132: Ye, Balenciaga, & Twilight Zone Propaganda (w/Francesca Tripodi)
We didn't have tracking BDSM Easter eggs in fashion shoots or Ye’s Jew-hating Christofascism on our bingo card. But here we are, covering a cluster of cursed images and hypomanic clips.We’ll stare right at the train wreck this week, but we refuse to feel hopeless. Because we can always learn—in this case about how the psychic and bodily impacts of this churn of bizarre hatred relate to the function of propaganda. And we can always be inspired by people who slow down and do the hard work of understanding the spectacle. From our side of the progressive aisle, it's easy to assume that consumers of Ye and conspiracy theories are gullible cultural dopes. But our guest today, sociologist and media scholar at UNC, Chapel Hill, Francesca Tripodi says "not so fast!" To understand how right-wing propaganda functions, she spent months consuming a conservative digital news-diet and went undercover in hard-right circles. Show NotesKanye "Ye" West—The Emperor w/No Clothes (TimbahOnToast)Balenciaga and the long history of "shockvertising"Jewish Allies Denounce Trump's Dinner w/AntisemitesMasked Ye West Praises Hitler on Alex Jones' InfoWarsProud Boy Founder Gavin McInnes Hosts Ye WestQAA 210: Balenciaga, Ye, Club Q
-- -- --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
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And when Derek found out that we were covering Ye and Balenciaga today, he let out a tortured scream and locked himself in the production studio.
But you can ping him a note of relief on Twitter.
You can find us on Twitter as well.
And you can find us all at Conspiripod on IG.
This is our backup account.
We are still daily making burnt offerings to clay statues of Mark Zuckerberg petitioning the return of our main account.
Oh boy, that is oddly sort of foreshadowing what we're going to talk about today.
A little bit.
We're also, you should know, killing it over on Patreon slash Conspirituality where we post editorial briefs and we host live streams and we have hundreds of hours of premium materials for subscribers to browse.
On that Patreon tip, I'd like to thank especially Jessica Hopper for coming onto our Listener Stories series to tell us all about her 13 years working for the now-dead S-Factor company founded by L.A.' 's Sheila Kelly.
This company crashed in 2021 after a slew of really bad press and complaints about how the company was conducting unlicensed group therapy, cosplaying enlightenment by co-opting the labor of sex workers, And whitewashing issues of racial equality.
Jessica is a really good storyteller.
She brings a great mixture of empathy, rage, and cringe.
Conspiratuality 132.
132 yay, Balenciaga, and Twilight Zone propaganda with Francesca Tripodi.
Yay!
We did not have tracking BDSM Easter eggs in fashion shoots or yay's Jew-hating Christofascism
on our bingo card, but here we are, covering a cluster of cursed images and hypomanic clips.
We'll stare straight at the train wreck this week, but we refuse to feel hopeless, because we can always learn.
In this case about how the psychic and bodily impacts of this churn of bizarre hatred relate to the function of propaganda.
And we can always be inspired by people who slow down and do the hard work of understanding the spectacle.
From our side of the progressive aisle, it's easy to assume that consumers of yay and conspiracy theories are gullible cultural dopes.
But our guest today, sociologist and media scholar at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Francesca Tripodi, says not so fast.
To understand how right-wing propaganda functions, she spent months consuming a conservative digital
news diet and also went undercover in hard-right circles.
Okay, so as we know by now, conspirituality draws on a smorgasbord of appropriated religious
traditions to soothe the problems it invents.
We've got New Age stuff.
We've got Orientalist versions of yoga and Buddhism that pretend to be traditional, but they're pretty postmodern.
We have pretendian shamanism.
It's really diverse.
But, we've done a lot of episodes recently that highlight the ancient American strains of Christianity that are gaining strength in the body politic, and as that happens, we're seeing an equally old anti-Semitism on the rise.
Now, maybe the juncture between Christianity and Conspirituality, especially in its New Age facets, maybe this started with the ascent of A Course in Miracles in the 1980s?
It's unclear.
Among the charismatics we study, we know that a lot of the antisemitism is laundered through coded attacks on medical, financial, and bureaucratic institutions, usually run by you-know-who.
So when Christiane Northrup goes on about Christ's consciousness overcoming the vampires, you're hearing a dog whistle.
And when the late Guru Jagat yaks about the lizard people with David Icke, that dog whistle becomes a bullhorn.
But these days, We're facing some big mask-off moments, like the straight-up, unmediated, Christo-fascist, anti-Semitic media blargs of Ye.
This is a very talented, wealthy, and unwell man who's mainstreaming QAnon garbage.
So, Julian, I mean, I think it feels like we're at some kind of watershed mark for right-wing propaganda.
Yeah, it's amazing how this is just front and center in the news cycle.
After a spate of conspiratorial public remarks about the Jews that everyone is familiar with at this point, the artist formerly known as Kanye West showed up at Mar-a-Lago for dinner with Donald Trump over the Thanksgiving weekend.
To break bread with the Donald, he brought extremist anti-Semite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes along.
Apparently to discuss Ye's not-at-all grandiose or delusional 2024 presidential bid.
Right.
And, you know, as we've seen, he next appeared on Alex Jones' Infowars show where he denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler while sporting a creepy black mask that completely covered his face and head.
And he was flanked again by the smirking Nick Fuentes.
Now, we can't confirm the origin of that hood, but It was similar to those that he actually designed for Spanish luxury fashion house Balenciaga, who had recently broken ties with him over all of this bullshit.
Yeah, I mean, who knows what's going on with the mask?
He could be trolling Balenciaga with it, as we'll get to later, but of course it also has these kind of terrorist ISIS overtones.
Yeah, I mean, Matthew, it's almost like he's not making self-aware, rational choices, huh?
Well, this is a theme we're going to return to because, I mean, I don't know.
He wore it two days later on a show run by Proud Boys founder and human rage blister Gavin McInnes, and he gave this explanation for it.
It's like, how many times do I have to prove or how many times do I have to do something like so miraculous for people to see that it's brilliance and it's not mental health?
Like me wearing a mask It gives me this ability to not have to worry about showing my face so I can think about what I'm saying and I can channel.
Well, that's clearly a very rational explanation for his costume.
Right.
We're going to come back around to Balenciaga, but prior to the appearance on Alex Jones, he did say he was standing with them.
Yeah, and we should also mention that this McInnes Show just landed in our lap this morning, and there's too much to review in it thoroughly, but it does indicate that Ye's spiral is speeding up and it's diving hard.
More full Holocaust denial, insinuations that Jews will have him killed and say that he died of suicide because he's ill, a lot of rants about pornography, all pornography.
pornography being pedophilia and that his ex-wife Kim is being paid to promote it.
McInnes, like Jones before him, tries half-heartedly to intervene, but what's really
going to happen here is that all of these guys are going to accept his Overton pushing happily
while pretending, you know, he's off the rails.
So, you already pointed out, as we were discussing beforehand, Julian, that Steven Crowder has figured out how to basically say, he's already sort of formulated it and twisted things, you know, into this message of, well, yay's not all wrong, you know.
There's a conversation to be had about the truth behind his embarrassing Nazi fetish.
Yeah, I mean, that Steven Crowder moment actually is remarkable, and you hear McInnes taking a similar line, and the line is essentially this, yes, there's a conversation to be had about how Jews are, you know, Steven Crowder, for the first time in his fucking life, saying Jews are disproportionately represented, so clearly there's something unfair going on.
Obviously, that's completely invalid when you talk about other issues in progressive politics, right, about who gets represented how, but what he does is he says Where Ye has gotten it wrong is that it's secular humanists who happen to have Jewish last names who are the enemy.
It's not the conservative and orthodox Jews, you know, who tend to be on our side on all of these topics, including, of course, LGBTQ stuff.
Can you possibly have imagined that somebody like Ye would start running interference for these assholes?
It's wild enough.
I mean, I think we should slow down additionally and say that if all of this anti-Semitic crossfire coming from a black musical genius is strange to you, I don't know, maybe you're not from the US, maybe you associate anti-Semitism with the figures that we're talking about, with McInnes, Fuentes, Crowder, maybe you associate it only with white supremacy.
