up at him with starry eyes and nodding and he's just saying things like you know along the lines of Trump won the election and then he gives the number that that adds up to and then the next thing will be QAnon the storm is coming and he tells you that it adds up to the same number and everyone sort of is like oh my god the revelation that the deep meaning has been shown to us through
Oh, we gotta go back to Sapolsky there with the numerology of religious ritual and being a form of OCD, right?
Yeah, so in a piece last week in Vice, Maureen McNamara, who is one of the faithful in attendance, she's described as a devout QAnon believer, who became disillusioned with what Prossman was doing, she talks about him controlling She's going to stick with the mainstream QAnon folks.
She has standards.
She has standards.
We shouldn't be mean to her.
I'm sorry.
No, it's a pretty poignant story that she tells.
She talks about him controlling the crowd on the street and preparing them for the moment when the great reveal was supposed to happen.
And then, of course, nothing happens.
He actually said to her, you're in the perfect spot.
You're going to have a great view.
Now just move back a little bit right now.
And then when nothing happened, uh, the next day he tells everyone, you got to go to the Rolling Stones concert that's happening nearby.
And at the Rolling Stones concert, he said, uh, Mick Jagger would turn out to be revealed.
I actually, actually, sorry, let me back up.
Uh, Keith Richard, the, you know, the, the eternal kind of zombie heroin addict who refuses to die will be revealed to actually be JFK Jr.
Mick Jagger will turn out to be Michael Jackson.
Uh, And on drums will be Prince.
So people bought $300 concert tickets to now go and follow this treasure hunt to the next stage of the reveal after it had failed the night before.
And McNamara said that many of the pilgrims had come at considerable personal expense.
Many of them had camped out on the street the night before.
She said there were old people, there were sick people, there were kids.
You know, there's a real sense of almost like a big tent revival, people coming to be at this holy healing kind of moment.
And that she felt that the people there, and this goes to some of, I know your analysis, Matthew, were there because they felt isolated and rejected in their everyday lives.
And they wanted to be with people of like mind and they wanted to be able to go and have an experience that they could return from and say, you see, we told you so, but that now they spent a lot of their money.
They ran out of money while they were there waiting, waiting, waiting for the big reveal.
And she described their predicament as not being able to now afford Christmas.
This is part of why I'm not particularly scared of this guy.
I can imagine him losing it and shooting them all, but I mean, he has done a shit poor job of actually serving those particular needs and sending them to a Rolling Stones concert when they're already broke and cold and tired.
Seems like a real reach.
It's like, oh, go do this.
And he's probably relieved that they're gone for the evening, right?
Which is exactly where they're going to sit around the barrel fires and ask him questions, you know, because he's run out of numbers or whatever, right?
Yeah, and he appears to be, you know, staying in the Hyatt Hotel.
So the inner circle are staying with him there.
He has like a conference room where he's holding court and he's doing his Gematria kind of sermons.
But check this out.
I don't know exactly the timeline.
It appears to be the day after the Stones concert.
A lot of this was reported just through Twitter videos and people giving personal accounts.
But what was shown was Prossman giving strict instructions to the smaller group of faithful who still remained to line up in single file while agreeing to not look up or down or backward as they did so so that they could have what looked to me like kind of like Darshan with the guru, right?
He stood at the front of the line a few feet away from them and one by one they would approach and at that point he would give them permission to turn around and look up.
And he had, oh, there's more.
He had a bird on his shoulder.
He had what appeared to be a parrot on his shoulder while he did this.
Like a live one or like a rubber one?
Yes, a live one.
And then when he would say, now turn around and look up there, what they would see was part of the architecture behind the book depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired the deadly shots.
That there was a pyramid, there was a triangular structure, and this was evidence that the Illuminati were behind the assassination, or at least the false narrative of the assassination.
And some who were in attendance also shared another account of a similar moment where he had people lined up, told them where they could and couldn't put their eyes, and then would point to the colors of the sunset and say that those colors proved that the Patriots were in control.
So there there is some creepy cultish shit going on here.
Right.
