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May 26, 2022 - Conspirituality
01:54:15
105: TikTok, Cults, & Conspiracies (w/Abbie Richards)

Is humanity doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? This week, Julian traces a timeline from the bright-eyed early days of the internet to the dark message boards where QAnon emerged—and that still foment white supremacist mass shootings. to the dizzying infinite scroll on TikTok. Each new evolution of social media exploits innate human vulnerabilities more effectively, delivering more potent strains of deceptive manipulation to receptive young minds. No surprise, then, that a crew of talented dancers with huge TikTok audiences appears to have been recruited into a high-demand evangelical group with a divine mandate to conquer all aspects of American life for Jesus. We'll hear from friends and family anxiously wondering what is going on.For today's interview, Abbie Richards returns. She's the the mis and disinformation researcher with special expertise on the "clock app."Show NotesHow Lonelygirl15 Changed The InternetAnalyzing TikTok Usage and GrowthIs "The Garden" a TikTok Cult?Dancing In The Name of The LordInside the $2.5M LA Mansion Where Alleged TikTok "Cult" Shoots VideosShekinah Church "About" PageThe Modern Apostles Who Want To Want To Reshape America Ahead of the End TimesHBO Recruits Instagram Independent Reporters -- -- --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

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Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
I'm Julian Walker on a solo mission today that starts with the following question.
Is time a flat circle?
But first, really quickly, I want to loop back and invite you to go to patreon.com backslash conspirituality if you'd like to support our work for just $5 a month and gain access to the bonus episodes we publish every single Monday like clockwork.
We'd be eternally grateful.
Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past?
Today I'll be looking at the tangled history of social media, cults, and conspiracies by tugging on a thread that is woven through the evolution of the platforms we've increasingly used to simulate human connection, in the process infecting our politics, reshaping our culture, and corrupting the information ecosystem.
That thread winds through the bright-eyed early days of the internet, to the dark message boards where QAnon emerged and that have hosted and even inspired recent mass shootings, to the shiny fast fashion of TikTok, and an alleged cult using young, talented dancers to propagate the new iteration of evangelical Christian conservatism infiltrating the highest echelons of American political power.
Now, where was I?
Oh yeah, that's right, thanks.
Time is a flat circle.
This is how the character Rust Cole, in HBO's True Detective, refers to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence.
Framed as a hypothetical question in his 1887 book, The Gay Science.
Now in the book, the voice of a hypothetical demon asks, What if this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more and there will be nothing new in it, the hourglass of time turned over again and again and you with it, speck of dust.
I'm recording this just days after a white supremacist mass shooting has happened in Buffalo, New York.
As you likely already know, the 18-year-old shooter deliberately chose a supermarket in his zip code with the highest percentage of black inhabitants, and appears to have posted a 180-page manifesto that leaned heavily on the racist and anti-Semitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory on the 4chan message board.
The manifesto included his detailed plan for how to carry out his mass murder, which he also live-streamed.
And both clips and still photos from that carnage reportedly circulated on 4chan and extremist websites.
The livestream video originated on Twitch, who took it down within about 2 minutes, but was screen recorded and then re-uploaded and shared Proliferating across the internet in the same way other manifesto-accompanied mass shooting videos have radiated outward from either 4chan or 8chan, which is now called 8kun, in the past.
The Buffalo Shooter wrote that he had been inspired by previous mass shootings, especially the one in Christchurch, New Zealand, and had himself been radicalized into racist extremism on 4chan during the pandemic because he was bored.
This is the fifth white nationalist mass murder in the last four years associated with these hate-filled message boards.
19 weeks into 2022 and there have already been 198 mass shootings in the USA.
Now that data point comes from the Independent Gun Violence Archives, which defines mass shootings as events in which four or more people are shot or killed.
According to that scale, we ended 2021 with 693 mass shootings.
In 1997, exactly 100 years after Nietzsche first posed his eternal recurrence question, the earliest budding of social media began its ever-accelerating journey toward world domination with a little website called the earliest budding of social media began its ever-accelerating journey toward and I'm going to go to the next slide.
That website grew in a short few years to a million users and then was bought for $125 million before being shut down in the year 2000.
Today, we'll explore what has happened since then in the increasing blurring of lines between real life and life online, between scripted entertainment sold as reality and the world offscreen, between social networking sites and between scripted entertainment sold as reality and the world offscreen, between social networking sites
between news and misinformation, politics and culture war theatrics, and of course, between the scholarly and journalistic processes of fact-based research and the fallacious reasoning of paranoid and unevidenced conspiracy narratives.
A little over a year after the website called YouTube was launched, the user LonelyGirl15 became the platform's first real star by the user LonelyGirl15 became the platform's first real star by sharing her straight-to-camera video diary.
The 16-year-old, who went just by the name Bree, posted accounts of her ordinary teenage life, directed people to her MySpace page where she interacted with her fans, and created video responses to already well-known YouTubers.
Bree said that life in her hometown was boring, and that as someone being homeschooled, she was lonely, and therefore spent a lot of time on her computer.
She did have one friend, though, who went by the username Daniel Beast.
He would sometimes be pictured sitting on the bed behind her.
Of course, it turned out that Daniel was secretly in love with her, and so videos of that teen drama unfolded.
They fell out with each other and then made up.
So far, so pedestrian.
But as the months went by, the suspense grew, with Brie mentioning from time to time that her family were involved in a mysterious religion.
This culminated eventually in her making videos about preparing to participate in an ominous-sounding ceremony for which she had apparently been especially chosen.
Lonelygirl15 became the most subscribed-to channel on YouTube, and journalists got involved in the hunt to find out who she really was and what was actually going on.
By the time the channel was exposed as an entirely scripted show featuring a 19-year-old actress from New Zealand named Jessica Leigh Rose, hundreds of thousands were following the string of videos that had been posted every few days for a couple months.
The entire series would end up garnering over 60 million views, with the story climaxing in Brie sacrificing herself, now everyone knew it was fiction, so that her friends could live free from the religious cult referred to only as the Order.
This novel form of storytelling made LonelyGirl15 the first YouTube channel to monetize via product placement advertising in their videos.
The creators of the show were two aspiring filmmakers fascinated with how the emerging phenomenon of YouTube blurred the lines between reality and fiction.
They went into credit card debt to the tune of $50,000 to create and launch the show and were, as it turned out, pioneers in algorithm hacking.
They figured out by painstaking trial and error how to place the perfect freeze frame in the exact spot that YouTube automatically selected as the thumbnail.
They used callouts to popular YouTubers and added friends to boost engagement and they deliberately generated a lot of activity in the comments.
This early instance of viral marketing via user-generated content and blurring the line between fact and fiction or reality and art might seem harmless enough.
It very effectively captured the imagination of viewers and exploited the internet appeal of a pretty and wholesome young woman.
But it did more than that.
It got people emotionally invested in what they thought, even if briefly, was the real-life danger of an innocent person involved with a cult.
If, as the famous early meme has it, the internet is for porn, well, perhaps then social media is for cults.
But certainly for conspiracies, and as the wheel keeps turning for real cults, like QAnon, based on conspiracy theories about false cults like the blood-drinking Democrat pedophile Cabal.
If the internet simulates reality, pornography simulates instantly available consequence-free sex, and social media simulates friendship and community, which is also, of course, what cults do.
What about conspiracy theories?
Well, they simulate research and investigative journalism.
We also know that social media has increasingly become a major vector for simulated, or fake, news and the political theater it inspires.
While the Oxford Dictionary's anointing of the term post-truth as the word of the year didn't happen until Trump's 2016 election campaign, the new media possibilities of the internet already had us rushing down that superhighway toward what philosopher Jean Baudrillard referred to in 1981
as the hyper-real, which he defined as a blending of reality and fiction in such a way that human minds cannot tell the difference between reality and a simulation of it.
Lonely Girl 15 happens in 2006, but Loose Change, the seminal online conspiracy 9-11 truth film was released a year the seminal online conspiracy 9-11 truth film was released a year before in
And the first Zeitgeist film, which also spent a third of its time on 9-11, before launching into good old anti-Semitic international banking conspiracy tropes, was released a year later, in 2007.
But the first third of Zeitgeist?
Well, as it turns out, that focused on how Christianity was really derived from pagan religions and astrology.
So, in the first of Peter Joseph's really influential Zeitgeist film series, we already have a conspirituality trifecta.
Ancient religion, diabolical government conspiracy, and the evil Jewish bankers who rule the world.
If Lonely Girl 15 deceptively blurred the lines between real life and scripted entertainment, Loose Change and Zeitgeist used the same tools of new technology to deceptively blur the lines between investigative documentary journalism and emotionally manipulative DIY conspiracy propaganda, complete with ominous music, disturbing visual montages that combined archival footage, animation, and narration
Uncredited quotes, paranoid speculation, and claims made with no evidence.
Conveniently and instantly these films were available to view either on YouTube or at that time on Google Video.
This meant that they reached millions.
So here's a timeline.