Maybe you clearly remember that Jews stood shoulder to shoulder with Black Americans during the Civil Rights era.
We should just ping the well-covered fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are a staple in some minority religious movements that sometimes punch above their cultural weight, like the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Now, why does this emerge?
Very complex, but as far as I understand it, the abstract, you know, summary answer is that power will always seek to sow division amongst natural class allies who would otherwise find solidarity and work together for structural change.
And sometimes it works.
Yeah, I think that that's a really good point of analysis.
And another one is that people who are in a desperate situation who have a history of uh, oppression and struggle will sometimes grab onto
whatever seems like it gives them some sense of power and dignity and purpose in the world.
For sure.
And so predatory figures like Farrakhan can come along and do what he's done for, I think
he's been ahead of that organization for 40 years.
Yeah, or more.
Yeah, and so you know, even though Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelite group, their membership numbers are estimated at less than 100,000 combined in terms of real hardcore official members, their ideas do show up in the verses of a lot of hip-hop artists.
For example, I did a search on lyrics.com and it turned up 378 references to Farrakhan.
No.
Yeah.
So he's in the consciousness.
Kyrie Irving, the NBA basketball player who's kind of gotten lost in the mix here because of all of the ferrari around around Ye, he recently ran into trouble because of his anti-semitic comments and sharing of black Hebrew Israelite style materials.
And just like Ye, he said, well, you know, I can't be anti-Semitic because the Africans
are the true Hebrews, right?
I'm already a Hebrew.
So this is, you know, and the stuff that he shared had to do with this conspiracy theory
that actually it was the Jews who masterminded the transatlantic slave trade.
You know, and Ye quite recently in the midst of his spiral joined a long list of mega star MCs
who've met with Farrakhan.
And when they do, they treat him as a political spiritual authority figure.
They pose for very differential photos with him, and then those photos are shared to millions on social media.
And if you look at Farrakhan on YouTube, he has 13 YouTube videos with over a million views.
Four of those are over 3 million.
One is over 5 million.
So he has some reach.
Can I just ask, because I haven't looked at Farrakhan much at all, I'm aware of his presence, but when you look at his materials, do you have the sense that he sort of carves the classic patriarchal cultic leader figure?
Absolutely.
And is that part of his discourse, is a kind of paternalistic leadership for especially wayward black men, is that part of the deal?
Absolutely, absolutely.
So there's been a fair bit written sociologically about how Nation of Islam targets black men who are in trouble, it targets former prisoners, it targets gang members, there's a sense of like Join this organization and become an upstanding, godly, powerful black man who now has a purpose.
And that purpose mixes together a lot of things, including misogyny, anti-semitism, black separatism, and a wild central mythology that includes UFOs.
Amazing.
We'll step aside from that.
There's something more going on here, though, which is kind of the elephant in the room.
Each escalation of what I believe can accurately be seen as West's bipolar mania has only found him doubling down in response to media outcry.
And this, of course, raises the thorny and complicated questions about mental illness, media exploitation, and political speech.
There's an excellent new video essay by a YouTube creator called Timba on Toast.
That's T-I-M-B-A-H on Toast.
And it echoes my sense of what's going on here.
He carefully chronicles Ye's story in relation to his own experience of a close family member's first manic episode And what he's since learned about the condition.
Now, I've had several similar experiences in my life of interacting with people in the midst of these kinds of episodes.
And essentially, for anyone not really familiar, when someone is in the hypomanic state, there are predictable features.
There are things like pressured speech, flight of ideas, delusions of grandeur, taking unreasonable risks.
Uh, getting into paranoid beliefs about the intentions of others.
And at worst, that cycle can start escalating into what becomes a full-blown temporary psychosis.
Obviously, I don't have the credentials to say for sure and to diagnose Kanye with any authority, but here he is himself in a 2019 Netflix clip that I actually borrowed from that Timba on Toast video.
He's talking to David Letterman.
I ramp up and I go high.
What does that mean when you ramp up?
What is that? What are we talking about?
Ramp is like when you're bipolar, if you don't take medication every day
to keep you at a certain state, you have a potential to ramp up
and it could take you to a point where you could even end up in a hospital.
When you're in this state, you're hyper-paranoid about everything.
Everyone now is an actor.
You feel everyone wants to kill you.
You pretty much don't trust anyone.
Everything is a conspiracy.
You see everything.
You feel the government is putting chips in your head.
You feel you're being recorded.
You feel all of these things.
And these are vividly realistic to you.
Yes.
Now, of course, I should say immediately being bipolar Doesn't make anyone anti-semitic.
Of course not.
Yeah, the ableism 101 rule here is that if we don't make this point clear, we might imply that anyone with a condition like this possesses or they will exhibit some kind of shameful moral failing.
That the condition is a sign of inner degeneration.
Yeah, and that would be discriminatory and defamatory and of course is false.
In fact, I would argue philosophically that the opposite is true.
The disorder interferes with the person's ability to be who they are truly the rest of the time.
It's very common that if you have someone you're close to who's going through this, they become kind of unrecognizable.
The accurate observation is that while ramping up, as Ye puts it, it's common for all sorts of behavior that might otherwise be uncharacteristic to emerge, including believing that certain people are plotting against you, and that your objectively worst ideas are actually divinely inspired absolute truths.
They're proof of your genius and perhaps even your divinity.
Start getting into this territory.
the behavior and the speech also become more impulsive.
So there's less inhibition, there's greater risk-taking.
There's a disconnection from social norms and interpersonal feedback loops.
I think if anything, in Ye's case, we might be able to see antisemitism
almost as a kind of lifeboat for a person drowning in paranoia
and the paranoia that might be exacerbated by mental dysfunction.
I mean, Ye's expression of hatred for Jews is like a socially conditioned path of least resistance for a person clawing their way back to certainty or stability.
So before he appeared on Tim Pool, Ye met with Farrakhan, actually, who, as we just described, is kind of like the epitome of cultic self-certainty.
So it's very easy.
For me to imagine like Farrakhan staring down this quivering guy and giving him like a calming red pill.
But, like, I'm really glad that you've brought up mental health as part of this complex conversation.
I have to admit, like, I'm usually uncomfortable in this territory because I think it's really hard.
I, too, have some close personal experience with several people who've been diagnosed as bipolar, and I think what Timba Antos describes lines up really well.
There's exuberance, there's pressurized speech, there's a Trans state manner, there's an inability to pause and listen and to take in any aspect of any other part of the relational context.
So we should flag that we cover a lot of characters on the influencer spectrum who show similar traits.
Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, David Wolff, Judy Mikovits, Sherry Tenpenny, Lori Ladd, Zach Bush even can get going pretty hard.
And then Christiane Northrup just does a Golden Girls version of this.
So the person can act like they're throwing up a wall of sound and fury against the world.
This is like really familiar to my experience of the people that I know.
They want to, I mean, influence the world, but they're also in the process of defending themselves against it.
And whatever they are doing, they seem to find it impossible to stop and listen.
Yeah, I mean I think one way of perhaps making sense of that is that the more paranoid, the more isolated and paranoid I feel I am in my unique perspective on what's really happening, the less open I am to taking in what anyone else might have to say because they may be plotting against me or they may be trying to tell me that what I'm becoming certain about And of course they're going to interrupt you to do that.
They're going to interrupt your flow.
Yeah, and the flow is actually driven by a dopaminergic sense.
The thing that I think is so hard about these kinds of diagnosis is that for the person experiencing it, there's enjoyment.
Mania feels really good.
So I think one fascinating aspect of this area of psychology, as my limited understanding grasps it, is that we're always talking about matters of degree.
Like all the figures you've listed above have styles of presenting themselves to the world.
Which amplify characteristics in ways that are less common in a lot of other people, which is why they become influencers, right?
Charismatic influence to some extent relies on having more narcissism than the average bear, truly grifting for personal gain or lying openly about matters of huge consequence, like how many people might be dying from COVID or maybe at risk from vaccines.
It does require some portion of sociopathy.
You're able to turn something off that the rest of the population would go, hmm, maybe I shouldn't say that, right?
Going full-blown conspiracist does entail an escalation of paranoia.
So I think there's a spectrum here with a lot of overlapping circles.