I mean, how how long it's going to last.
Yeah.
OK, so we'll get to that.
Yeah.
And then in addition, of course, he sold T-shirts with negative 48 on them that people clamored to buy.
I want an NFT.
I want an NFT of the bird.
That's what I want.
I want a fucking close up of the bird and NFT it.
That would be great.
And then at the same time, he's on his social media channels asking for donations to his 100,000 plus followers for the Inauguration Ball so that people who are there on the ground can afford tuxedos and ball gowns.
Because the inauguration ball is happening anytime now.
So the number of people has ebbed and flowed, but the weird thing that was being noted by people there is that as of this past Monday night, which is two weeks after the failed Kennedy appearance, hundreds have once again gathered with Protsman at Dealey Plaza.
They were shown in a video posted to Twitter unironically singing, we are the world.
And according to Vice Journalist David Gilbert, a member of Protzman's group, as we talked about earlier, who identifies as a rapper, and yes, I'm being snarky there, and goes by the name Prime Minister, P-R-Y, Prime Minister, has offered up a piece of land near Dallas where he says they can set up headquarters.
What are we doing with a Patreon account?
There are so many other ways we can be making money right now.
Totally.
And then just one last thing on this topic, because this is related.
In the Daily Beast, Will Sommer talked about, as you noted Matthew, another QAnon influencer.
He goes by Juan O. Savin.
He appears on a lot of videos with Roseanne Barr doing conspiracy kind of rambles.
And he's really close with Jim Caviezel.
He's toured around the country with him.
Oh, boy.
Doing promotion for Sound of Freedom, which is Caviezel.
If people don't know, this is the guy who played Christ in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ.
And he has a documentary about child sex trafficking called Sound of Freedom.
Yeah, he's terrifying.
A documentary of dramatization.
He's terrifying.
He's going to make a run for Congress.
Yeah.
And this guy, Juan Osavin, has apparently been strategizing with MAGA celebs Mike Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and Jim Hoft to get handpicked candidates into secretary of state positions around the country.
No doubt for the next wave of Stop the Steal recounts because these can be people in place who refuse to participate with the electoral college.
I'm thinking about the We Are The World and wondering if they took turns at the mic, because when I think of that, I think of Michael Jackson, so that's got to be in the mix there, right?
Because he's dead and gone, but you can step up and rip it out.
Yeah, I mean, I think we can all hear it.
Our generation, you can hear the different voices taking their turns on We Are The World, right?
It's such an iconic moment.
There's a choice we're making.
We're saving our own lives.
Remember, was it Geldof himself who was saying to Neil Young, you know, you're flat, man.
And Neil Young is saying, no, that's my style.
That's my style.
That's right.
Anyway, look, I respect Mike Rothschild and everyone else reporting on this and taking it seriously.
I do want to push back a little bit on the cult angle because Okay, I didn't know that he was staying on the Hyatt.
Who knows how much he's bringing in online, but with regard to his on-the-ground resources, they seem to be really small, or he's parsimonious with them.
And he's got a limited bag of tricks.
Like he can't pull off the bird thing more than a few more times.
Right.
And this failure of prophecy gig where you double down after the failure, it doesn't work immediately, uh, indefinitely.
Uh, and usually it works when people have a long-term relationship with the group or the person.
So, you know, winter's coming, uh, The people who are gathered there are running out of money.
You know, he's taking in online donations, okay, but you just can't keep people standing on the grassy knoll forever.
There's no compound.
I mean, I'm sure this is why they're talking about an off-site property.
They've got to look forward to something like that.
But everybody who went there has driven there.
They can drive away when they get tired.
There's no word.
Have you heard any word of them being armed?
No.
He's not offering any amenities.
I mean, every in real life cult at least pays lip service to giving people snacks, right?
Feeding and housing devotees.
So standing around in the plaza having to go pee and then probably shitting yourself because you took ivermectin does not make for cultic glue.
And so in some of the more panicked commentary, again, not from Mike or Will Sommer, I detect a little bit of, please let this be a cult, almost, a kind of wish fulfillment thinking.
