182: Recovering from Conspiracy Theories (w/Stephanie Kemmerer)
What is it like to get red-pilled, find a fragile community of peers, and then come out on the other side?
What are the personal, social, and political wounds that make conspiracy theories feel like medicine—or a drug? What is the difference between debunking theories and healing wounds?
Today the trio discusses excerpts of an interview Matthew recorded with Stephanie Kemmerer, a former conspiracy theorist and now public educator. Stephanie is part of a newly formed non-profit called The American Information Integrity Alliance and co-facilitator of the support group DOUBT: Discussing Our Unusual Beliefs Together.
Kemmerer’s journey tells us a lot about how people fall into the rabbit hole, how they can claw their way back out. But she also suggests that the rabbit hole is really a hole in the culture, and that there’s plenty we can do to fill it in.
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Show Notes
American Information Integrity Alliance
D.O.U.B.T. (Discussing Our Unusual Beliefs Together)
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World Trade Center, Building 7, UFOs, Satanic Ritual Abuse.
Today we ask, what gets someone deep into conspiracy theories, and what might get them out?
We've got an interview today with a former true believer, with whom we discuss loneliness,
trauma, and how conspiracy theorizing can feel like an addiction.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of
conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
extremism. And And this week, we can add how you never really know how much sense a conspiracy theory makes until you talk with someone who believed in one.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspiracy Theories with Stephanie Kammerer.
We're starting today with a question.
What is it really like to live through the experience of becoming red-pilled, fully identifying with that community, and then coming out on the other side?
Today, we'll be answering some of those questions by discussing excerpts of an interview I did with Stephanie Kemmerer.
She's a former conspiracy theorist and now public educator.
Stephanie's part of a newly formed non-profit called the American Information Integrity Alliance, and under that umbrella, there's a support group she's involved with called Doubt, or Discussing Our Unusual Beliefs Together.
We've done a lot of work on this podcast covering conspiritualists, debunking conspiracy theories, and talking about how they relate to science denial, spiritual bypass, magical thinking, cult dynamics, and even apocalyptic religion.
We've reviewed the literature on how conspiracism functions and talked to religious scholars, sociologists, and historians about the overlaps with politics and conspiracy theories.
But it's been rare for us to talk to someone who actually has been a true believer.
And to get a really personal account of their experience.
Some critics have even accused us of being one-sided for not debating anti-vaxxers or interviewing COVID contrarians.
And we've wondered at times if we might be caricaturing the demographic we study.
I've come to feel that one of the biggest moral liabilities in a cultural criticism project are things like, you know, objectification, othering, stigmatization.
We already inhabit a social spectacle in which, you know, identity, whether it's political, cultural, or religious, is instantly assigned, staked out, defended, commodified, weaponized.
And this technology we're using increasingly prevents people from knowing each other.
The social platforms have really figured out that paranoia is more engaging than empathy.
And I think if we think about how somebody like Chaya Raychek of Libs of TikTok has mastered this type of viral, you know, harassment, there's a mechanics of spectacle that's at the heart of her technique.
Because her followers know within the first two seconds of any video what the angle is and what visceral emotion they're supposed to feel in response to the purple hair or the nose ring or Some queer-coded tone of voice or a social justice keyword.
And whoever she targets is instantly dehumanized.
There's no possibility that there's a human there with complex thoughts and desires or a history or good intentions or love and authentic friendships.
So it's impossible that Raychick and her followers could learn from that person because, you know, that's not what they're there to do.
And we know where that goes.
You know, it's a kind of othering or demonization that's just basic to the nervous system of fascism.
But I think that in the anti-disinformation sphere, while this is obviously not the aim, we can wind up using a similar principle of abstraction.
You know, the conspiracy theorist, the conspiritualist, the anti-vaxxer, We begin or we can begin with a kind of flattened picture of a person that focuses on what we assume about their beliefs and where those beliefs come from and what they say about the person's faculties.
There can be scorn.
There can be derision.
There can be a flattening of all non-normative beliefs.
And in that situation, things like vaccine hesitancy, drinking your pee, and the belief in quantum healing all somehow blend together.
The person would go in for all of those dumb things.
And there can be an echo of Raycheck in that, I think.
The immediate dismissal of a person's sanity or their earnestness.