Let's start with the fact that Facebook is created in 2004.
YouTube begins in 2005, and that same year, Loose Change is released.
In 2006, Lonely Girl 15 gave us a relatively harmless scripted show pretending to be real and dropping clues about a mysterious cult and possible human sacrifice.
2007 saw the release of the first Zeitgeist film.
In 2008, a hacker collective called Anonymous that had started on the 4chan message board, where everyone's first screen name upon joining is exactly that, Anonymous, made waves by attacking the Church of Scientology.
By 2014, troll armies from 4chan were organizing raids not only on political targets and suspected pedophiles, but also flexing their collective power on the more sweet and innocent message boards that existed for younger users, especially Tumblr, a site dominated by politically progressive teenage girls.
2014 also saw the vicious harassment campaign of Gamergate, which expressed male outrage at feminist critiques of how women were represented in video games.
This was characterized by threats of real-world rape and murder, as well as the doxing of targets so as to make their private whereabouts public knowledge.
A former guest on the pod, Dale Buran, chronicled all of this in his extraordinary book, It Came From Something Awful.
It culminates in what his subtitle describes as an internet troll army memeing Donald Trump into the presidency in 2016.
Pizzagate emerges during that 2016 election campaign and will lead to an armed young man storming Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. to rescue children he believes are being held hostage by Hillary Clinton's supposed Democrat pedophile cabal.
Before surrendering to police, he will fire three shots as he attempts to gain access to the basement dungeon in a building that has no basement.
and Hello, QAnon.
Q's first drop is in late 2017, and then Hello Pandemic.
2020 would see Mickey Willis' 26-minute anti-vax and COVID conspiracy video interview with Judy Mikevitz, Plandemic, reach at least 8 million views within two days after being released, before it was then removed from YouTube.
Okay.
QAnon would give us a gamified, lurid, nightmare conspiracy that first jumped the rails into mainstream social media sites like Facebook, where QAnon groups initially spread Plandemic by the way, Twitter, and Instagram, and then forced its way out of the screen, motivating marches
Murders, kidnappings, armed standoffs with police, and getting candidates elected to public office, and then mobilizing many of the participants in the January 6th assault on the Capitol in 2021.
Which brings me to TikTok.
Launched in China in 2016 under the name Douyin, the app grew to 100 million users and over a billion video views a day in its first year.
Then it went international.
American celebrities jumped on board by 2018.
2019 saw the signing of a multi-year partnership with the NFL.
And by September of 2021, TikTok had surpassed 1 billion accounts.
41% of the app's users are between 16 and 24 years of age.
90% of that demographic use it daily.
TikTok currently has 100 million users in the U.S.
alone, and they spend an average of an hour and 25 minutes on the app every day.
Now, time may indeed be a flat circle, but it spins faster with each social media platform's cycle of growth.
Statista.com crunched the data to tell us that while it took Facebook 8.7 years to hit 1 billion users, YouTube did it in 8.1, Instagram in 7.7, and TikTok, well, 5.5 years to get to well, 5.5 years to get to 1 billion users.
In case you're not familiar, on TikTok, users create short videos which they can edit within the app for maximum impact using filters, slowing down or speeding up clips, and by adding music.
The scroll on TikTok is also infinite, both horizontally, because every video is an endlessly looping GIF, And vertically, because the scroll downwards from the top simply never ends.
What's more, the feed of videos you're scrolling through is algorithmically selected for you, but in no chronological order.
And those videos are devoid of any date and time information.
So, ironically, the clock app brings you into an infinite array of frictionless content all happening only in the dizzying and intoxicating timeless present moment.
The platform has led to multiple viral trends, lucrative opportunities for influencer marketing, the creation of new internet celebrities, the launching of modeling and musical careers as a result.
The app has also become a significant factor that drives the popularity of new music by already established artists and breaks unknown artists.
It played, for example, a major role in making Lil Nas X's song, Old Town Road, the longest-running number one song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100.
18-year-old Charli D'Amelio currently tops the popularity list with 140 million followers.
Like many other popular TikTokers, she grew her following by posting dance videos and has a background in competitive dance.
She now has a reality show on Hulu, a book, a podcast, a nail polish collection, a mattress, and a makeup line all available for sale.
At 18, she has an estimated net worth of $12 million.
But 21-year-old Addison Rae, another dancer, ranked third in followers, is worth $15 million, and was the app's highest earner in 2021.
Charli D'Amelio's sister, Dixie, elder by two years, is at $57 million, the 10th most followed on TikTok, but she ranks as the third highest earner, with an estimated net worth of $10 million.
This kind of reach and influence has also meant that TikTok, like earlier platforms, can be politically impactful in novel ways.
Like when users pranked the 2020 Tulsa campaign rally of Donald Trump at a 19,000 capacity arena by flooding the event with requests for hundreds of thousands of tickets ahead of time.
This resulted in Trump reportedly expecting a packed house, addressing an arena that was two-thirds empty.
On a less humorous note, hashtags for Pizzagate and QAnon reached 80 million and 50 million, respectively, by the same month as that Tulsa Trump rally.
And TikTok has also been a vector for plandemic and other COVID misinformation.
More recently, as we will hear from our TikTok correspondent Abby Richards in a little while, the app has been a major source of Russian propaganda about their invasion of Ukraine.
But there's another phenomenon on the time-stopping clock app that will bring us to a story that has been in the news the last month.
I hinted at it when we started today.
It seems to have the potential to be an effective recruitment vehicle for cults.
As with the Tulsa prank, echoing the type of trolling exemplified by Anonymous in their collective actions against Scientology, there's a viral trend of so-called profile picture cults, which exhorts users to show their loyalty to particular influencers by all changing their profile picture to the same image.
This similarly generates an intoxicating sense of impactful collective action.
This ironic use of self-identification with cults and in-group language to create a large group cohesion and then demonstrate dominance by flooding comments threads also reiterates earlier internet battles between the chans and other message boards.
So here's 29-year-old Melissa Ong.
She goes by Chunky's Dead on TikTok, and in 2020, she drove one of the biggest examples of this phenomenon with her self-described cult called Step Chickens.
I do feel like a real cult leader.
Like, it feels like I actually have a real religion.
In a world of many TikTok cults, only one can stand at the top.
And that is us, the Step Chickens.
People will, you know, do what I say, and I don't want to say the puppet master, but... Supreme leader, tell me what to do.
I'm all yours.
I'm your chickie-poo.
I do feel like I have influence or power to sort of craft this narrative that a lot of people want to be a part of.
We must demonstrate that we are the most powerful TikTok cult by dominating the comments section of the For You page.
Rise up.
Rise up, stepchickens!
Rise up, stepchickens.
Rise up, stepchickens.
Rise step chickens!
To be honest, I don't know that much about real life cults other than the ones that have orgies because I remember I was invited to one of those on my 18th birthday.
I think that there would be a subsection of my cult that would be open to an orgy if I were to orchestrate.
My End goal with the Step Chickens has always been total internet domination.
When I saw that we completely took over and shook up TikTok, I was like, wow, like with this kind of power, we could really take over the entire internet.
So I know a lot of my followers watching this or who watch me, see me as inspiration to try and create their own content.
And I just want to let you know that I am living proof that you don't need to be good looking or talented in order to get famous and be successful.
People have always asked me like, hey, what if this You know, career path doesn't work out for you.
And I very bluntly told him, like, I would just kill myself.
Like, I literally would just go and overdose on heroin.
and I would like empty out all my savings, like book a ton of travel, just do a ton of drugs and just die.
Hi, I'm Melissa, but call me Mother Hen.
Leader of the Step Chickens, cult, not a clan.
There's no father rooster, don't need no schlock, when I'm my own father with this giant horse cock.
See me on screen and say, Stepchicken, what are you doing?
Words cannot describe how proud I am of our power.
The devil works hard, but Stepchicken's works hard.
Stepchicken's infiltrated comments sections of highly visible professional accounts like those of the Washington Post and Adweek, as well as sports franchises like the Tampa Bay Rays and the Kansas City Chiefs, and got them to change their profile pictures.
numbers.
This rapid growth and exposure led to a YouTube channel, a Step Chickens app, a theme song on Spotify, and a merch store whose homepage shows a full-screen picture of a pigtailed Ong double-flipping the bird in a green hoodie with a grotesque graphic on the front.
Items for sale include references to inside jokes like they have horse cock tees and towels with the large words cum towel emblazoned across them and a clitoral hood hoodie sweatshirt So far, so harmless, perhaps, but the echoes of 4chan ripple through this organized mass trolling as performance art.
Melissa Ong just figured out how to monetize.
Here's another story.
In early 2021, Hanging out.
off-the-grid intentional community in Tennessee called The Garden, released a video depicting life in their commune that would go viral.
The video gave the exact address of their property and invited people to come and join.
It now has billions of views.
Here, let's listen.
Rainy and wet day here at the commune.
Hanging out.
Painting.
We're playing pool.
Sam is still working.