And I think just as the JFK truthers want him to show up, I also think there's probably a little part of the left that wants to see them blow each other up to prove that they're nuts, to get rid of them, to prove that they're off the island.
And I think the more polite version of that probably is fantasizing about them all catching COVID.
And I really think that cult researchers or people in that milieu have to be really mindful of this particular thought, which is, ooh, that looks like a cult.
Because it's a little bit porny, right, to be honest.
And, you know, if we think back to Tina Guion appearing on our podcast in his essay with Becca Williams on Moral Outreach Porn, they define porn as the pleasurable thing you don't have to be responsible for.
Cult-calling porn is that, you know, there's this validating pleasure in calling Pronsonman a cult leader, but nobody's actually taking responsibility for what that means or the kind of care that people would need if it's true, so I just want to say that.
I think what will be the glue between these two stories we're covering this week points to what you were just talking about, Matthew, in that people will automatically ascribe Something as a cult, if it gives any sort of markers of it.
And the same thing goes true with this story, which is conspiracies.
So everything has become a conspiracy now, at least in the view of people, especially in the social media age.
So nothing is as it seems, which is one of the defining characteristics of conspirituality.
Any event now is going to have that feeling, and there will be people to start promoting that idea.
So I would also say conspiracies as much as cults we have to watch out for, but this brings us to Astral World.
Right.
So you have 50,000 people who show up in Houston to see this festival, and it's headlined by a native of Houston.
So we're still in Texas here.
We're gonna hit all Austin, Dallas, Houston.
Well, maybe we'll get to McGowan by the end.
Travis Scott.
So a surge of fans were caught in the middle of what was effectively a mosh pit, and there were hundreds of injuries, 10 deaths.
Eight of them at the concert, two later died in the hospital.
And the incident I've heard has made some call for general admission reform.
And I want to address that briefly because having worked in music festivals and having performed at dozens of them, that's just very reactionary to me.
A festival that is done properly with proper security protocols It does not need any sort of reform.
Most people can be in large crowds and handle themselves okay.
I've again experienced this, I would say overall in attendance, maybe a hundred festivals in my life.
It's very much part of my upbringing.
So The reactionary nature of it was a little bit much.
Now, that said, what happened there should be pointed out as a phenomenon which is called group flow.
And we usually associate flow states and group flow with positive experiences.
For example, research on group flow when musicians perform together, their brainwaves sync up and they act as one unit.
But there's also potentially negative consequences.
So I think back to Covering a festival in Casablanca, Morocco, where one of the headliners that one night was 50 Cent.
And 100,000 people turned out to see him.
And I was in the photo pit right in front of the stage covering it.
And what I noticed was all of the security were just people younger than me.
I'm talking like late teens, early 20s.
And they weren't watching the crowd.
They were turned around watching the stage.
And I had in college, I had worked in security at festivals and concerts.
So when you're up there, the number one rule is don't turn and look at the performer, watch what's in front of you to pull people out of the pit, whatever that was.
I left to go to another venue because it was in multiple areas of that city in Casablanca.
And I'm sorry, it was Rabat that this festival was in.
I heard later that the crowd and security all charged the stage.
And all of a sudden, in a swarming moment, they were on the stage with 50 Cent.
And this is actually not the first time.
50 Cent performed somewhere else in Africa, and I don't want to misname the country, but where someone jumped up and grabbed his gold chain off of his neck.
So security is very important.
And when it's not done properly at a festival, you will get incidents like this.
Now to highlight what I think happened at Astroworld, I had the pleasure this week of being on The Daily Show, it will drop soon, but with Jordan Klepper and between filming, I had the opportunity to talk to him for a while and I asked him, What it was like being at the Capitol on January 6th.
And he actually talked about this phenomenon of group flow and the negative consequences.
And he said, you know, there was this moment where you have the Proud Boys and they seem to really know what they were doing by breaking down the barriers.
Like they didn't hesitate.
They went right to it and did it.
And then all of a sudden, hundreds of people behind them are looking like, is this okay?
Is this okay?
And then they just swarm and they just all collectively make a decision.