And then this additional echo in the unconscious production of an echo chamber in which you can monetize your content by speaking to your choir.
I mean, I thought of a phrase for this the other day.
Maybe we can call it stigma capitalism.
So, yeah, whenever there's the opportunity to sidestep that machine and the instincts that drive it and talk to a person directly and understand their human network first, I think it's gold because, you know, when somebody like Stephanie Kemmerer comes around, reaches out to us, it's just like an open door.
I think that's generally right.
When you say the social platforms have figured out paranoia is more engaging than empathy, considering we're not fully AI yet, it's really the engineers and their creation of the algorithms in an attempt to maximize attention, which leads to greater revenue through a variety of different means.
I'm just a little hesitant to give too much power to tech, at least yet.
You're saying that we always have to remember that there are still human engineers making human choices because otherwise, like, the picture is just too despairing.
Yeah, and I think a lot of times people will give agency to the platforms that is not yet deserved, although that is changing.
Right.
I think about the fact that when I'm using a platform like Midjourney or DALI and I put in a prompt, I will get very different results from those prompts
because different engineers have created those platforms.
And in fact, Midjourney is much more willing to take art from others upon a prompt, whereas
Dali will say, you can't do that.
And so then you get to places like Elon Musk with Lex Friedman and they're playing with chat GPT-4 and he's saying, oh, it's woke.
But what you're really talking about is the fact that the engineers actually want to have some boundaries and what's allowed within the context of that.
But you know, that is changing.
So I think you're mostly correct, but I did want to make that distinction.
Yeah, it's really interesting, Derek.
I just want to observe something that like, even in, even in making that distinction and sort of trying to unpack the thing you're unpacking, there's an intuitive tendency to still sort of ascribe a certain kind of agency, right?
Like, like when you say mid-journey is, mid-journey is willing.
It's, it's, it's just like, it's interesting in terms of how we think about this stuff to, to imagine a conscious agent behind a lot of things that are much more overdetermined than that.
Yeah, and that begins to sound conspiratorial, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Right.
Okay, that's the problem we're dealing with today.
All right, carry on.
Well, that's true, and that actually gets to the part that I wanted to answer what you asked, Julian, because I think when it comes to How we respond to these people, and we've had this discussion before, but I have a different stance because I come from a different culture.
So take, for example, Donald Trump.
Growing up in New Jersey, seeing in the 80s, seeing what he did to Atlantic City, most people I knew knew that he was a huckster, he was a fool, you didn't take him seriously.
So when that translates to people voting for him decades later, I kind of look at them like, what the fuck's wrong with you?
Because that was the guardrails that were in place for me growing up, because if I said something dumb, my friends were like, what the fuck?
And that was how you learned where your boundaries are.
In social media, it can be different, because I know that I irritate some people with my attitude, but I also know that there's a lot of people who, when I say those things, are like, yeah, exactly, that's how you deal with it.
So shame has a role.
But also, trying to extend yourself, which I think in the interview with Stephanie is fantastic, and understanding that these are people too behind these machines.
It's challenging for me.
I think it's challenging for a lot of people when we default to what we know best.
I'm very happy that I'm finding that Threads is providing a lot more unpacking and nuanced conversations than like say Twitter or other places we have conversations.
A lot of doctors and epidemiologists unpacking things right now.
So I hope that continues and I hope that we as humans with our own agency can make social media a better place.
Now, that's not saying there aren't trolls on threads as well, but I'll end with this.
Something did happen where somebody pointed out on threads that they're starting to realize that a big part of the appeal of Twitter is the fact that either just contrarians or trolls can own the libs, and since a lot of progressives have left Twitter, They're finding that they're really in an echo chamber and they're not having as much fun, which is deranged in one sense.
But so far, what I've seen on threads is that there are more guardrails that people are saying, hey, no, not in this space.
We're not allowing that.
We'll see how that unfolds in the future.
Yeah, I hope you're not going to, like, push me or Julian or anybody else to join threads.
But, I mean, one thing I wanted to add is that there's something about the speed that is really important here, and it affects both the writerly content and output, and also the reader's response. Like, you know, I know that we try
to be concise and balanced in tweets most of the time, but because the format itself is built
for this instantaneous reaction, the reader's impulse is not geared towards absorption,
consideration, generosity, you know, and I have to admit, I often find myself
scrolling through socials in a kind of predatory manner.