With Ye, at different times, we see very loosely associated streams of ideas.
You know, even with the Gavin McInnes thing from this morning, he's calmer.
It's like the manic state has clicked down a few levels.
But if you track, like I sat with a pen and paper and just tracked his responses in the first like 10 minutes of that video.
The stream of loosely associated just-like-going-in-a-multiple-different-directions-in-response-to-one-question is pretty telling.
The massively grandiose claims of genius, divinity, The highly idiosyncratic preoccupation with his self-importance and how he's going to change the world and he's going to become president.
And then of course the very personalized overwhelming propaganda, I'm sorry, paranoia.
Mossad is after him.
Bibi Netanyahu is after him.
Ben Shapiro is warning that he might be in danger of killing himself as a pretext for people to assassinate him the way they did Michael Jackson, JFK, and Aaron Carter, right?
It's just, it's really intense.
You know, because he's more measured, he's speaking more slowly with Gavin McInnes, I actually texted you and I said, I think this might mitigate our conversation a little bit about the impact of hypomania because this is going on for days now.
Yeah.
At stake in this conversation between content and form or between like, you know, a person's true nature and how something is distorting what they are doing or what they are saying is, is he in his heart an anti-Semite?
Like I think that's what a lot of people are going to try to figure out or they're wondering or is this The natural outcome of, you know, a certain amount of conditioning and the paranoia aspects of this mental disorder.
And yeah, so I think I'm not resolved on that.
It does seem like he can be slower and more measured, which to me indicates that he's more settled in some conscious awareness of just how much he believes the bullshit that he's saying.
But I'm not sure.
Yeah, I think what really complicates the issue here is that he's...
A hugely famous and wealthy person who is getting to be center stage in front of millions of people with what's going on with him and the tendency in the midst of that kind of paranoia and grandiosity not only to double down but to just To keep going, to keep feeling like the intensity that he's experiencing, the pushback that he's getting is evidence that he's onto something, and that now the stakes are even higher, and now he needs to even more fully dig in.
I think what's tricky about this is we have these intuitive mind-body dualism ways of looking at people where we want to, it's really natural to imagine that there is a person or a mind or a soul that somehow stands apart from neurobiology and that can make choices that are not influenced by whatever's going on in the brain.
I don't think that's really true, but I also at the same time think that we can absolutely condemn all of his anti-Semitic statements and the other things he's saying as well that are offensive and hateful.
And we can hypothesize that at different points on his journey, he's gotten in contact with propaganda
that has made him start to buy into these beliefs for whatever reasons, his own ignorance, his own trauma,
his own perhaps lack of ability to think critically about this kind of stuff, just like anybody else
who gets sucked into these sorts of conspiracy theories, and that then it gets amplified and remixed
and becomes a mission for him when he's ramping up in this way.
And that's why I feel like in this conversation, we're starting to name the raw material of a kind of
internet sizzle.
It's as if the algorithms are selecting disorders to amplify.
Like, as if the structure of social media itself favors and rewards the hypomanic.
Like, I think it's folk knowledge by now that social media fucks with natural narcissism ranges.
But, yeah, hypomania is something different.
And I also think we need to say that the vast majority of the time, that wall that I was describing of continually externalizing, it closes the person in, it puts them in this very isolated prison.
You said this as well, Julian.
And that prison causes untold suffering to them and everyone who loves them.
It destroys employability, relationship capacity.
Two of the bipolar folks I know are in and out of homelessness.
One has been in and out of jail and psychiatric lockdown.
They've bounced through a neglectful care system trying desperately to find therapeutic or medication help.
I mean, comparatively, Ye is living a charmed life because his issue was likely given the space to fuel artistic output, and now his obscene wealth is going to cushion him from a lot of the consequences, like so much so that he can go public and say, I'm not going to take my medication because ramping up is powerful.
So, it feels like Ye is lucky, but then there's something else which is that the world finds it entertaining, or even captivating.
And as you're saying, this means that through audience capture and gamification, he can, however conscious he is of it or not, transform crisis into charisma.
So people are literally paying him to accelerate his mental distress.
No, who I haven't heard anyone talk about yet in this context, which is a sort of landmark in this particular cultural sphere, is Charlie Sheen.
Right.
I can remember a few years ago when Charlie Sheen just, he was everywhere for a few weeks, and he just kept doing interview after interview, and he was a Vatican assassin, he had tiger's blood, like it was easier to sort of Yeah, it was lower on Abbie Richard's pyramid of conspiracy theory concern, right?
You know, you get to that top peak and we've crossed over the anti-Semitic line of no return, but before that it's kind of harmless, and if you're having a hypomanic episode during that, then People can sort of humor you or your entertainment function is intact.
Yeah, I think there, you know, part of what's going on here is that the affect and the content and the way of thinking is so, it's hard to process.
So if you're relatively unfamiliar with what bipolar mania looks like, it's just like really funny.
Like, oh my God, this guy's, he's, He's crazy, man, and listen to the things he's saying, and there can be a real lack of empathy for it.
If you know more about it, you look at it and go, oh my god, this poor person, why are we using him for entertainment?
And Charlie Sheen's an awful human being.
And it's not always funny.
I've mentioned before that something similar to this kind of celebrity monetization of mental illness happened to a friend of mine, the late Michael Stone.
Now, he was Jewish and he would never have followed his hypomania into antisemitism or conspiracy theorizing, but it was astonishing for me to finally put it together and understand that his always slightly unhinged passion about things, which was filtered through the placidity and calmness of the Buddhism that he loved,
was in part his bipolar suffering that was just shining through.
He was an inspired teacher to the extent that he was barely keeping it together.
And the tension of that eventually killed him because he took street fentanyl to numb out, I'm imagining, and he died in his car, you know, leaving a huge disaster behind and students in chaos.
So, I think we should keep in mind that one of the reasons that the culture finds Ye captivating is not just the car crash spectacle, but because there's also a correlation between hypomania and charismatic religious leadership.
Insofar as religious leaders have to transcend social norms and then they're perennially forgiven because their quote-unquote greater message is so important.
There's a fascinating lecture from I think it's Stanford psychology department of Robert Sapolsky that we've talked about before and you know there are multiple different about how neuroatypical, certain types of neuroatypical functioning might prefigure or might self-select for certain kinds of religious roles within groups of people.
But, you know, there's one more dynamic here, and I've touched on it already.
Ye's celebrity platform and enormous wealth, I think, do two things.
They translate into revenue for those willing to report on him, interview him, and provide opportunities to spout his incoherent, obsessive, paranoid, anti-Semitic hate speech.
Right-wing influencers like Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan, Tim Pool, Lex Friedman, and Alex Jones can rake in bank on his cultural death spiral, and now we add Gavin McInnes
to that list, while casting themselves as, well, they're just asking questions. You know, McInnes
talks about like he's trying to do an intervention. Alex Jones was trying to talk some sense into
him, like, oh, no, no, I don't like Hitler. Like, you've gone too far now, but I'm going to let
you keep talking. We can go four hours if you want to, says Alex Jones in the midst of it
all, right? Unbelievable.
Ye's reach is only amplified by these outlets.
And it also means that his dehumanizing conspiracy defamation of Jews, this is the second thing, increases the risk of stochastic terrorism.
And what I mean by that specifically is The observation that the more a group of people is dehumanized on a big stage and a lot of people, the greater the number of people are who are hearing that dehumanizing message and that scapegoating message, the more the probability of some people in that massive audience tipping over into acts of terrorism and truly obscene violence goes up.
And that's the propaganda piece.
So, we have the exploitation of heightened states of paranoia and grandiosity that stimulate charged and even religious responses that can turn violent, and then all of that is recorded and then spliced and diced for targeted messaging.
Okay, so I mentioned Balenciaga and we have to go there.
As everyone likely knows, there's an intersecting story here.
The Spanish luxury fashion house were also in the news concurrently thanks to several ill-considered ad images in which two young girls held teddy bears who were dressed up in BDSM leatherwear and a young boy posed in a black hoodie The pictures combine adult elements like candles stuck in a beer can, wine glasses, and the aforementioned stuffies in bondage gear who also have had their eyes scratched out in kind of a creepy way.