This has happened a number of times with concert festivals.
Woodstock 69 is always romanticized as being peace and love, but there were two deaths.
One person was run over by a tractor.
There was almost a mass electrocution that occurred.
There were at least four documented cases of rape of women that happened right in the crowd.
Yeah, let's just put a pin in the word documented because I think that's a key word.
I'm betting it was way, way more common than that.
I believe so.
And there was also a group of anarchists that tore down fencing to let people in for free, which also happened at Astral World.
So the 50,000 crowd was even more than that.
So again, pointing to the lack of security.
There was the Who concert in 1979 at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati where 11 people were killed in a human stampede.
Woodstock 99 watched the documentary.
It was a shit show.
Numerous cases of sexual assault and rape and problems all across the board were there.
Also, I'd just like to point out for the listeners, if you haven't seen—is it on Netflix or is it on HBO?
It might be Hulu or Netflix.
I forget right now.
Anyway, it's well worth watching, but please take care of yourself while you watch it.
The sort of devastating arc of that festival is so Fascinating to watch but also I didn't realize how connected the turn from late 90s grunge rock to whatever came after was so kind of resonant and influential with the All of the sort of underbelly of what we're actually dealing with now, especially as it's emerged from the early internet.
It's like, it's almost like the music version of Dale Barron's study of The Chans or something like that.
Anyway, fantastic documentary.
I had no idea.
And there was a moment in that documentary where it was getting out of control and the producers asked the Red Hot Chili Peppers to tone things down and they went out and actually ramped things up, which is very reminiscent of what Travis Scott did in the sense that in 2017, he had another incident where a man was paralyzed.
He had to do a payout to two people in the crowd.
So this isn't the first thing he's known for inciting riots during the performance, which is exactly what you shouldn't be doing.
And thankfully on Twitter, I've noticed a number of people posting all of these times like when Kurt Cobain pointed out someone feeling up a woman in the crowd and stopped the show.
Like you can see what's going on from that vantage point.
Finally, Roskilde was very well known in Denmark in 2000, where nine people were killed during a Pearl Jam performance.
Fantastic band, but not known for inciting riots.
But again, just indicative of that group flow that happens.
So two quick things there.
One, I just think it's worth mentioning that Red Hot Chili Peppers went out after being asked to calm things down because the crowd was setting things on fire and destroying the infrastructure of the festival.
They went out and played Jimi Hendrix's fire.
Let me stand next to your fire, right?
Just completely egging the whole thing on.
And the other thing I just wanted to mention is I know there's research out there and the psychology of this and even like the legal theory around the psychology of crowds is something that's been looked into quite deeply.
And this has a long history of people having different opinions and arguments about it.
How at a certain point in a crowd when you cross a threshold into taboo behavior...
And into into violence that that it seems to be pretty easy if you're in a crowd like that to get swept up in whatever is happening and to have it sort of be normalized like, oh, this is just what we're doing now, which is terrifying.
Well, identity is contextual.
You know, you there's been plenty of neuroscience research showing that you might think that you are one thing all the time, but it's always context dependent and environmentally dependent.
Who you're with and where you are matters.
And the same holds true for crowds.
So if you think, well, I would never do that, chances are you don't know that until you're actually in the experience of the crowd because you are not the same person.
You become part of the group at that part point.
And if you don't consciously step away before it starts, there's a great increased likelihood that you will become part of that swarm.
Well, you also don't want to step away because it's the nature of the experience to want to disappear into that group flow.
So, if it's going south, it's really too late.
And so, it seems to me that the answers are really about preparation and infrastructure beforehand, right?
Like, you would never have fencing that could be overcome so that the capacity is over numbers or something like that.
You would never I don't know what you would do, but it seems like you should be able to plan for that, right?
Absolutely.
It also reminds me of the Osho Ashram.
It reminds me of Rajneesh.
Of course.
And of those kinds of Dionysian ecstasies, right?
And getting into those shared group flow states.
And then all of the reports that were, you know, suppressed, but that eventually came out about how in those big group processes... Yeah, there's nothing but assault.