And you can come be wet with us too at 8967 Galen Road, Lafayette, Tennessee.
Join us.
So several creators who lived at the garden each grew followings in the tens of thousands over the next few weeks.
But the fact that members work the land all day to get access to food and shelter and sleep in shared bunk bed dormitories started critics wondering out loud if it was a cult.
Experts asked to comment said that so far it seemed not to qualify, but it was the kind of situation that could easily go bad.
Then TreeIsAlive, the username of the person whose voice we heard in that clip, talked in a live stream about having killed a stray cat who had killed some of their chickens.
He then said they ate the cat so that it didn't go to waste, And that it tasted like chicken.
This earned them the wrath of a group of users dedicated to taking down cults.
As the profile of the Garden grew, so did the number of detractors.
And the fact that they had sent out an open invitation along with their address drew criticism that there was no vetting process and that a commune drawing in people looking to escape conventional life could be unsafe for young people and marginalized people.
The prominent figures associated with the garden reportedly received death threats and ended up leaving the property.
As it turns out, none of the fears that the garden is a cult have been validated, but misinformation and extremism researcher Elizabeth Creaston told inthenow.com that although it had no charismatic leader, she did see dynamics in the garden that are often present in cults, adding, we are seeing the fringe become mainstream.
Another cult expert, Dr. Gail Sulz, told In The Know that cults prey on people who have a shaky sense of identity and wish to belong to something.
TikTok users critical of the garden have pointed out that the self-contained isolation of such groups posed risks with regard to their financial system and potential medical emergencies, which could leave members who'd become dependent on the group extremely vulnerable.
Elizabeth Creaston agrees that various social protective mechanisms are left behind when someone becomes embedded in a cult.
Critics also cite that cultish dynamics often evolve out of seemingly positive or innocuous groups.
For example, Keith Ranieri's Nexium began as a multi-level marketing company, then offered self-improvement courses, and eventually became a secretive, high-demand, sex-slave cult that branded the leader's initials into women's pubic areas.
I'll leave my references to this inthenow.com article, which I'll link in the show notes, with these last words from Kristen.
She says that cults create catastrophes, like inculcating a core belief that people are deeply broken, and then offering the cult's teachings and practices as the only solution.
So even though The Garden is both an example of a potentially cultish situation that has so far turned out to be benign, as well as an example of how users caught up in TikTok sleuthing can drive a premature algorithmic magnifying glass that can result in slander and death threats,
The discussion did also identify some key red flags that indicate potential cult dynamics, things like isolation, joining up to experience a totally new way of life, and in other instances you would see an all-powerful leader
absolutism about the singular importance of the teachings and convincing of people that their brokenness at a point in their life in which they are vulnerable can only be redeemed by the cult.
Up next, we're going to delve into the strange tale of the Wilking Sisters, a popular dance duo who followed their dream from Michigan to California, only to be split up by a quite disturbing-seeming a popular dance duo who followed their dream from Michigan to California, only to be split up by a quite disturbing-seeming religious leader who has built a TikTok dance crew that is dominating social media and has popped
But first, I'm going to bring on the person I think of as our TikTok correspondent.
So, Abby Richards is an independent myths and disinformation researcher who specializes in TikTok and...
And listeners may remember her from an excellent viral conspiracy chart, sort of an educational video that was incredible and got a lot of exposure.
And we talked about it on the podcast.
And then after that, maybe a few months later, we had you on for episode 49.
Thanks so much for joining us, Abby.
Thank you for having me.
That feels like so long ago.
Right, especially with all the work that you're doing.
It's never-ending, right?
Yeah, I lose track of time.
I have no concept of time at this point.
We can definitely relate.
On today's episode, just to kind of bring you up to where I'm at, I've been talking so far about how the evolution of social media platforms has lent itself to a blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, a kind of simulation of reality, if you will, that inevitably gives rise to fake news, alternative facts, and it's fertile ground for cults and conspiracy theories.
Which in a way can be seen as kind of simulations of community and family and activities like research and journalism.
I think of you as kind of being our TikTok correspondent because none of us are particularly savvy about TikTok.
It's probably a generational thing.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts about the Clock app and if it is especially fertile ground for cults and conspiracies and misinformation.
And if so, why do you think that is?
I have a love-hate relationship with it.
I think that it's difficult to say it's especially fertile because it's really difficult to find any sort of baseline and to know exactly what sort of impact it has compared to other platforms without having that data to back it up.
But what we can see are that conspiracy theories and misinformation are able to go viral on TikTok.
at a rapid speed and to a very large scale.
And I think that TikTok's algorithm and its video format, whether or not it's completely unprecedented is difficult to say, but it's very easy to say that there is a lot of misinformation on that platform. but it's very easy to say that there is a Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
One of the things I noticed in researching for today, and this will have been obvious to you, but I noticed that as I was trying to sort of create timelines of things is that I couldn't find any information about when different videos were posted on TikTok.
Is it the case that it's just sort of this eternal present moment of content?
Was it while you were scrolling on the For You page, or were you going back into somebody's account and specifically trying to look at what date they were posted?
I was looking at specific videos and then going to their account and not seeing in the same way that I would on other apps that this was posted on this specific date.
So this is a problem with TikTok's design that does also facilitate the spread of misinformation.
While you're scrolling in the feed, you are not given the date that that was posted.
So it could be two hours ago, it could also be two months ago, and that's not specifically said to you.
You can sometimes get a sense of the date based on the comments section, but that's not necessarily accurate.
So then what you would have to do is go to that user's account Find that video no matter how far back it may be and then if you go and access the video through their account you can see the post date, but I have been long lobbying for it to be much easier than that.
Yeah, that just seemed to me like one of the things that I felt like I was entering this alternate reality where I was trying to clearly identify when a post was from.
And you're right, I did then go to the account and scroll through and I just felt like I'm gonna be scrolling forever trying to identify the post by its thumbnail and you know, I don't know.
I don't know when it was posted.
Yeah, especially there.
I mean, there are people who post like 20 TikToks a day.
They just post all of their thoughts and everything they're doing.
I don't do that.
And I like clearly label all my videos to try and like combat that.
But yeah, the app is not necessarily set up in a way that is supposed to make you feel aligned with time.
So when you say that may be one of the reasons why misinformation can go viral, what's your reasoning there?
Well a lot of the times we see content surface that is out of context or it's delayed in some capacity.
So a really good example of this was early in the start of the invasion of Ukraine.
Old viral, like, older videos of people speaking Russian, speaking Ukrainian, speaking any language that Western viewers interpreted as Russian or Ukrainian.
Or, you know, other protest videos, like footage from Kazakhstan, even though it had been posted Like, weeks ago.
It would be resurfaced because there would be this surge of attention and the algorithm would respond to that attention, that increased attention.
And because of that, like, the algorithm was contributing to this surge of misinformation just by providing old, out-of-context videos and people couldn't even tell what their date was and, like, where they were from.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, I saw you posting about that that is that is very I mean, it's it's it doesn't sound like it's deliberately misleading but it's it's easy to then manipulate that right?
Yeah, I think it's it's also just Going to respond to our human anxieties in times of uncertainty where there's especially when there's like an information vacuum and we don't have a good sense of what's going on and we have a lot of worries about it and fears, then it's very easy for misinformation to come and fill that void.
So when the algorithm provides older content without context, it's super easy for our brains to just assume that that must be relevant.
It's happening now.
So...
Wow, so my other question was, to start us off, do you think there is something about the TikTok demographic especially that might make them vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracies, cults?
I think that humans are vulnerable to those sorts of things, and I think that that might vary across different demographics, but these problems have been going on for a very long time, so I don't generally tend to blame it on an age thing or a generational thing.
I think that like, look, I mean, conspiracy theories are particularly appealing to younger people, especially like teenagers.
Like the prime age for believing conspiracy theories is about 14.
So there are some aspects when you don't have like a complete worldview yet that make those theories appealing.
But at the same time, a lot of people who believe in conspiracy theories are adults.
Totally, totally, and in advanced years.
Would you say though that the problem of misinformation and the related things that we're talking about has been amplified by social media and that the sort of evolving iterations of social media have perhaps in some ways made it worse?
Maybe?
It's difficult to say.
I mean, I certainly think that there is just more information on social media.
Like, now we are flooded in constant information.
So...
Of course it's easier for some of that to be misinformation.
I don't know if we're any more likely to believe falsehoods than we were before because we've always been very likely to believe falsehoods, very easily manipulated.
But now we're just bombarded by so much of it that I don't know if it's, I don't know if I could say it's definitively a larger ratio so much as like it's just a larger scale.
Yeah, yeah.
You've been gathering data and doing analysis specifically about TikTok for how long now?
Well, I started as a creator on TikTok just over two years ago, and I would say I started doing research on TikTok about a year and a half ago.
Okay.
What's your sense?
Do you have a synopsis about how these sorts of trends have been unfolding up until now in that time period?
In what regards?
Like general misinformation trends, like what do you mean?