These are solitary, unsmiling children posed in these settings, one of which looks like a child's bedroom with a lot of little scribbled drawings on the wall, and there's a drawing of a red figure with horns in the background behind the boy.
A thick roll of tape in the foreground has Balenciaga printed on it in big black letters, but it's been spelled with two A's and angled so that you can see that, so that it says Baal Enciaga, and Baal is an ancient Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifice.
So, of course, hungry internet sleuths gathered several IG posts from former Balenciaga stylist designer Lotto Valkova.
And we don't really know whether she styled the images that she shared on her IG herself, but they're preoccupied with children.
Some are in restraints, there are bloody, severed body parts, there's even overt, staged kind of occult imagery.
They also dug up a promo photo of a Balenciaga purse resting atop these fanned-out printed legal documents that turned out to refer to a Supreme Court case that had to do with child pornography.
So, naturally, QAnon adjacent folks online interpreted this as the smoking gun on the elite satanic pedophile cabal, with some saying, ah, that's why they booted Kanye out.
Right-wing pundits, naturally, are more than happy to fold this emerging story into their anti-LGBTQ propaganda, because this is evidence of the liberal elites being involved in something, you know, truly disgusting, while poo-pooing observations about stochastic terrorism that showed up after the recent mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs.
Yeah, okay, so just a little bit of recursion because there's so much to string together here.
We've got anti-Semitism.
We've got assholes capitalizing on a dude's mental break.
We've got a totally cursed photo shoot.
The umbrella topic today is propaganda.
I want to slow down again and look at how all of that goes into the sausage making, because what we're laying out here is traveling at the speed of memes, and that has consequences.
And to help slow down, I want to point to Julian Fields' really good rundown of the Balenciaga story
on their most, on the QAnon Anonymous' most recent podcast.
It's really perceptive and nuanced.
And his argument is that, now I'm gonna paraphrase and expand quite a bit here,
is that Balenciaga is a fashion house, which means it operates in a corrupt
and exploitative landscape built on sucking the life out young people's bodies.
So Peter Nygaard is not an outlier.
Very young people are everywhere in the fashion spectacle and for decades it has been, you know, In season to depict young people as distressed, anxious, underfed, neglected.
In other words, the industry is a screaming structural example of what red-pilled folk sense is actually true, with good reason.
Youthful sex is definitely commodified.
Nygaard and Epstein flew exploited girls all over the world.
There is definitely trafficking and it has to be stopped when the evidence is found.
But you don't stop something by pretending it's in one single evil place.
Instead of being a mundane, predictable, repetitive feature of the capitalism that you also say you love, you don't stop something by making shit up for titillation and to score culture war points.
So, definitely true at Balenciaga that somebody organized, many people organized, directed, and rubber-stamped their leather daddy teddy bear pictures.
So what the fuck happened?
We know that fetish teddy bears are a thing.
You can buy them on Etsy.
You'll see them at pride parades.
And so, some art department stoners thought it might be fun and edgy.
And so, like most campaigns, they produced something in shitty taste because directors and executives have always co-opted and monetized the taboo testing of marginalized communities and the art world to win the hour-by-hour attention war.
They have to do that because they've got nothing else otherwise.
Advertising is curated plagiarism.
The art world has always challenged the taboos of normative culture because that's how people grow.
But the ad houses don't give a shit about the subsets of art, culture, or queer culture that they pillage for aesthetic and shock value.
So, whoever designed that shoot didn't care about what the kinky teddy bear might mean to an adult into BDSM, or how it might relate to their relationships, or to their childhood selves, or to their history of abuse.
If they did, they wouldn't have handed it to a child.
Whoever the Balenciaga crew was that day, they cynically and lazily deracinated this imagery from its cultural import and they served it up according to the metrics of attention capture.
That means that advertising, propaganda, and conspiracy memes all operate on this same cut-and-paste principle.
Now, Field also pointed out that whatever command structure or editorial process that exists is subsumed by the subcontracting process required for producing limitless content.
Many subcontractors hate their bosses.
It's entirely plausible that that court decision about child pornography got stuck into that shoot by a troll.
And Julian, you mentioned how Lotta Volkova got spotlighted by the Anons, but really, we have no idea who made the images.
But that won't stop people from making stuff up.
Volkova hasn't worked for Balenciaga since 2018.
But yeah, she has a kinky Cruella De Vil Instagram mashup.
It's easy to use as a decoy for outrage.
And then once an obvious blunder like this is made, because people are just trying to make money, the bakers start going back and forth to find proof for what it means by taking other things out of context.
And there's no end to that.
That goes on sort of infinitely.
And this can be done to any culture maker's work.
Anyone who has ever earnestly explored a social convention or a taboo can be targeted.
I have written a few novels, for instance, about which I will say no more given the circumstances, but I'll just say they were novels that explore childhood trauma, alcoholism in the family, and then sublime and weird Catholic hallucinations.
So there's this fearful symmetry that emerges.
There's a lazy, decontextualized, ad-house copypasta that mirrors the unhinged, anon baking it inspires.
So on the level of communications and spectacle, Balenciaga The MAGA people, Matt Walsh, the Anons, Steven Crowder, they're all doing the same thing.
They're doing a kind of pastiche for propaganda.
You know, this was my first experience of actually being a consumer of Twitter posts that came pre-baked with these images.
It was fascinating to be in that epistemic twilight zone as my brain engaged in the sense-making process.
I mean, look, the ad campaign with the kids, as you said, is clearly just disturbing and inappropriate, and it did make me think that someone involved might have some ugly preoccupations.
That's as far as I went, because I don't tend to buy into these larger conspiracy theories.
You know, so I didn't see evidence of sex trafficking or actual satanic ritual abuse or evidence of a cabal of elites, but as I learned more, I did notice the ease with which I could form false impressions, right?
The delicious confection of conspiracy baking meant that the different ad campaigns that I would see All kind of pushed together in a single post seemed like they had happened at the same time.
And then the Instagram posts from Lotta Volkova.
Oh, well, she's obviously the designer behind these campaigns.
Oh, wait, she hasn't worked there for four years.
The gruesome art photo of a woman holding two plastic babies and kind of like pouting and staring very intensely at the camera.
That's obviously a picture of Lotta Volkova or so I was led to believe.
Oh, actually, no, it's not.
And actually, it's just an image she shared on Instagram that she maybe didn't have anything to do with creating.
Right.
You know, I saw, wow, it's really easy to quickly perceive a set of connections and a chain of events and believe those as an accurate representation of something that's been discovered that's true when actually it's fabricated.
Yeah, and it gives us a feeling and I think you are bringing up something like true and phenomenological and relatable.
I've never really heard it described very well.
I know what you're talking about.
It is a kind of twilight zone because something happens in that fog that changes us.
Like, you described this real-time experience of consuming.
You're consuming it passively.
There's a Twitter story emerging, the images are tacked onto it, the story seems coherent.
The same thing happened to me.
And the more posts I saw, the more creeped out and dejected I felt.
But I also realized that I wasn't looking very carefully.
But I didn't want to, because it was gross.
And we're both lucky, like, we pulled ourselves out of the feeling, and in some ways it's our job to do that, right?
We have to look closer.
So I think we're lucky, but what is that feeling in our bodies?
Like, what does that kind of suspended half-belief do?
It's not uncommon that I feel it, that I catch myself in this twilight zone of, oh, I have a sense of what's going on, but it's not fully formed.
I don't like that feeling, and it's strong enough That I have to work really hard to brush it aside to make sure that it doesn't distort the next thing that I see.
So, in a way, it's the recognition that part of it is bullshit is there, but there's also part of the experience that makes me cynical about everything.
Part of the story seems to be true.
How could it not partially be true?
Those kids are just standing there.
They look depressed.
They're holding kinky teddy bears.
Like, what the hell is that?
I don't like it.
But I also know that I can't quite believe it, but then I don't have time to investigate it.
And so I disengage.
I dissociate a little bit, but I'm generally left with a sour feeling in my mouth, which is like a mild poison.
And even now when I hear the word Balenciaga, certainly when I say it, there's a part of me, a small part of me that buys into on some subconscious level that there's gross stuff going on in that house.