Yeah, people would get their arms broken, they'd get the shit beaten out of them, they'd get attacked sexually, all of that.
Yeah, and because it's happening in the ashram instead of in a public venue that has its own insurance protocols and the police are involved or something like that, nobody ever hears about those particular stories.
They get absorbed back into the mythology of the group.
So in a way, the group flow of the chaotic Rajneesh Puram meditation is protected by its own narrative.
There's no oversight, there's no way that People can examine it afterwards.
Yeah, so less regulation and more sacralization of a range of awful things.
Yeah, right.
It points to something, one of your favorite terms, Matthew, which is late stage capitalism as well.
And when that enters the music industry, you know, something like Coachella lost money for five years.
And that's actually built into the business plan when you're producing festivals that you want to hit profitability, hopefully at year five.
That said, there are a lot of vendors to pay along the way of a festival.
But now that Coachella is $100 million a year venture for two weekends and brings all this money into that valley, there has been such a capitalization of certain festivals that are now occurring where a lot of them don't make money.
But when you're talking about the level of having Drake behind you and Travis Scott, who's one of the biggest artists in the country, and then Golden Voice, it's just there's such an immense amount of money.
Now, to your point, Julian, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers were never held accountable, and in fact, most people didn't know until the documentary, Travis Scott, Drake, Golden Voice, they're all being sued for $750 million right now.
So there will be some accountability that's happening for this event.
And I hope that's precedent for how people treat security and price inflation and all of those things in terms of festivals moving forward.
So I know it's a bit of a music history but this is all in the context of the fact that after the event The conspiracy theories came, and that's where we've landed.
So you have Pastor Greg Locke, who jumped onto TikTok to proclaim that the entire performance was an elaborate satanic ritual.
Of course, of course.
Over 100,000 times.
Others on TikTok called the concert a portal to hell.
And hey, we're back to the Illuminati.
There was the Illuminati references in his lyrics, Travis Scott's lyrics, apparently.
There's also the piece here, I've seen photos, aerial photos of the stage and the way everything was set up that suggests that it had sort of satanic overtones in terms of the symbology, right?
You mean that it looked cool.
It was set up to look cool.
Well, people immediately pointed to the satanic panic of the 1980s.
looked like an inverted cross.
And there was some other stuff.
Yeah, okay.
I don't remember exactly what.
Yeah, just, you know.
Well, people immediately pointed to the satanic panic of the 1980s.
Julian, you've covered it, Matthew.
You've covered parts of it on the podcast before.
And while QAnon and child trafficking, fear-mongering of this 80s crossover, I feel is just too broad of a comparison, But Ali Berland, who covers a lot of QAnon and conspiracy theories for Mother Jones, he points out that conspiracies are just how we process things now.
Meaning that every event in the news, as I mentioned at the beginning, is now seen through the lens of conspiratorial thinking.
And I pulled this from the article where he writes, Conspiratorial theories aren't necessarily incited by a specific incident.
Someone can just post something weird online and people were one with it, like the false accusation that Wayfair trafficked children in armoires.
Many such theories have layered and bleed together in what Anna Merlon, friend of the pod as well, described in Vice as a conspiracy singularity.
She's really good at coining terms.
Which is the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging, a melting pot of unimaginable density.
Merlin, I said Merlin, I'm sorry Anna, Merlin wrote those words to make sense of what was happening early on in the pandemic, but since then the trend has both persisted and worsened.
I want to flag a topic we're going to be addressing in more depth in December, which is specifically the longstanding conspiracy theories that have existed in white evangelical communities in America since the 1950s.
Given that the three of us broker in wellness spaces, which is predominantly couching Eastern philosophies, we haven't covered as much of the Christian influence.
But when we mentioned in the show notes we have some big shows coming up, that includes a number of episodes where we discuss various aspects of Christianity, including the persistent media push of certain Christian organizations, which really helped to inform the creation of Fox News in the mid-90s, and how that has primed the American brain to think conspiratorially.
Now that said, I want to hear your guys' opinion about Ali's theory.