Well, would you say that a year and a half or so ago, when you started really observing and researching and sort of gathering data on this, has it changed between now and then, or has it basically been the same thing with different details?
Oh, interesting.
I think that, again, the scale is increasing.
I think that more people are on TikTok, so more people are posting on TikTok, so there is more false information to go viral.
And I think that TikTok has also been evolving in that time, like away from, at least in some areas, away from dances and memes and, you know, towards Longer short form content.
So, you know, they opened up like the three minute feature and now even a 10 minute feature that I don't think I've ever seen used.
But the... I think everyone on there is going, that's not what TikTok is.
Why are you giving us 10 minutes?
Nobody asked for this.
Exactly.
We had IDTV already.
Yeah.
Why are you doing this?
I don't want to see a 10-minute long TikTok.
Oh, my God.
But, I mean, I am certainly guilty of making three-minute long ones.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, well, I mean...
It's always been impressive that you can convey as much information as clearly as you do in such a short amount of time.
So it makes sense to me that having a little longer to lean into would be valuable.
Yeah, I mean I think about like my first early videos when I was doing like Q&I explainers and they were a minute long and I literally would go into the editing app and for certain chunks have to speed up my voice up to like 1.02 or 1.03 to make it fit in 59 seconds and now we don't do that anymore so people were already like, you talk fast enough?
You don't need to artificially enhance that.
To make it to 59 seconds I do.
Yeah.
One thing I've seen you describing is the phenomenon of moral panics on TikTok.
What, what's up with that?
Yeah, there's a, I think it's, it's, it's also, I would phrase it specifically as moral panics about TikTok more often than they are on TikTok.
It's a lot of older people looking at kids these days and their new technology and assuming that because it's something that they don't understand, because it's something that they don't use, that therefore all of these horrible things that kids are doing on the app must be true.
And it's usually like this viral TikTok challenge where kids are, you know, doing X, Y, Z harmful thing.
So it could be like slap a teacher as a TikTok trend, which was a hoax.
And then later research into it found that it never even originated on TikTok.
And then, you know, sometimes panics about something like the blackout challenge, which is supposedly this TikTok challenge where you hold your breath until you can pass out.
But if you actually look into that, it's been this game called the choking game that has caused dozens of deaths in the last several decades.
So that's been like an ongoing kind of cultural game that we've played.
Not that that's any better, but it's not a TikTok challenge.
There's something bigger going on.
I mean, same when it comes to like there was like National Rape Day, National School Shooting Day.
A million different ones.
Recently in France and Belgium, like in French language media, there was a lot of attention given to this thing called the Labello Challenge, which was supposedly a TikTok challenge where every time you get sad, you would apply Labello Chapstick.
And then once the tube ran out, you were supposed to take your own life.
Now, this is not how suicide works.
It's actually quite trivializing to suicide.
It really fails to understand how self-harm and suicidal ideation come about.
And it really doesn't help to destigmatize it or help anybody get the assistance they need.
But since it's a simple narrative for a major anxiety that we have as a society, it can be very appealing when it comes to Clickbait stories.
Yeah, so I hear you really cautioning against taking, I mean, if there's millions and millions of posts happening daily, it's probably even more than that, there's going to be some nutty things that some people are posting.
There's going to be some sort of weird trolling and a sense of humor that we would find completely inappropriate.
And if that's circulating amongst certain people, it doesn't necessarily mean that this has the power to result in the horrible outcomes that we might anxiously imagine it would do, and to your point, in a way that completely misunderstands why those outcomes exist in the world already.
Yeah.
I mean, if you want to have a panic about every single Yeah.
people talk about doing on social media, you're going to have an endless news cycle, really.
Some things, especially if it has not gotten attention, if it's not something that people are actually doing, I think that we should just be very careful about what we amplify and what we give oxygen to.
Because sometimes those things are better to be siphoned off and then instead take all of that energy and go put it into actual mental health resources.
That would have been so much better.
What a concept.
Yeah, crazy.
Yeah, so one of the moral panics that I came across was, or I'd be interested to see what you think about it, was this commune called The Garden.
I remember The Garden.
Yeah, and they had a post where they just invited anyone to come and gave their address in Tennessee and come live the off-the-grid life, right?
Yeah, that was a while ago, right?
Was that 2020?
2021.
Again, I have no concept of time.
Yeah, and so it seemed like there was a big upwelling of accounts who were then very, very focused on the Garden account and on their different influencers and saying, this is a cult.
They're inviting people.
It's dangerous.
We need to investigate this.
In the end, it turned out that it was all pretty benign, although some experts were saying, well, it has some of the hallmarks that could potentially be dangerous down the line, but you've basically put all of this attention on a group of people and gotten them into a position where they're getting death threats and they're being accused of all sorts of things that have no basis.
And so are you asking if this would fall under the category of a TikTok panic?
Yeah, yeah.
I had thought it might have been a situation that you had followed.
I mean, if it wasn't, that's fine.
No, it was.
It reminds me less of the TikTok challenge panics and more of the TikTok sleuthing.
Phenomenon.
More of like the true crime sleuthing that occurs on TikTok that the algorithm also like helps to go viral and to resurface so that like it builds upon this knowledge where people dig up certain information and everybody has a theory and everything kind of like this big cultural moment just continues to snowball via via the algorithm into this much bigger phenomenon.
So I think that it reminds me a little bit less of the panics and a little bit more of that like sleuthing culture on TikTok.
So are you what you're calling the panics is more around these sorts of challenges and, you know, things that just seem really dangerous.
Yeah, I mean, I tend to, you know, talk about like news coverage of TikTok and how as a culture we view TikTok.
Whether or not there's a cult moral panic is a whole other question that you are probably much better equipped to answer than I am.
Yeah, yeah.
I've seen you post recently about the problem with the relationship between extremism and satire and how satire can sort of have this sort of problematic way of disguising things that might actually be extremism.
Tell us about that.
- Yes, it's an old internet adage called Poe's Law that essentially stipulates that any, parody of an extremist view can be interpreted as a sincere expression of that extremist view.
So a lot of the times when people are joking and creating parodies and satires of a very extreme view on anything really, Somebody can watch that and look at that, and because, you know, they harbor similar views with their own biases, assume that you are coming from, like, approaching it from the same lens as they are.
And there was a really good example of this on TikTok, which is what I used in that video, was a Real Crunchy Mom, no, Real Crunchy Mama.
Who was like a, I haven't checked in on her in a hot sec, but she was making these parody videos, kind of parody, difficult to tell, actually pretty, pretty near impossible to tell, of crunchy lifestyle.
And for me they felt like parody, but for other people they were like, you know, thought that she was making fun of herself, but also sincerely promoting this lifestyle.
It was very difficult to tell.
And it included things like putting garlic cloves in your ears, right?
Oh yeah, lots of different things to avoid, not touching any chemicals, garlic cloves in your ears, which you really should not do.
You shouldn't put anything in your ears, really.
Or food anywhere except your mouth.
Yeah, I think I said, don't put food in any holes except your mouth was my exact quote.
Yeah, there were all these conspiracy theories about her at the time too when she was a hot topic that she was like an industry plant to sell to like market these crunchy products.
Uh-huh.
Because she had too many props for it to really be a joke.
Okay.
That's interesting.
Her set was too crunchy for it to be completely satirical.
Yeah, yeah, and this is one of the things that I just find myself so curious about in all of this, is like, you know, there's satire, there's pretending, there's knowingly pretending to be something you're not, or knowingly saying things that you don't really believe, and then there's the people on the other side of the screen who, you know, either will Have a perception that is accurate based on your actual intentions or will take you at face value.
And so then with regard to extremism, it makes me then think about, you know, everything that comes from 4chan onwards around trolling where there is this complete negation of sincerity and just a move into dark irony that is
You know, just self-perpetuating, and often has a lot of very violent overtones, very ugly messaging, with the sort of notion that this is all a joke.
Like, no one really believes this.
Yeah, and another thing to point out, first of all, is that you have to be coming from a place of power to find those sorts of jokes funny.
You have to really not be affected by them, usually.
So there kind of is this intrinsic Power and being able to laugh at them.
Which is, I think, why white men have such an easy time with that type of humor and don't understand why other people don't think it's funny.
Like it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't strike at any place where they feel powerless or traumatized or... I mean, no.
Like these racist, misogynistic, ironic jokes that they have aren't about them.
They're about other people.
And... I mean, like, sometimes they're self-deprecating, but that's... Aside from that point, the other thing I wanted to bring up was...
That people often will use jokes to test out how it feels to say something before they actually were ready to say it seriously.
And we see that with extremist ideologies as well.
You might jokingly say these things to test how people receive it, test how it feels to you, before you actually were ever to sincerely express that belief.
So I could almost see it as well as kind of like a social feedback loop in which you're actually trying to figure out where your community is, right?
Where the people are who are going to perhaps start to align with those emerging extremist attitudes?
Yeah.