Not because there's gross stuff going on there objectively, but because somebody found something specific that's different from what Peter Nygaard was doing, or that's somehow more explicit or worse than whatever is going on in some other fashion house.
And so it's easy to see then how that sour taste in your mouth leaves leaves an impression in the mind that says, you know, there's really ugly despicable shit that goes on in this kind of setting and with these kinds of people and so that the next time someone presents you With a conspiracy theory or a piece of propaganda or a too quickly jumbled together set of associations, I think for a lot of people there's then a place in the mind that goes, well, it wouldn't surprise me because remember that thing with Balenciaga?
Right.
And I think that's exactly what happened over the last couple of weeks with the Hunter Biden laptop secret, you know, reveal that that Elon Musk has gotten everyone all, you know, engaged in.
Right, and so I think that this is where, we're going to hear from Francesco in a minute, but this is where some of the outcomes of propaganda start.
A kind of mental and emotional numbness that hovers in this zone of belief, incredulity, cynicism, and maybe even despair.
And so here's a speculation, like I'm willing to bet that this suspended, dissociative, disquieted feeling is pretty widespread.
And perhaps a very powerful antidote, and maybe the best antidote to it, is a kind of religious conviction.
So it's not just that the conspiritualist is trying to find that masturbatory relief of confirmation bias.
It's that a period of uncertainty and lack of resolution around what they're actually looking at is resolved by an Anon Baker saying, this is what it means.
And then suddenly that feeling of, I didn't quite understand this creepy thing that I was looking at is resolved and it might feel really, really good.
And Julian, we do not get to have that pleasure.
Because our resolution is, shit, this is really complicated in about 18 different ways, and I'm sure glad I have this Dadaist gamer on QAA to help me figure it out.
You know, Matthew, it really strikes me that this is an extension of what you've talked about in terms of simultaneously terrifying and then consoling.
That is so characteristic of cult leaders, right?
This is a version of that.
I'm going to simultaneously show you that the world is so much darker than you've ever imagined and then I'm going to give you a scapegoat or a way of thinking about who's to blame and how it functions and how you can sort of be in the know.
Yeah, stay tuned for more because we've got all of the news for you and we will continue to help you cycle through this oscillation of terror and pseudo love.
So the solution for the horrible feeling you're You're having right now is something that I'm going to keep delivering to you that lets you be on the side of the good guys.
And this actually relates back then to a lot of the pseudoscience grifting that we see around things like supplements.
I'm going to convince you, like Mallory talked about, I'm going to convince you that you are filled with parasites and worms and toxins and you're going to really, really hate how that feels.
And then wouldn't you know it, I've got a product that is going to help you with that.
Yeah, complete with green flecks that you can examine in your stool.
Yeah, so the conspiritualist gets a reward, which is, this is what Balenciaga is doing to your children.
And I think that feels good, it feels juicy.
I think maybe that's the moment that propaganda is fully communicated, when it deeply satisfies, you know, what you're talking about, which is a manufactured terror or confusion.
But what I get sad about when I think about how badly Balenciaga fucked up here is, you know, like what happens to the original source producers of transgressive imagery because the ad houses are just chopping and pasting and copying stuff.
I remember years and years ago that there was an artist I knew here in Toronto.
She was a young woman who made jewelry.
Earrings, pendants, and a lot of the punk girls and ride girls I knew would buy this stuff.
And some of her most popular items were little clay molded aborted fetuses that she would make into earrings and they would be painted so that they would be bloody and all of this stuff.
You couldn't quite tell what they were until you got up close.
And when you saw what they were, like I at least had this realization that, oh, this
person is saying something deep about her response to patriarchy.
She's impacted by something or she's overcome something or she's trying to normalize the
fact that she's basically been harassed outside of abortion clinics with pictures of aborted
fetuses over the last decade.
And now she's decided to flip that shit and turn that into an aesthetic object.
And that was just on the ground level, like in the cafes.
But publicly we had Sinead O'Connor, Diamanda Gallas, PJ Harvey, Laurie Anderson.
Like, you know who I'm talking about.
Courtney Love, this whole range of feminist artists who are using imagery like this to express personal and political experience and depth.
To confess something about what had happened to them, what they were afraid of, what they were angry about, how they were tortured in terms of their imaginations.
Yeah, it's very powerful to take back, to own it, and to say, whatever the worst things are that you think you can project onto me, yeah, fine, I am that, and you can't reduce me to that because I have dignity and I can reclaim my power.
Yeah, and everything that you think is twisted is actually gorgeous.
And so it's additionally sad what propaganda does at this level because it very easily turns human expression, which Can be nuanced and have a lot of integrity and rich and it turns it against itself in this case.
So the person who is expressing something about their inner life is suddenly confessing something about their criminal behavior in the hands of Matt Walsh who can openly talk about how the age of consent should be 16 years old because that's when women are fertile or whatever and you know marital rape might be okay and that gets blown over.
You know, right-wing propaganda especially not only suppresses the truth, but it like runs a muscle car over vulnerable people who are trying to say things.
So, speaking of muscle cars, our interview guest today, Francesca Tripodi, was at Charlottesville that day.
And what I really appreciate about this interview that you did Julian was that it like let me see yet another side of
a world erased by propaganda, which is the real lives of those that it's meant to recruit.
Our interview today with Francesca Tripodi, author of the Propagandist's Playbook, How Conservative Elites Manipulate
Search and Threaten Democracy.
The book tells her personal story, as Matthew just said, of being present at the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which involved KKK members and open neo-Nazis and culminated in the murder of Heather Heyer.
And she noticed how radically different the news reports of the event were from, say, CNN versus Fox News, which led her to a research project on how right-wing propagandists exploit key differences in how conservatives interpret information.
We discuss how conspiracies and religious ideology intersect with political propaganda and what she thinks we can do about misinformation.
One of the things that's really intriguing about your book is you let us in on how your research on this topic included going undercover amongst conservatives.
And you talk about the cultural signifiers that you deliberately adopted so as to win the implicit trust of your anthropological subjects, shall we call them.
Tell us about Franny and how she suited up for this mission.
So going by Fran or Franny has a lot to do with just making sure people can say your name and remember it.
My name's kind of unique, and there is sometimes difficulty in understanding what I say.
This has become less true over time, but especially as part of my childhood, I get a lot of like, Jessica's, or just like, why is that your name, kinds of questions.
So Fran and Franny, I find, is a very tight, easy way for people to understand who I am without any kind of confusion at the onset.
And then in terms of blending, you know, this comes from Goffman and Garfinkel, who are ethnomethodologists in sociology.
And passing is a huge part of obtaining ethnographic observations.
The more you stick out, the less likely someone is to trust you.
So I adopted just a more conservative look to my fashion choices.
And then there are very basic consumption signals that are not exclusive to conservatives.
So, you know, many liberals, for example, actively don't eat at Chick-fil-A, whereas Chick-fil-A is a common signifier in conservative circles.
There was often fundraisers where they had these baskets that people could bid on, And Chick-fil-A was a regular donor to those baskets.
It was also regularly featured as the catering option, you know, at different events that I went to.
So I realized, you know, for example, if I need to be caffeinated, I stick out a lot less if I have a large Diet Coke from Chick-fil-A than I would having a Starbucks cup, which might be my go-to if I'm on the road, for example.
As a latte liberal, Yeah, a latte liberal.
I also just was quiet a lot.
And I was very honest, though.
If people asked me what my voting record was, I told them.
They knew I was a sociology professor.
I was interested in how people gained trust in media, and that's a question of concern for many, regardless of their political affiliations.
My husband is a veteran.
That's a truth.
Right.
But by leaning into signals that I knew resonated with those I was studying and by Just kind of leaning out of those other markers, it made it much easier for me to blend.
I do note, though, a lot of my blending just has to do with who I am.
You know, I'm a white, cisgender, straight woman.
I have two kids.
I was raised in a Catholic household.
So I didn't have to do that much blending to fit in in these situations.
Yeah, I actually wanted to comment, you just brought something up in terms of the juxtaposition that I thought was really fascinating and I wanted to ask you about.