Is everything going to be a conspiracy theory moving forward?
Well, I think there are people who are always going to find a conspiracy angle on current events.
And the research does show that in times of great social upheaval and uncertainty, and also times of technological change, which we certainly have, you know, with what's happened in the digital landscape.
Over the last 10 or 20 years, conspiracy theories will really flourish.
The research that I'll include in the show notes here from Van Pruyen and Douglas have a 2017 article that talk about exactly that.
And they also talk about how even in times when the crisis has calmed down, the conspiracy theories are passed on as cultural narratives and alternative histories sort of from generation to generation and then they get reinvented.
It's like they go in and out of hobby status, right?
Yeah.
There's an activity that you can do, and then it's kind of modeling at home.
And then you can go out and do it, and then it's modeling at home.
Yeah, it becomes popular, right?
And so then places that, outlets that will allow you to engage in that hobby spring up all over the place because there's increased demand.
And the demand, I think, is because times are uncertain Yale professor Jason Stanley, who I've talked about on the pod before, wrote a book called How Fascism Works, and he also talks about how fascist propagandists deliberately sow mistrust in institutions, mistrust in journalism, in the media, and spread conspiracy theories as part of how they sort of get people
engaged in the populist activity that underlies fascism coming into power.
And part of how they do this is the notion that there's been a glorious past that we've lost somehow.
They have an anti-intellectual bent about them and that the dominant group is somehow the victims, right?
So we recognize all of this from the stuff that we cover and that then there are fantasies of punishment and somehow regaining a muscular male virility.
At the same time, yeah, punishment and - And regaining virility at the same time, right?
Yeah, well, and also that once we have regained this masculine virility and returned to our traditional roles, then we will be able to punish these terrible, amoral, degenerate, unclean, perverted, parasitic people, whether they're immigrants or the cabal who are sex trafficking children, etc.
Yeah, so Christian.
Yeah, and so all of this is so very Christian, right?
So filled with compassionate regard and Christ-like qualities.
Yeah, and so I just want to mention here too that another piece of conspiracy psychology, and this comes from Professor Douglas, who is also featured in that Ryan Pruyan article that I mentioned, she talks about three aspects of what makes people susceptible.
The first is epistemic, that there is some sense of gaining knowledge and certainty around issues that are confusing or disorienting.
And that the research shows that people who are not necessarily less intelligent but less educated are more prone to these kinds of explanations because they're not really well-versed in how to differentiate on the sources of information that they're reaching for.
She talks about existential reasons, that there's a sense of loss of autonomy and wanting to regain power and control.
And also wanting to explain why I have this horrible feeling of losing a sense of power and control.
And then lastly, that there's a social aspect to what makes conspiracy theories appealing.
And that has to do with group identity, right?
If I can find an identity within a group that affirms that we are special, we are in the know, we are outside of the mainstream kind of hypnosis, we've woken up, and that also this special group is being underappreciated and rejected, and so we have sort of a cause, right?
We have something to push back against.
So, yeah, I think in that sense we're in a time where an activity that is always happening is particularly amplified and for many people it becomes the lens through which current events is interpreted.
So, Derek, I do have some thoughts about your question, but I wanted to just preview by adding to your Astroworld report this thing about the rumored syringe punctures at the moment of the stage rush or in the middle of the chaos.
There was a report or maybe several reports that a security guard had felt a pinprick in their neck And immediately thereafter had collapsed, and this blossomed immediately into a conspiracy theory about people running around with fentanyl needles poisoning, you know, security guards randomly.
I think the police chief actually came out and not substantiated it, but he cited it as something that was being investigated.
But then, of course, it was taken back because there was no evidence.
And Annie Kelly, talking about it on QAA, pointed out that it was really interesting that that becomes a fixation point in the midst of, obviously, anti-vax conspiracism.
That, you know, the needle becomes visualized as a weapon in an actual sort of urban warfare.
Which is pretty interesting because the optics of that, of being stabbed in the neck by somebody randomly at a public event, they kind of reverse the clinical scene, the process of getting a vaccination.