When I saw the video about satire and extremism, I thought immediately of the step-chickens and this whole thing of like, you know, almost, it's like satirically pretending to start a cult, but in the process of doing that, you're actually gathering a huge number of people who are all behaving in cult-like ways.
Do you have thoughts about that?
Do I have thoughts about the stepchickens again to me and like in tik-tok world So long ago so long ago But again for me time is a flat circle because I'm just I'm just looking and it's like it's all happening now Is there anybody still in the stepchickens I don't think that it died out like it was short-lived I Don't know I think the like cults
Operate on a spectrum and there's a point at which, you know, the thing is concerning enough to get involved and then there's the point at which it's just internet culture and like a meme.
I don't know if I have a super strong opinion on the Step Chickens though.
I was just curious about it in terms of something that is doing a sort of satirical performance art kind of thing.
thing with which which is using the uh the social media platform as kind of the medium to get all of these people involved in behaving a certain way to make some kind of um some kind of point about you know how you can mobilize people and there's just something so in reading about it it's it sounded there was something transgressive about it and something very much like we're gonna
we're gonna flood these different comment sections we're gonna go to these um sports franchises and these big media publications and get them to change their profile picture we're gonna demonstrate a kind of like uh power over as many people as we possibly can and how even though the There's nothing necessarily malicious in the content of what they're doing.
The process of what they're doing is still kind of like, wow, that could be used in very negative ways.
Yeah, I see that point.
I mean, I think that the reason why it worked was because it wasn't malicious and I think that it was so silly.
And I don't know if it could have gone as far if it were malicious, but that's hard to say.
I think that you're definitely on to something with, like, the formula they used is very similar to one we see time and time again of how people act en masse when they're following a person.
Yeah, well for our last couple questions, why don't I back up and then come fully up to speed here, because I know you have some other stuff that's much more fresh, but would you say that there was When I first became aware of you, of course, you were talking about QAnon and you were talking about the pandemic.
In hindsight now, how significant do you think TikTok was in spreading COVID misinformation and getting people interested in QAnon?
I think that I would say probably more so COVID misinformation specifically like a lot of once like because it was it was more up and running once vaccines were out.
So I think I've seen a lot more COVID misinformation than specifically like QAnon followers who were going to other platforms.
I did see quite a bit of Save the Children narratives starting in the summer of 2020 like everybody else did as it spilled over.
And I mean, you still see some QAnon stuff.
I would say that QAnon is more significant on TikTok in how it has shaped our relationship with conspiracy theories and how popular they are.
And the way that we interpret the world often through the lens of conspiracy theories.
And it's shaped a lot of TikTok culture in that sense, more than I would say that TikTok helped shape QAnon.
Interesting.
And so what about the current multiple horrible news stories that we have?
I mean, I'm thinking of Roe vs. Wade and I'm thinking of the recent shootings.
How are you seeing that stuff showing up on TikTok or being sort of the feedback loop there?
I haven't been able to check in on the shooting side.
I guess, you know, like the fascist side of TikTok.
Yet, that is on my unfortunate to-do list.
When it comes to Roe v. Wade being overturned, I didn't see, and again, TikTok's difficult to monitor, because other platforms, you can kind of do text-based searches and find what people are talking about and trends over time, whereas TikTok, like, you don't even If you haven't gone out and found the video yourself, you'll never really know it exists.
That's just the current tools that we have.
So, from what I've seen, I mean, there's so much more pushback.
My cat is crying outside.
Aww.
Do you want to let the cat in?
I could.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Okay, come in.
But, from what I've seen, there's a lot louder Push back and anger on TikTok about Roe v. Wade being, or the draft overturning of Roe v. Wade, then there is a lot of anti-abortion celebration.
But that's just what I've seen.
TikTok also, sometimes you need time to be able to understand how news is shaping the broader events.
So what shall we end on?
Is there anything, any final topic that is sort of top of mind for you around all of this?
Oh, I have one contribution to make.
For the dance called 7M thing.
Okay, good.
I was reading some of the articles about it and they were describing a lot of the videos as like this Disney Channel-esque style dancing and some of them are but there is more nuance there I think in like the number of videos that You know, either use memes or songs that have curse words.
They're not wearing that much clothing a lot of the time.
A lot of the dances are sexier than just, like, a Disney Channel dance.
Absolutely, I agree.
So I thought that that was just interesting.
Because it definitely, like, you know, there's some folding into Christianity there.
But I did just think that was an interesting piece to add.
Yeah, that there's a contradiction there in terms of how it's being framed, right?
Yeah, it's just like, it's Disney Channel dances.
I'm like, eh, kind of.
I don't know.
Disney Channel's changed since I watched it then.
Yeah, no, I definitely agree with you on that.
All right, well, Abby, thanks so much for joining us today and also for all of your very important work.
We'll keep following up with you.
Where can our listeners stay in touch with you and find out more about what you're doing?
Yeah, I'm on TikTok at Tofology, Instagram at abbyasr, and Twitter at abbyasr.
And thank you so much for having me.
As we were finishing up that interview, you heard Abby's reference to the 7M alleged dance cult situation, which we talked about a little bit before she and I started which we talked about a little bit before she and I It's been a widely reported news story in the last month or two.
Involving a pastor named Robert Shin, whose son Isaiah is the videographer for TikTok dance videos published under the banner of 7M Films, which is owned by Robert Shin.
The videos, which have very high production values, feature equally high-profile dancers who already had significant followings before joining up.
But the allegation reported from many sources by Rolling Stone, The New York Post, Gawker, The Daily Beast, The Sun, and The Daily Mail is that the dancers may have been drawn into a cultish religious group.
They may have been isolated from their families and moved into homes owned by the pastor and allegedly indoctrinated into a form of dominionist Christianity.
Which believes that its followers have a mandate to take back dominion over the world from Satan.
7M have said these claims are all untrue, as have all the dancers involved with the group.
They point to the massive growth in followers, media exposure, and financial, professional opportunities that being involved with 7M has generated for the dancers.
The story first came to wide attention when a young woman named Melanie Wilking sat down with her parents on February 9th of this year and tearfully alleged via an Instagram Live that her formerly extremely close sister, Miranda, had been under the control of a cult-like group for the past year and begged for her return home.
It was the date of Miranda's 25th birthday.
Very rough.
So today is my sister's birthday and...
We're not, I mean, okay, I don't even know where to start.
We're not allowed to contact her and it's really sad because we're blocked on absolutely everything.
So whenever we try to say anything, like I even just commented on a video today, instantly blocked.
So it's just been really hard to deal with and we really don't know why.
I don't know, do we wanna say?
This was totally on a whim, so I don't even really know where we're going with this, but January 18th, my sister and I were supposed to go home to Michigan for my pup's funeral because he passed away after Christmas.
30 minutes before we were leaving for the airport, Miranda calls my mom and dad and says she's not coming home.
And it was like, what do you mean you're not coming home?
She said she had COVID.
She did not have COVID.
We had had it the month prior.
I mean, she was not sick at all.
Um, and she even said it, she even admitted that it wasn't because of COVID.
She was just making that up and that she just, and that she just couldn't come home.
She was sorry.
And we won't understand.
We won't understand, but she can't come home.
And so we tried to, we tried to then, Melanie got on the flight, came home.
The next couple days Kelly and I went and tried to get to see what was going on.
Came back here in California and spent a day and a half here.
She was here at the condo.
We talked to her for a couple hours and she was a very different person.
Different person that we've had than when she was home.
Many times.
She seemed very disconnected.
Like just not herself at all.
And she couldn't explain why she wasn't coming home.
She kept wanting to leave, wanting to leave.
And my dad even texted me because I was in Michigan and they were here and he said she keeps saying that she has to go film videos with James B-Dash.
Should I let her go?
And I said well if you let her go that'll be the last time you're gonna see her.
And it was.
And it was.
And she just kept saying, when I said, please come home to Papa's funeral, you're going to regret it.
And she said, I'll see, I'll see.
And I said, well, who do you have to ask?
And she's like, oh, I'm afraid I'm going to make a mistake.
I'm just learning.
So whatever she's involved in, she's got some kind of control over her that is making her afraid of something.
And as anyone that knows our family, She knows how close we've always been and prior to her getting involved in this like religious group that she's involved in, we never ever had a disagreement or an argument, her and I. So here's the thing too, Melanie also was going to this these church things and everything and she realized the Well we never really addressed that so I guess we're addressing it.
Miranda is a part of a religious group and she's not allowed to speak to us.
They tried to get me involved.
I did go.
I did like it at first and then I realized there were numerous red flags that I could not ignore and knew that it was not something I wanted to be involved in and then as soon as I was telling Miranda you know these concerns that I had she would just you know oh you don't understand blah blah blah and if you guys know we we never fought Miranda and I were very strange we were attached at the hip we didn't fight about anything and then towards the end
As soon as I decided to leave this organization and Miranda decided to stay, we were fighting constantly about this.
Because I was like, Miranda, they're taking you.
They're going to try to separate us.
They're going to blah blah blah.