You know, in the book you describe this kind of subtle disguise, some of it's behavioral, some of it is just modifying how you're dressing, what you're consuming.
how you're identifying yourself in terms of your name, making it easy for them.
But yet at the same time, you're very honest with everyone that you speak to on a sort of ethical level as a
researcher that, hey, I'm a sociology professor, I vote Democrat.
What I find really fascinating in the juxtaposition is the implicit and the explicit kind of difference there, right?
Is that there seems to me to be a way that you're blending in through a lot of implicit kind of perceptions, whilst at the same time being frank, you know, when you talk to people, hey, this is who I actually am and why I'm here.
Yeah, that sounds about right, sure.
I mean, I think, so I met, how I gained access into the groups that I studied is I reached out to the president of each of the organizations that allowed me access to their groups.
I told them I'm interested in studying media and trust and how do people come to trust the media.
Initially, my project was hopefully going to look at both conservative and more progressive groups.
I actually had started doing work around the primary for this last presidential election, embedding myself in amongst Bernie supporters, but that was cut very short because of COVID and then effectively all in-person ethnography just stopped.
But yeah, and then amongst the presidents that said yes, I'm interested in this project, I went to the first meeting and they gave me the opportunity to talk to the members of the group and tell them what I was interested in doing.
And then I just kind of hung around from there.
And then at any events that I was at, you know, I let people know that I was there as a researcher.
So yeah, I mean, I think in terms of fitting in, people feel more comfortable if you're one of them.
That's just basic belonging identity work.
But you're right.
I mean, I think what this book did, or what I hope it does, is really take a more critical look at the role whiteness plays in normativity, in kind of making what are actually very extreme positions just sort of float under the radar.
And, you know, I think it's really important to think about both like the Unite the Right group that I went to these in-person events, but they organized in public groups on Facebook.
And so just that, that kind of assumption of complicity or just, you know, that kind of assumption that like nothing to see here is very much tied to whiteness.
And just sort of recognizing that role whiteness plays is part of the reason why I was able to gain access to the groups that I could.
But I think it's also my responsibility as a white woman to elevate this conversation a little bit more.
Absolutely.
You also, as part of this research, created social media accounts that would allow you to get inside the algorithmic experience of conservative women.
Like, what are they being served up through their social media?
So I feel like I really should say thank you for your sacrifice because I know that that was That was a difficult and intense sort of experience.
And one of the things you talk about is that once you traveled far enough down the rabbit hole of alternative facts, you kind of organically discovered that there was a right-wing bias beginning to creep into your expectations of the news cycle.
Is that right?
Sure.
So there's, there's two parts of the research project.
The creating the online component of it was definitely a way in which I could understand how kind of Facebook advertising was tailored to my needs.
I got a lot of really interesting commercials around the fears of immigration, for example.
And that was easy for me to do because I didn't have a personal Facebook account and I still don't.
So having just a very professional excuse me having a very professional Facebook account where it was part of the informed consent I only asked to be friends persons whom I had a one-on-one interview with And I asked them explicitly as part of the interview if I could friend them with this work account.
And then other friends would be recommended to me or sometimes people I would meet at events would ask to connect, but I would always say no to those connections because I felt like that's a different form of informed consent than it is in a public group setting at like a large barbecue or some sort of a fundraising event.
So that was very unique, because then I could really see what are the news and sources of information that those I interviewed liked or shared or commented, and it helped me see what my newsfeed would look like if I were a conservative.
The other part that you're talking about, I think, is this process of media immersion, which I cultivated as a form of extended ethnography.
So I would say one thing that ethnography kind of lacks is a really deep dive into person's media environments.
And as information environments and media environments are increasingly intertwined as part of our everyday lives, I felt like that was like a big part that was lacking methodologically, especially if you're trying to understand what are people's news and information environments.
So for four months, I obtained all of my news and information exclusively from sources that my respondents described as trustworthy or accurate.
And during those four months, I refrained from news sources that I would typically turn to when it came to getting my news and information.
And that was definitely a mind-altering experience.
And I think that was very important for two reasons.
One, it allowed me to really understand what are the themes and concepts that are being focused on.
Differently than just content analysis.
I also did a content analysis where I would take transcripts from podcasts that I had listened to and do a more thematic coding analysis.
But by just being immersed in it from the get-go, it allowed me to really see, like, well, what is the news in a very polarized news environment?
And the second thing I realized is just how powerful it is.
Because here's this person, me, who was raised very progressive.
Consumes mainstream news and information, definitely, you know, identifies as more progressive.
And it was during the Mueller report, and they were kind of putting out these breadcrumbs, like, who's going to be indicted?
And I legitimately thought I was in the shower and I was like, oh, maybe Hillary Clinton is going to be indicted.
And I got really scared because I was like, oh, I voted for this person and maybe I'm going to be this one with egg on my face, you know, going to these events and telling people this is who I voted for him.
Maybe that could happen.
And I talked to my husband when I got out of the shower and he was just like, I don't, I don't understand how you could think, like, I'm just not quite sure what you're even talking about.
Yeah.
And then it's actually interesting because I was at a job, I was at a, I was traveling for work and I got the opportunity to present my research at University of Washington.
And we were talking amongst, like, the graduate students and faculty afterwards, and I was saying, oh, you know how they had all these breadcrumbs, who's going to be indicted?
And one of the faculty members was like, I don't think there were breadcrumbs.
Like, I think we all pretty much knew it was Manafort.
And I was like, wow, that's a totally new thing that I didn't even realize is that, yeah, that this whole, like, who's it gonna be?
Was also very lopsided.
Yeah.
When I read that, I pictured, you know, your husband with a hand on each of your shoulders, kind of looking at you contemplating having to do an intervention like... Well, another friend of mine just made it, had a talk here, a colleague of mine, and he was like, I think that's the point where your spouse says, you've reached saturation, right?
There's this, there's a methodological rule in qualitative research that says like, how many is enough interviews?
And enough interviews is when you can basically assume what someone will say, because you've heard it so many times.
There's no surprises in anything anybody's saying to you.
And that was like, I think that's when your spouse just said, like, you've reached saturation.
You are done with this immersion aspect.
But it was very interesting because, you know, here's someone that didn't agree with a lot of the content I was listening to, and yet it was very influential.
Later in my research, I saw an advertisement for PragerU where it said, you know, in two weeks is all it took to mold a conservative.
And it had quotes and ran BuzzFeed.
And I thought, I think I was a source for that article.
And I don't think that's what the article was saying.
And then I went back, and in fact, they had taken that quote out of context
and used it in another way.
So yeah, it's a very powerful information system.
Yeah, I want to back up just a little, because there's more I want to ask you about that.
But you were present at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which you've alluded to already.
And we need to talk about that briefly.
I mean, you go into such a compelling storytelling mode as you discuss this in the book.
You got to see how that horrific story got told through hugely different narrative filters after the event, having been there yourself.
Tell us about that.
So the Unite the Right rally, I think many people don't realize it was the third gathering, very large gathering, it was the largest, but it was the third gathering of very open white supremacists.
in the area within the span of about three months.
So I had actually stumbled across the first gathering by Richard Spencer in May, just a couple months prior, while we were headed to the International Festival.
And we were walking past and then we saw these smaller crowd of white men and women Flanked together and Richard Spencer had a bullhorn and they were yelling much of the same epithets that then were recycled for the Unite the Right rally and they also held a torch lit rally that night.
It was much smaller in scope and it didn't include a march like a processional through the town but it was a torch lit rally using the same kind of symbolic tiki torch Yeah.
And then in July, there was a KKK rally where members of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan came down to rally against.
And in that one, it was really fascinating because you had all this language amongst attendees.
And I would say an overwhelming number of the attendees were there to protest the KKK.
But there were a small number of white persons there who identified as Confederates and were there because they didn't think these statues should be taken down.
And they kept referring to outsiders.
These outsiders want to remove our statue.
Meanwhile, they had actually come in from out of town, and also the KKK had come in from out of town, right?
So when you talk about an outside agitator, they were referring to Black Lives Matter, which is a trope that's been used since the civil rights movement to refer to civil rights protesters as somehow these outsiders within.
And then when it came to Unite the Right, what was fascinating is I learned about it first through Facebook.