That's just, that's interesting to me because the reality of being vaccinated is not mayhem at all.
It's actually, you know, being managed and processed.
Like the second shot that I got was at, I think it was at the North American Record Setting Day here in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre where the Maple Leafs play and the Raptors play.
And I don't know, they vaccinated I don't know, 50,000 people in the building that day and we got 20-minute slots and there was just sort of this endless snaking line like you were going to the sort of shortest basketball game in your life.
And it was very orderly and there was this team of...
of admins standing there with iPods ready to sign you in and everything was completely flawless.
And also because it was at the stadium, it was kind of fun.
But I was imagining that like, if it wasn't such a jovial atmosphere, it was really the picture of absolute managerial perfection of people just sort of calmly filing through the line in a way that would it was really the picture of absolute managerial perfection of people just sort of calmly filing through the line in a way that would make the anti-vax propagandists talk about
So it's it's it's weird because the mayhem of that fantasy that the needle is now a public weapon, actually, I think it tells us something about what people are really scared about, which is that being vaccinated is very mundane.
You know, and in other commentary that I listen to on this thing, I tend to agree with a lot of it, especially on Chapo Trap House, that here the conspiracy theory is really a way for the explanation for the tragedy to be way more attractive than the ugly truth that these people just got chewed up by greed and cost-cutting and shitty planning and people being, you know, and capitalists being capitalists in the event planning industry.
Because that's just too awful.
It's just mundane, right?
And, you know, some other thoughts, like one thought I had was that as a Gen Xer, I, like, I don't think it can make sense for a broad base of consumers who are not all evangelical to be interested with satanic ritual abuse material without finding it funny or ironic, right?
It's like, I don't know how long, you know, people who are not invested in a church structure are going to say, oh yeah, that's really spooky.
Even on TikTok, like, where, you know, irony is sort of like the top menu choice when I think people are doing their videos.
But Matthew, I can't help but wonder if everything old is new again for a generation who's being exposed to these memes, these tropes for the first time.
Well, certainly that's one of the points that Abby Richards keeps making all the time with her own activism work on TikTok, is that with each wave of conspiratorial thinking, there's this kind of incredible, fresh, innocent naivety that's being sort of mobilized to push the story forward.
But yeah, I mean...
Between our two stories, I see this connection between the kind of dreary concrete of Dealey Plaza and this poorly organized concert venue, that both of these places need a kind of surplus of imaginative input to feel like they do something for something to matter.
And, you know, I'm thinking that for You know, people like Pastor Locke, whoever he is, we also have to think about projection and displacement because what could be more exciting to the evangelical preacher than evidence that their values are tangible and engaged in the world?
You know, I'm sure that there's a lot of folks in his shoes who wish they were there so that they can battle Satan directly, right?
And, you know, not to put too much lipstick on a pig, but I think it's worth remembering that going way back, Satan embodies freedom from the cruelty of an authoritarian hierarchy, He is a figure who operates in a place of personal autonomy.
I mean, does this sound familiar?
You know, so one basic interpretive rule I apply is pretty simple that whatever somebody who's pious is terrified of, they actually want.
And so I think contemplating that is appropriate in the lead up to our Christianity December because Our heritage here really is thick with this kind of internal splitting, usually around bodily denial.
So, happy NoFap November, boys, and to all of the proud boys out there.
And I think I'll add with, just end with John Milton, because every time Satan comes up, I think of Paradise Lost.
So, book one, lines 221 to 270, Milton writes, In the voice of Satan, Lucifer, is this the region, this the soil, the clime, said then the lost archangel, this the seat that we must change for heaven, this mournful gloom for that celestial light?
Be it so, since he who now is sovereign can dispose and bid what shall be right.
Farthest from him is best, whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme above his equals, and farewell happy fields where joy forever dwells.
Hail horrors, hail infernal world, and thou profoundest hell receive thy new possessor, one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place.
Sound familiar?
And in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.
What matter where if I be still the same and what I should be all but less than he whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least we shall be free.
The Almighty hath not built here for his envy, will not drive us hence.