Every single thing I said was going to happen and my parents said was going to happen, happened.
And the thing is that B-Dash was involved and he also, we believe, is a victim of this.
Yes, exactly.
They broke and lured in and now they think that's the only way is that the way they live.
That's the thing.
That's the thing that we've realized is Miranda, James, all these people that they're with, they're not in control of their lives.
Someone else is controlling their lives and they're all victims of this and it's it's so it would be so easy to just like forget about oh screw her you know like she she doesn't care about us anymore but we know that's not her she would never ever block grammy No.
Grammy and Papa were everything.
And after Papa died, to think that she wasn't attending his funeral.
And he was like a second father to us.
It's not like we weren't close.
You guys talk to Grammy and Papa every single day.
If not more than once a day.
So to not go to his funeral and he was like the number one supporter.
Oh my gosh on his last day he was showing the nurse our TikTok videos and he facetimed us.
It was like oh he was showing that you guys were on the billboard in New York City.
He's so proud.
We can feel how upset these family members are.
Melanie Wilking is one half of the Wilking Sisters, a Michigan dance duo who followed their dream to Los Angeles and by April 2020 had grown their TikTok account to over 2 million followers and over 175 million views.
An article about them in Forbes detailed their having worked with Victoria's Secret, Adidas, Nike, NBC, CoverGirl, and Seventeen Magazine and having danced in videos for Chris Brown, Iggy Azalea, and Selena Gomez and performed live with Bruno Mars, Jason Derulo, and Joe Jonas.
The TikTok account is now just in Melanie's name and at this point has grown to 3 million followers.
It sounds like, in early 2021, Melanie and her sister Miranda began attending services associated with Shekinah Church and their pastor, Robert Shin.
But Melanie got cold feet, while Miranda became more involved.
Now, you heard the girl's parents mention James, or B-Dash, which is his dance name.
That's James Derrick, a dancer who has also gotten involved with 7M.
Let's listen to Samantha Long.
She refers to B-Dash as her best friend, and this is her on a February 28th Instagram Live. - So there is a cult slash organization that has formed and has taken in dancers.
They promised them like fame, money, They provide all the resources that they have to these dancers, so the people that they want to join.
And then when they join, they control them.
They let them know who they can or can't speak to.
They control Every aspect of who they are.
We actually aren't even really sure, like, when they post, if it's even them on their accounts.
And this has affected me personally, as well as many people I know.
So today I'm just going to be talking about my experience, and then I'll also, you know, of course touch base on People I know as well.
Make sure to check out the Wilking sisters at Handle because they have all the resources and information that you can know about the situation, as well as there is a video of the Wilking family breaking down their experience.
Okay, here we go.
This is a lot.
Okay, so just to kind of give you guys some further context, B'Dash and I go way back.
He's like one of the first Friends I had in LA, honestly.
And, like, it was back when we were both on The Come Up.
Of course, we would collaborate and dance together.
We did meet through the dance world, but we always hung out.
Like, we were just always doing things together.
Literally, whoever I was friends with at the time is who he would, like, end up dating.
So, for example, like, his wife now, Miranda Wilking, Uh, was introduced to him by me.
So I introduced B-Dash to her, um, and now they're married.
Uh, and then I also introduced B-Dash to the girlfriend he had before that he dated for three years.
Um, and so it literally- that's how close we were.
Like, whoever I was around, I was like, ooh, you guys are cute, and then they would end up dating.
Um, and...
We have literally lived in the same house together.
You know, I know all about his upbringing, the trauma that he's overcame.
Same for me.
And so we've had, like, I want you guys to understand that, like, I looked at him like a brother.
Samantha pauses right there to choke back her tears.
As she continues, she starts to talk about one of the red flags she observed regarding her best friend changing before she knew anything about the church.
which And that red flag was his preoccupation with conspiracy theories like the 2020 election having been fraudulent and the MAGA and QAnon prediction that Biden wouldn't really be sworn in.
So, when COVID happened, obviously, like, everybody was kind of, like, in their houses, like, doing their thing and not really, like, out with people.
I had just, like, moved into my own place.
And so, when that all transpired, um, you know, during that time when things started to, like, ease up a little bit, um, I reached out to him and was like, hey, like, we should totally meet up, like, let's, you know, hang out, catch up.
And he would reply, but he would never follow through.
It was like, he was always, like, Oh, well, yeah, I can do Thursday.
And I'm like, okay, perfect, let's do it.
And then I would never hear from him.
And this cycle happened so many times that I literally ended up just cold calling him.
I was like, yo, what's going on?
How are you?
I don't need to see you in person, I guess, but how are you doing?
Are you alive?
Are you okay?
And that call was so interesting.
It was like, I didn't understand who I was on the phone with.
It was like a different person.
It was just like conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, and it like really weirded me out.
Because that's, that's not B-Dash, that's not James.
So by the way guys, James is B-Dash's, like, real name.
So I'm just gonna say B-Dash, but if I say James, just know that's who I'm referring to.
And so, on this call, I mean, I'm on this call for like two hours, and I would kind of start to call him out on things, and like fact check him, like, you know, um, Like, Vidash, that's not true.
I think at this time it was like Biden was about to be president, he was about to be sworn in, and there was some talk of like, he was like, well, we don't know if that's true or not.
And I'm like, well, actually, like, statistically speaking, it is.
It's happening tomorrow.
Like, and he's like, you don't know.
He's like, just do your own research.
And I'm like, I'm just sitting here thinking like, Do my own research.
But like, there would be stuff like this over and over again that he would continue to tell me, do your own research.
And it got to a point where I was like, you know what?
We're just gonna have to get to a point where we agree to disagree because I can't sit here and be like, you're right!
I just can't do it.
So I switched the topic into marriage and was like, how are you and Miranda doing?
Are you thinking of marriage or anything like that?
Just kind of messing with him.
And he was like, oh yeah, like, um, I definitely believe in marriage, but he didn't tell me anything such as, like, I'm getting married or anything like that.
It was just like, oh yeah, you know.
And then after I got off the phone with him, I just remember sitting there being like, that was so weird.
Like, I don't know who I just got off the phone with.
I have no idea who that was.
And then, like, within that week, I went over to Melanie's house.
So Melanie Wilking.
Um, and we just were gonna meet up, hang out, and then she confided in me, and she told me what was going on.
Because at that time, if you guys have seen, um, the Wilking families live, they talk about, you know, um, when Miranda just picked up and left out of nowhere.
And when they asked her, like, why are you going?
Can you please tell us why you're going?
And she says, like, you just wouldn't understand.
And was just telling me everything that was going down.
And I'm sitting here shook because, and to anybody out there who knows the Wilking family, you know how sweet they are.
Like, they are just so much fun to be around.
They're all, they were all so, they're like this, all of them.
And so to hear that this was happening I was completely just shook.
I was so confused and but then at the same time it clicked and I was like oh my god like this makes a lot of sense though because B'Dash He's been acting completely different lately.
He has not been hanging out with me.
He hasn't been following through.
I got on the phone with him and it was conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
And then, you know, when, obviously, Melanie was telling me about the cult, I was like, I didn't even know what to do because every dancer that was in that cult, I had known.
Like all these dancers that Are in it now?
Like, I know!
Like, I lived with some of them in a house before COVID.
And it's, through time, the only people that I've seen around, like, B'nash are these people that I met before that I now know that they've been initiated into this, like, cult organization.
Um, and I know that this organization, they love to pry on people who, and dancers, who are maybe struggling in their career.
Maybe it's financially, or like they don't know what to do as far as like next steps, and they promise them everything.
So if you have, if you have somebody who's in a vulnerable position, and you're like, we're gonna give you a house, we're gonna take care of you, we're gonna manage you, we're gonna give you the highest production possible to blow you up, Like, why, you know, a lot of people would be like, oh, why wouldn't I go there?
Like, why wouldn't I do that?
And so, that is how they lure these people in.
And I was like, wow, there's so many people there that, um, I know.
And it got really weird.
And ever since, you know, obviously I've been in talks with like the Wilking family, um,
And we've just been, you know, staying posted on the situation and, like, whenever I would see videos of them online, I would literally just, like, I would get chills because I'm like, oh my god, like, this is so, like, I can see in their eyes that, like, they're not, um... They're not the same people.
Let's go back to the Wilking family now and hear how events have been unfolding.
We probably aren't even making sense because it's... She got married and we don't even know when, where.
I don't know where.
I don't know who officiated the wedding.
I don't know who was in attendance.
And when people say, oh, congratulations on Miranda's wedding, I don't even know anything about it.
And then we'll and that's why it's like social media it can be such a crazy place because then I'll get messages where it's like Oh, you don't support your sister's marriage or you and I'm like, I didn't even know about I didn't know about it and I'm more blocked so we don't see anything and so it's just It's so hard but let's let's see some of the and so this has been going on for over a year where we have constantly tried.
We've showed up at different places that we know she's going to be at.
We've we've gone to everything.
That's another thing throughout all this right after she says she wasn't coming home to the funeral.