So through this work profile, I was seeing these notices about Unite the Right.
And I was curious, what is this concept?
And then I was following, I joined the Facebook group, you know, it was this open group, and there were thousands of people RSVPing to this event.
They were using it to coordinate ride sharing amongst attendees across state lines.
There were supposed independent journalists that were trying to crowdsource funding to attend the rally.
When the day unfolded, we just didn't really know what to expect as a town.
But it was extremely personal because I lived there, you know.
My babies were born there.
And there was just this groundswell of Nazis, right?
Very open, open, open white supremacists that had scoped out the area the night before.
They all arrived in McIntyre Park the night before.
They scoped the area.
They were highly, highly coordinated.
So many of them, it was clear they were staying in surrounding campsites.
There was an extreme coordinated effort when it came to parking and like logistics, right?
They all parked at McIntyre Park and then took these shuttles into downtown because downtown doesn't have, you know, open public parking and it was heavily marked off for in anticipation of this event.
And it was also just, I mean, it was the most violence I've ever seen in, and I hope to ever see in real life.
So it was interesting.
It took a long time to actually write.
That was the last thing I wrote.
And it had been part of this research project that never materialized into the Data & Society Report because I just didn't really know what to, like how to make sense of it.
And it wasn't actually until I was summoned as a juror.
So then I got this juror summons to come as part of James Field's defense.
I'm sitting here and I'm listening to these defense attorneys and they're talking about the hysterical left and how he was acting in self-defense.
And all of a sudden it clicked because that was also a central theme that was running through the news coverage.
So I like went to Unite the Right Rally and then came home and watched coverage of the Unite the Right Rally on Fox News that night.
And they were talking about all these Antifa groups and Unicorn Riot and really portraying them
as this problem.
And that's why violence had ensued.
Now, there were armed members of groups like Redneck Revolt, but to assume that some sort of historical left
was the reason behind the violence that transpired, death of Heather Heyer is so disingenuous, right?
So having that backdrop really is what kind of put all these light bulbs in motion for me and made me realize how much I had to kind of fold that narrative back into.
We spend a lot of time on this podcast looking at conspiracy theories.
It strikes me that just like the term conspiracy theory and the term misinformation, your term, propaganda, has this mercurial quality in that it essentially refers to a way of destabilizing how we know what is true and what is false.
And thereby it actually obscures its own work, right?
When propaganda is working effectively, you're confused about what's true and what's false.
And that can then lead proponents to being able to position themselves as actually being savvy, skeptical truth seekers, and in turn they can frame people like us as being the real propagandists for the mainstream narrative, right?
What I want to ask you is, how would you reply to that person just sort of randomly sitting beside you on an airplane who said, you know, when they asked you about your book, uh, isn't propagandist just a disparaging term for someone you disagree with politically?
That is a very good question.
So I actually draw from a really wonderful scholar whose name is Carolyn Jack, and I Who wrote this fantastic paper called Lexicon of Lies.
And the concept of propaganda is just effectively a way in which political actors bring together people in nations in a common conversation or brand with the goal of political ends.
So propaganda itself doesn't have to be nefarious.
And there's a lot of things that we could think about when it comes to unifying the national identity around common causes and conversations.
And we've seen how propaganda campaigns can effectively work to change minds under power, like dictatorships, right?
So the playbook does not necessarily have to end with the storming of a Capitol, for example.
What it's about is the ways in which politicians, in particular those on the right, have a very acute understanding of their audiences, voters' desires, have done a remarkable job at stitching together otherwise kind of disparate groups engaging with different forms of media literacy in order to really resonate with those common concerns.
And it's also about building a really impressive media network and media landscape that's not exclusive to online.
And then the last thing is just about linking together these concerns into very tight, neat, Words and phrases and then repeating them on a constant drumbeat.
And by doing so, you can change the conversation in the direction you want it to go.
You referred to earlier research suggesting a two-step flow whereby influencers actually mediate content and that rather than framing people on the right as being cultural dopes who've just been fooled into believing things because they're gullible, right?
You start from this premise that They actively engage in a deliberative intellectual exploration.
Tell me more about this sort of aspect of what you discovered and what you were exploring.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, I think this is part of the narrative that I was dissatisfied with surrounding the election of Donald Trump.
was that somehow these Russian bots had cultivated this mass following that just followed him in droves to the polls and that there was this no, what it referred to in media studies and sociology is like active audience research that no one is told what to think.
We might be told what to think about, but there is a huge element of interaction with the media that I just felt wasn't being captured at all.
And also, I was extremely dissatisfied with this notion that somehow Trump supporters were less educated or were somehow not smart enough or something to see.
And so I purposely sought out highly educated Trump supporters.
I wanted to find people who had voted for Trump who were college educated, who had good jobs, right?
These were undergraduates in college and very affluent women that I was that I was meeting with.
Many of whom were connected to local politicians as well, right?
And also what I was very interested in is kind of unpacking the connection between conservative culture and the establishment because Even though I was embedded in Republican organizations that were called the Young Republicans or, you know, the Women's Republican Organization, right?
Those who I interviewed identified as conservative first.
For me, what I really wanted to understand is I was dissatisfied in this idea that they were just somehow believing in what they saw without any kind of inquisitive mind.
Because that's what you do when you're in college, right?
You know, you learn how to think.
And what I found is that many of them just rely on A way of engaging with text that is also heavily influenced in a Protestant engagement with the Bible.
And while those in my study definitely ascribe to a more Protestant religion, I argue based on comparisons to other sociological studies and also comparisons to groups of people, for example, like QAnon, that this focus on literal inerrancy
is a fundamental way of understanding the world and of thinking critically that is being exploited by people who want to hold positions of power or, you know, have monetary gains.
And so by understanding that media literacy looks different, I think we can engage in a more meaningful understanding of, like, what does it mean to Have information literacy or have media literacy.
This is so crucial and I think it's a complex topic and there are two things I want to ask you about this.
One is looping back around right to your moment of realizing that you'd hit saturation because the cryptic digital breadcrumbs that QAnon is sort of like the It really most intense manifestation of that we've had in the last few years as a way of persuading people that through quote-unquote doing their own research, they can actually discover the truth that the propagandists want them.
To think they've come to through, you know, their own sort of clever critical thinking and media literacy as you were just saying.
So that relates very much to what we talk about on the podcast because we look at how traditionally liberal alternative medicine, kind of spiritual magical thinking demographics were susceptible to this as well.
I'm excited to veer this way too.
So I refer to this as the IKEA effect of misinformation, drawing on business scholars who find that when people put together furniture themselves or have an active process in creating furniture, that they come to value it more than they would a piece of equal quality furniture.
So if you look at the exact same piece of furniture from Target, Versus from Ikea, if they're putting it together, they're more likely to value it.
And it's this kind of interactive, do-it-yourself aspect of information seeking that can be used for good or for ill.
And it's combined with search engine optimization and seeding the internet ahead of time.
Effectively, what you find people doing, and what I've narrowed in on with political propagandists, but Two of my really fantastic colleagues, Alice Marwick and Will Parton, have done an incredible amount of work on QAnon and they find a lot of these same tactics are used where you use this process of keyword curation, what I refer to as keyword curation, so you create
a concept or a name or just something that's unique to a situation and then you just fill the internet with a bunch of stuff around these concepts or ideas and then you encourage people that follow you whether this be on the internet or on radio or through print To do more inquiry around this or not even not even actively say do it yourself or Google it yourself.
You can just talk about it all the time.
David Nunes did this during the first impeachment of Donald Trump when he actively said at every opportunity possible, we shouldn't pay attention to this.
We should be paying attention to Nellie Orr.
Nellie Orr is who we should be paying attention to.
And then lo and behold, you search Nellie Orr and the only information available about this person comes from the right wing media ecosystem.
Same thing happens with QAnon, right?
You look at these like very explicit SKU codes or when you know, talking about Actually, funnily enough, Ikea—no, it was Wayfair, excuse me—Wayfair trafficking young children.
Look for yourself.
They have all these pieces of furniture that are named after girls, right?
Well, the internet will return what you want it to return.
In information science, it's called relevance.
And search engines are built around relevance.