When we got here two days later after that phone call and talked to her for a little bit and then she stormed out and she left we realized we went upstairs and saw that Her closet was empty and her drawers were empty.
And she had moved out in one day, the day after that phone call.
She never told us where she moved to.
She ended up blocking us and changed her phone number.
Dean and I hunted down and did our little private investigating to figure out where our daughter was living.
Someone said, does she speak to anyone in your family?
No.
No friends, no family, no happy birthday, no happy Mother's Day or Father's Day, no Merry Christmas.
Everybody she's cut ties with.
We've constantly, and friends, we have constantly tried, she changed her phone number, we have constantly tried to reach her in any way we can and we don't know if things go through.
We've kind of got a hold of her new number through somebody.
We also contact B-Dash because we still have his and nothing doesn't respond back so we don't know if it gets through or not.
So we just, we're living in, first of all, the fear, and also that we have, we're going every day saying, we just don't know what's happening.
Now, here's James Derrick's former best friend, Samantha Long, again.
And I think what was really hurtful for me was, you know, I had to learn that B'Dash and Miranda got married over Instagram, you know?
Um, and I think that that was really hurtful because, I mean, obviously I introduced them and was, you know, very close with B-Dash and was also, you know, friends with, um, Miranda.
And I was so confused why I was like, wow, like, I didn't get invited either.
Um, and if you've seen the Wilking families live, you know that, um, they had no idea either.
They weren't invited to the wedding either.
And So with all that being said, I haven't wanted to speak out and say anything until the Wilking family kind of decided to.
And when they did, I was so grateful.
And I wanted to come forward and tell my side and what I've gone through.
Because I want to make it very clear that all the dancers that are in this cult, they're victims.
They've been manipulated and brainwashed And they were taken at a vulnerable stage, which anybody who's been through something like this, whether it be in a relationship or a friendship or anything like that, like people, you know, who want to manipulate you, want to bring you in at your lowest state.
And something they also want to do is they want to remove anybody and everybody in your life that met you before they came into the picture.
At the end of the day, you know, when I messaged him and I was like, you know, really just honestly breaking down how I felt.
You know, I touched on like, I just want the best for you.
And...
how I was hurt as far as not being invited to the wedding.
I mean, that's actually a really big thing.
And I mean, everything in between as far as my emotions.
And his replies were robotic.
It was like I was talking to a machine who didn't hear anything of the message or any of the emotions. - Okay, so let's hear from Miranda Wilking herself now.
She goes these days by her married name, Miranda Derrick, and has 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 800,000 on her new TikTok.
Both she and B-Dash, or James Derrick, have claimed in written posts that this is all really about a family dispute because she married a black man of whom they did not approve.
The Wilking family scoff at this explanation, pointing out that B-Dash had always been welcome in their home, that they loved him, and that Melanie also has a black boyfriend.
After this story started blowing up, Miranda did some Instagram Lives for the first time, and they sounded like this.
Never felt safer.
Um, but yeah, I mean...
There have just been a lot of lies being told, just a lot of twisting of the truth.
Yeah, I mean, I just want to say that I have spoken to my family this past year.
I actually just talked to my sister a week ago.
So, there's that.
Oh my gosh.
I should look presentable.
The kind of pretend playfulness or casual dismissal while looking very uncomfortable and tense characterizes moments in each of these clips with Miranda.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a very private person.
Obviously, this is the first time going live on my account.
So one of the questions is, are you okay?
I am great.
I'm actually way more than okay.
Thank you for asking.
Are you in a cult?
No?
I'm not in a cult.
Okay, more details to come.
But yeah, we're gonna have a family meeting.
Now that last clip was a live stream during which you can see Miranda's parents kind of apprehensively walking a few steps behind her and Miranda looks very stone-faced.
I've yet to see any information released after that meeting as to anything changing or even how the conversation went.
Miranda has also posted videos parodying the claim that she's being held hostage or is under someone else's control.
In one of those videos, B-Dash appears as an ominous figure lurking in the background while she is on camera, seemingly oblivious or acting like she doesn't know he's there.
In another, he asks her to roll down her car window and then abducts her.
Here's another live in which Miranda only read from the Bible.
Your heart and knowledge will fill you with joy.
Wise choices will watch over you.
Understanding will keep you safe.
Wisdom will save you from evil people, from those whose words are twisted.
These men turn from the right way to walk down dark paths.
They take pleasure in doing wrong and they enjoy the twisted ways of evil.
I want to go back now to Melanie Wilking talking about her anguish and then responding to questions during that same live stream we've been exerting about her own brief experience with Shekinah Church.
The best way I describe it to people is like, I feel like she died.
Like I feel like she died from our family, yet she's still like around.
So there's still hope that she'll come around, but she's gone.
So it's like this weird, like you can't come to terms with it because she's still out there and you can't just forget about it.
Or I don't know.
Heal from it.
You can't truly heal because she's still there.
It's like we are living in constant trauma.
Yeah.
Somebody asked you to explain what it was like when you were there.
It was fun.
That's why I liked it at first because we didn't grow up religious at all so Going to this it was just something new you could relate it to life and there was music there Of course, there's a bunch of dancers at it.
So of course we're having fun, but then There would just be red flags where they like wanted control of your of a lot of your time and they tried to I had um I had plans to pick up someone from the airport and it was conflicting with a service so I couldn't go it was just I had already had this plan for a while blah blah blah and then it's like they were calling me calling me trying to get me to come in try to get me to cancel the plans and I was like this is weird like why
like it's gonna be okay I just can't go to one and then oh I wasn't invited to the next one because I missed the other one so then it's this whole They're brainwashing you.
This mind game where it's like, oh then I did something wrong so now I have to give all my time type thing.
And I was like, this is not healthy and this is not normal.
And then what I was telling Miranda too is I was like, if you want to go to this, cool.
And we were saying, we don't have to talk about it.
We don't have to do anything.
If you want to go, awesome.
But like, let's like we can still be okay just you do that and i just won't and nope they she that wasn't okay i guess because they had to go but i understand why they like it and i understand like i feel like and especially now - Like everything is growing. - They're so talented and they're growing and it's amazing.
So now you can just see how they would stay even more.
So it's like, it's this whole thing.
But my mom just asked me yesterday, she was like, do you ever think that like, if you stay, you would like be more popular I was like, never in a million years.
I don't care about any of that.
I have you guys.
I have my family.
I have friends.
I never cared about that.
That's the thing.
People are like, oh, she's chasing fame.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe because she had a whole personality change, but before she didn't care about any of that.
She just was happy dancing.
She just wanted to make dance videos and have fun.
This next clip is from a prominent YouTube channel called Without a Crystal Ball and that channel covers cults and especially fundamentalist Christian groups.
The Wilkins might have brought this attention to the situation by letting us know who the group was and what they were facing.
The issues are not only related to Miranda.
In fact, since this has gone sort of, I don't know, slowly going viral, more and more people that are associated with the dancers have come out and said that their relationships with the dancers have changed dramatically.
We, I, have heard from Multiple people.
I have heard from friends from Aubrey Fisher, who has one of the largest platforms of all of the dancers.
I have heard from Kendra Willis's best friend, who is very worried about her.
I have heard from B-Dash's ex-wife, who is worried about him and he's not talking to his son.
I have heard from people connected to Tight Eyes.
I've heard from people connected to Kylie.
The overwhelming theme from all of these people is that since getting involved with Robert Shin and his group, they have changed.
They don't speak the same way that they used to.
These are, of course, second-hand reports of what friends of dancers have shared, and they seem safe enough to repeat.
There's an in-depth article in the last few days on the New York Magazine's culture and style website called The Cut.
And that article claims that several sources who have been close to members say that 7M requires clients to participate in regular Bible studies as a prerequisite for representation.
But 7M denies this, maintaining that 7M and Shekinah are completely independent and that its dancers are not required to be church members.
However, four of the eleven dancers who gave statements to The Cut through 7M's lawyers proudly mentioned their membership in Shekinah and how it had changed their lives.
There's a core group of dancers in the 7M crew that are the recognizable rotating cast of TikTok videos and in various configurations have also been in Spanx and Toyota commercials, performed on Ellen DeGeneres and at Clippers games, and in music videos and on tours with big-name artists like Janet Jackson and Cardi B.
So these dancers include Miranda, B-Dash, Tight Eyes, who is a legend of the LA crump scene, Concrete, Kylie Douglas, Aubrey Fisher, Vic White, Kylia Gray, Nicholas Rayano, Alexandra Watkins, Gordon Watkins, and Kendra Willis.
There's a choreographer named Chris J. Moore who had previously worked with the dancers and he recalls in that same article from The Cut that the last time he saw them was in a December dance session and that he thought they were all acting weird.
He quotes Tide Eyes as saying, we are the anointed ones and we only move when we're told to move.
According to Moore, he then wouldn't move until he felt like he was told to dance from whoever or whatever higher power told him to dance.