So it's a very easy way to trick search engine heuristics without a computer science degree.
You don't need to know what the algorithm is doing to trick it.
And it's interesting because I think large corporations understand that this is being done and they don't want to be a pawn in this chess game.
Unless they can make money from it.
Sure.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's funny because it's not funny, but like, I mean, this is just SEO 101.
You know, you don't, if you're trying to get out something in a saturated environment, you have to talk about something a little bit different or else.
You'll get lost in the noise.
Yeah, yeah, that's such a huge part of this puzzle as well with sort of like the contrarian sphere and the heterodox and you know, if you take a position that is out of the mainstream and then you say because of that position you must be a brilliant sort of original thinker, then that gets you a lot more eyeballs and it's a lot more interesting than just saying, you know, the vaccines work, they're safe and effective.
But I wanted to come back around, in this whole topic right here, there's a term that you use which is inference from scripture, and you use it to describe how conservatives have a different way of sort of pursuing knowledge, a different epistemological style than liberals often do.
And what's interesting in terms of the overlap with our work is that more spiritual kind of new age and yoga and wellness type folks I think also have an affinity for this Can you say a little bit about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, this notion of scriptural inference kind of gets at this idea of leveraging a literal translation of written text and doing your own analysis on that text rather than relying on an interpretation of those texts or events and getting your information via the interpretation.
And I draw a lot of juxtapositions to the Protestant Reformation within the United States explicitly because this is really the foundation of much of the United States was this idea that individuals are as powerful as clergy, that you have the power to engage in the Bible yourself, that you don't need an intermediary, you know?
And so I think this kind of like rugged individualism is That is an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation.
It's very much bound up in a lot of things within the United States.
It's a unique brand, I think, of engaging with stuff.
You know, a textual inerrancy versus like a sympathetic listening or an empathetic listening is a very different way of engaging with the Bible.
So you see, the Bible is not I mean, it can be used for partisan gains, but no one party holds the Bible.
But what you see is that a lot of faith-based organizations that are more progressive really lean into that empathetic listening and application of Scripture into everyday contexts, whereas more conservative groups, faith-based groups, really dig into that literal translation.
And that literal translation transfers outside of the Bible to any text deemed sacred, right?
So we see this with constitutional conservatism, this over-reliance on a text deemed sacred and Getting into the inerrancy as though that is truth and leveraging the Constitution outside of any kind of deep understanding of who wrote this, for what reason did they write this, and who was left out of this conversation at the time of writing, void of any kind of historical understanding of the text in which it was written as well.
And so you see that with, you know, constitutional concerns, the Federalist Papers is often relied on, but you also saw this during Trump's first impeachment.
When they were actively saying, read the transcript, read the transcript, which was just a redacted memo.
There was no actual transcript of the call.
And it was interesting because many people were like, yeah, that memo says it all, but it didn't say it directly.
And so I think that's where you see this disjuncture.
Yeah, yeah.
It's almost like the literalism then sort of, it starts to try to remove any sense of
contextual analysis or interpretation because all of that is seen as the spin and as the
propaganda and if you can just go directly to the source and understand it just like
a, in a common sense sort of way, then you will know the absolute truth that's sort of
handed down from whatever the invisible authority is.
Because I think in the people we look at, you see this with like the cherry-picked PubMed
So if you're going to say ivermectin works, or you're going to say that vaccines cause way more horrific side effects than they actually do, then if you can have a document that you can point to, you have a link to this particular study that says it in black and white, well then there it is.
And context and scientific consensus and when the paper was written and who actually did it, none of that really matters if it proves your point.
No, absolutely.
I mean, we saw this.
I did some work looking at Facebook groups of reopened groups on Facebook, and there was a lot of that leveraging Fauci's words on 60 Minutes from, you know, two or three years ago where he said, you don't need a mask, right?
And it was like, even though that had been, you know, so they actually used his own words against him to say that we were the ones being with the, you know, the people who were wearing masks had the wool pulled over their eyes because they weren't even listening.
I have two really quick closing questions for you, and you'll laugh because they're grossly oversimplified.
The first one is, why are conservatives so much better at digital propaganda, or at propaganda in general, than people on the left are?
Okay, so in terms of conservative elites, because I think it's important to recognize that not all conservatives are propagandists, that there is this distinct elite group of politicians and media producers and pundits that are wielding this mechanism.
But in general, one, they have a very robust network that has adapted to the media Environment du jour so it started in you know radio and print and then they have a very robust television and cable and now you have a lot of podcasting and internet presence.
So one they have a much more robust just network of information and Two, they understand words work.
So Frank Luntz, who is a political strategist from the 1990s, has a book called Words That Work, and his book is about how You don't like if you don't like what's being said, you change the conversation.
And he used focus groups and interviews and went out and got to understand what people cared about and then wrote very specific words and phrases that then he photocopied back in the day and distributed to all persons running for the house.
And they were able to take over the house.
And so he understood, you know, we can't do anything about global warming.
It's not in our best interest to talk about it.
We're going to change the conversation to climate change.
Climate change seems less scary, like the science isn't out.
So they understand words that work.
And then they use that same strategy of words that work to tag their content.
So they just understand how information flows.
They have more money to invest in highly curated, very professional programming that then is better tagged and categorized.
So I partnered with a data scientist that wrote a script to scrape how Content creators tag their content on YouTube.
And we found that content creators on the right are much more effective at tagging and categorizing their content than content creators on the left.
So I would say it's a lot of things.
You know, more money and resources.
A much more integrated network, an understanding of bridging together people with like-minded concerns, a really sophisticated understanding of how language works, and then just applying that to the internet.
You say in the book that there's no top-down solution for the problem of misinformation, that the tech giants could just turnkey apply and it would solve the problem, that they could just fix it.
Defining problem of our time because it seems to turn out that having free and open and seemingly unmediated access to unlimited information and content at all times doesn't mean that the truth rises up like cream to the surface inevitably, right?
And so traditional ways of thinking about the marketplace of ideas, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and a kind of free speech absolutism, which I think can be well-intentioned, but it's turning out to be naive in the face of the world we live in now, especially with social media and viral disinformation campaigns.
I know that you probably don't have a definitive answer, but Francesca Tripodi, how do we save ourselves?
Okay, so this is a great, this is my long-standing joke, but you never invite a sociologist to a party because we have a great way of showing a bunch of problems and we don't have a lot of solutions.
However, here are my ideas.
One, being mindful about how search Works.
So I think many of us rely on search engines, but we've stopped engaging in exploratory search practices.
So many of us have become over-reliant on those knowledge graphs or just the summary, kind of the quick summary.
And because of the way the internet works, sometimes those summaries might be inaccurate.
Sometimes those summaries might not be from a source you would even trust.
Also, sometimes those summaries have been manipulated so that all of them look like they're in agreement with each other.
And just because everything on the first search page is in agreement with everything on the first search page doesn't mean another opinion doesn't exist or that that is in fact correct.
So Google and Bing and DuckDuckGo, they are all trying to give you the information that the algorithm thinks best matches your needs.
That's not to say they're giving you the best information possible.
That's kind of part one.
I think when it comes to recognizing the deep-seated role misinformation plays, right?
Du Bois was talking about misinformation in 1935.
Amazing.
He wrote Black Reconstruction in America and he showed that some of the original disinfo around stolen elections, for example, traces back to Reconstruction and Black people getting the ability to vote and electing a record number of Black people to serve in Congress.
And then all of a sudden you have these lies, these elections have been stolen or something has been manipulated, right?
And so I think really understanding that legacy of these buys, that a lot of this content is just recycled, reused, kind of tragic disinfo.
And so that's not going to get fixed by media literacy.
Some things can get fixed by media literacy, right?
Understanding how search engines work, recognizing the role keywords play, those things can get fixed.
But really taking an honest look at the relationship between disinformation and racism and sexism Especially in the United States, but I would argue in many, many places, is kind of the first step, right?
We can't really fix the problem of disinformation if we aren't going to recognize the role slavery played in the creation of the United States, you know?
I mean, a lot of these things are intertwined.
And so if we really want to fix the problem, we can't expect that we can solve centuries-old disinfo with, you know, a media literacy campaign.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