The wave of negative publicity following the Wilking family livestream seems to have resulted in various cryptic social media reactions from church members, as well as the Perhaps for Show meeting between Miranda and her parents, and reports of the LA Clippers reconsidering their relationship with 7M along with the brands Spanx and Toyota.
Now, the cut also reports on Pastor Robert Shin's history of legal woes involving court cases from 2009 and 2011, both alleging undue influence and manipulation.
That's why I'm not a person.
The first lawsuit, which claimed a woman named Lydia Chung had been swindled out of over $4 million, was unsuccessful.
The judge ruled that she had acted of her own free will, but he did comment that the church's practices bordered on coercion.
In the second lawsuit, Young Hee Lee won $9,215 in unpaid wages after telling the court that Shekina had total control over the bank accounts of the employees at the Shin-owned real estate firm where he worked with other church members.
He said they were paid $30 a week and were told that their work was done in the service of God.
On March 22, the newspaper The Sun published an article with photos about the $2.5 million five-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom, 5,200-square-foot mansion in Studio City in which Robert Shinn and his son Isaiah live.
As I've mentioned, Isaiah is the 7M videographer, and many of the slickly produced and wildly popular TikTok videos the dancers appear in are shot by him on this same lavish property, as well as at another even more opulent $40 million property in Malibu, whose owner remains a mystery.
Isaiah Shin's YouTube channel, which reposts his TikTok feed, has 1.3 million followers, but his three most popular videos have view counts in excess of 50 million, with one featuring B-Dash even cracking 70 million.
Miranda Derek's biggest video here has 13 million views.
There are three anonymous Instagram accounts actively involved in researching and posting about this story, and in talking to them, I've heard tell of the religious tone within the group, the beliefs and practices, tithing requirements, and mission in which they are engaged.
Now, I won't repeat any of those details here because they remain as yet unconfirmed.
But here's what is public knowledge about the Shekinah Church, with which Robert Shin is affiliated, and the theological significance of this term 7M, which he has chosen to name his production company.
The Shekinah Church website lists its mission as follows.
shows.
Shekinah is here to equip believers to transform their world through a radical encounter with Christ.
Our mandate is to facilitate an atmosphere of love, power, and grace that allows for a transformative experience with the glory of Jesus.
We believe that as this happens, we become a disciple of revival, fully ready to experience and share the reality of Christ in everyday life.
The site also hosts something called the Immersion School of Equipping, which offers several courses that believers can pay for, along with the following invitation.
This school is funded through the generous donations of partners like yourself who believe in the call of Christ to make a bride ready for his return.
Your partnership at any level helps to fund the training, equipping, and releasing of God's ministers through Shekinah Church.
But what about the concept of 7M?
Well, you may remember Donald Trump's spiritual advisor, Paula White.
She's that televangelist and proponent of prosperity theology who went viral in the video, I'll play you in a moment, of her prayer right before the 2020 election, in which she was calling on angels from around the world to come to Trump's aid.
We break and divide every demonic confederacy against the election, against America, against that who you have declared to be in the White House.
We break it up in the name of Jesus.
We lose confusion into every demonic confederacy directed right now at this election, directed specifically at the six states.
We come against people that are working in high levels right now with demonic confederacies and secrecies and demonic plans and networks.
We break it up and we command that it be exposed right now in the name of Jesus.
Strike and strike.
The angels have even dispatched from Africa right now.
Africa right now.
Africa right now.
From Africa right now.
They're coming here.
From Africa.
From South America.
Angelic forces.
Angelic reinforcement.
I hear the sound of victory.
That trance-inducing rhythm and the speaking in tongues is typical of neo-charismatic Pentecostal Christianity.
That emphasizes the availability of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, like speaking in tongues and faith healing.
They also believe in the fight against spiritual demons in everyday life, and they sometimes refer to exorcism and being delivered or saved from evil forces.
For them, healing and financial prosperity are amongst the, quote, signs and wonders that those who've confessed their belief in the Holy Spirit can bring about, due to having been anointed to perform miracles.
Some neo-charismatic Pentecostals, like Paula White, who you just heard, are also devoted to something called the Seven Mountains Mandate, often shortened as 7M.
According to L. Hardy's excellent in-depth article in The Outline, which I will link to in the show notes for you, three different Christian leaders claimed in 1975 to have received a concurrent message from God to, quote, invade the seven spheres of cultural influence.
Now it wasn't until 2000 that this message was resurrected when one of those prophetic leaders named Lauren Cunningham teamed up with Lance Wallnau, who started creating seminars and training courses marketed to evangelicals as a template for warfare in the new century.
By 2013, Wallnau had co-authored what is now seen as the manifesto of this movement, a book titled Invading Babylon, The Seven Mountain Mandate.
Hardy quotes Andre Gagne Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Concordia University, as saying that conjuring up fears from the spirit world is a disciplining force that keeps believers on a constant war footing in both their real and spiritual lives.
He says, one easily becomes paranoid and scared of being constantly attacked by forces of darkness.
Now, 7M is a form of Christian dominionism.
This calls on believers to gain control over cultural and political institutions.
Those seven spheres of influence, or seven mountains, are listed as education, religion, family, business, government-slash-military, arts-slash-entertainment, and media.
The Manifesto sees us as living very close to the end times, with Christians carrying a mandate to prepare the world for the return of God's Kingdom.
There's a lot more chilling detail in the outline article I mentioned, And on the political implications of this movement, with links to figures like Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk and Mike Pompeo.
Mike Pompeo.
In 2019, 7M claimed 950 legislators in 38 states, and they're behind a group formerly called Project Blitz, but now rebranded as Freedom for All that ironically seeks to orchestrate theocratic legislative but now rebranded as Freedom for All that ironically seeks to orchestrate theocratic legislative change in the
LGBTQ rights, prayer in schools, conversion therapy, and other related topics via its model legislation proclamations.
But for now, let's move on, having noted that the use of the term 7M denotes a conservative, evangelical strain of Pentecostal Christianity, which focuses on spiritual warfare against demonic forces in the world in preparation for the end which focuses on spiritual warfare against demonic forces in the world
It's associated with speaking in tongues, faith healing, prosperity theology, and the mission of gaining power and influence over the major institutions of culture, entertainment, and politics.
Now, to tie this back to Shekina Church, this is Benjamin Dietrich from their About page.
He's listed as the visionary apostle and leader.
And his description says that his desire is to see an apostolic and prophetic people engulfed in the flames of revival rise as an army in the earth to fulfill the mandate of the Great Commission.
This obviously refers directly back to the Seven Mountain Mandate, claimed to derive originally from the Biblical verse that says, "...now it shall come to pass, that in the latter days that mountain of the LORD's house shall be established on the top of mountains." This is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 2, verse 2.
I would speculate that Robert Shinn's naming of his son Isaiah is probably not coincidental.
Now, Katie Joy of Without A Crystal Ball, that YouTube channel I mentioned earlier, claims to have documentation showing that the dancers are paying rent to live together in houses owned by 7M.
She alleges that they drive cars owned by the church, too, and live under tight control of everything from clothing to food to exercise to money, as well as who they are allowed to talk to.
She says they wake up early for intensive Bible study sessions before getting to work on the dance videos.
We can't confirm any of these allegations, but in the last few days, HBO Max has announced a planned docuseries about this unfolding story.
And the three anonymous Instagram accounts I mentioned earlier?
They're named Expose7M, CultsYuck, and StopCulting.
Well, they've been researching, talking to former members, and cataloging and analyzing posts by current involved dancers.
I wouldn't be surprised, given how deeply involved they are in this story, if they were consulted for the Cut article, as well as for some of what Without a Crystal Ball has been saying.
But here's what I do know.
All three of those accounts have collectively announced that they're now working with HBO on that documentary show.
So we'll be following this story with interest as it continues.
I started off today with a reference to Nietzsche and his question of eternal recurrence, which in one sense can be seen as a version of the type of endlessly cyclical which in one sense can be seen as a version of the type of endlessly cyclical time that Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugan have borrowed from the Hindu
You could also hear it as representing the doctrine of reincarnation, but in another sense, eternal recurrence represents how history repeats itself, perhaps because while our technology, knowledge, and access to information continues evolving at accelerating speed,
Our innate human cognitive capacities, our emotional needs, power dynamics, spiritual yearnings, group psychology, and relational vulnerabilities remain constant.
It's as if each new generation has to learn the same lessons as if for the first time.
Only now we do it on social media.
We all start at square one, and unless we are sufficiently grounded in what the past has taught us, the same tragic mistakes inevitably continue.
It turns out that the great western popularizers of watered down eastern spirituality were wrong about their central dogma.
The past really is a source of wisdom, and care for the future really is a source of motivated compassion.
And living in the eternal present, especially the disembodied, digitally frictionless, open-ended, simulated, endless moment of commodified hyper-reality, is not enlightenment after all, but a portal into something much darker.
As always, thank you for your time, your attention, and support as we seek to understand the world around us and our roles in it.
May you and your loved ones be healthy and safe.
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