Like I'm not looking for the new perspective that would take some patience and work to really take in.
Like sometimes I'm just looking for where a person has fucked up.
Where they're nuts, where I might respond with a correction or something snide.
So on the writerly side, I think we're incentivized to provoke.
And on the readerly side, we are incentivized to police.
And that whole feedback loop is really fast.
It's exciting, but it's also paranoid.
And I think we're going to get some of the sense of that as we listen to Stephanie.
That's a really good point.
I'm glad you brought all that up.
I do want to also say that we're talking a bit about how the engineers behind the algorithms manipulate people, which is absolutely true.
But I also do still think there is some responsibility in terms of people who engage on these platforms.
And that's also why I'm a little more bullish on threads, because I'm seeing more morality and intelligence happening over there.
And I'll say even from my own perspective, being over there in those spaces, is making me less reactive to things
and more of like I'm following doctors and I'm seeing these fascinating studies come out
and so I'm more inclined to be like, oh my god, look at this, what a great study
and look what is possible through medicine or whatever now rather than being,
oh, look at this dickhead over here doing this.
And I think we can create those environments but it does take our own agency to be able to do that.
That sounds to me like a classic New Jersey statement.
Look at this dickhead over here doing this, right?
Like you're revealing your culture.
It's actually very similar to where I grew up as well.
But, you know, I want to say I hear you, Matthew, almost echoing Very faithfully, the critique of someone like Tristran Harris in The Social Dilemma, right?
They were essentially saying the way that these platforms are set up pushes us in this particular direction because that's what keeps us engaged and that's what allows them to sell advertising.
And I hear you, Derek, saying, hey, there's a whole group of people who've gotten wise to that and are trying to do something different.
Maybe there's something about threads and its architecture that helps support a different way of engaging.
And maybe there's also a demographic of people who are like, OK, we're sick and tired of this unsatisfying and, you know, perhaps toxic way of engaging in social media.
Let's try something different.
I find, Matthew, to your point, the impulse to empathize with the humanity of our subjects really valuable.
I think we've done that quite consistently through this project.
Especially with those who we see not so much as profiting cynically from disinformation, but as being vulnerable to being harmed by it through their own sort of good faith inquiry or whatever they're suffering from.
It seems to me that the difference between legitimate criticism and cultural analysis versus dehumanizing propaganda along the lines of libs of TikTok, Lies in how the latter deliberately distorts reality in the service of an ugly agenda, rather than making factual and evidentiary observations and ethical arguments about statements, behaviors, and beliefs.
So there's sort of this tension between like, are we talking about beliefs and their impacts, or are we talking about individuals in a sort of morally condemning way?
Like Derek, I think there's room for condemnation.
But I also think, like you, Matthew, it's important to be judicious in terms of when we dole that out and whether or not we're flattening people.
We're talking about all of this today, Matthew, because you did this wonderful long-form interview with Stephanie Kammerer that we'll be sharing excerpts from and discussing as we continue.
The interview came about as a result of her emailing us.
What was it about her story that made you want to talk to her?
Well, she's just done a lot of, I would say, difficult work to understand her journey, why it made sense that she wound up where she wound up, how she was vulnerable.
And also, she speaks to the relief and the pleasure she got out of conspiracy theory culture in a really compelling way.
And I think more than that, she's also put a lot of work into being able to articulate that experience, and that's really not easy.
And I think it takes a kind of maturity and wisdom because, you know, when people first get out of toxic or high demand situations or groups, they'll often go through a rage phase.
Like, I can't believe I was fooled.
I can't believe I was exploited.
I can't believe people are such monsters.
And I think that is necessary.
It's developmentally appropriate.
It can provide a good example of boundary setting for other people who need permission to break free of a particular situation.
And I think that's what a lot of call-out culture is trying to do.
That's fine.
But it's also, I think, a stage.
Because after the rage has done that work, you know, you can become a little bit more philosophical about how it all happened.
You know, how you played a role, how certain, you know, aggressors may have been, you know, uniquely positioned for their fate.
And Stephanie is like a long way down that road to the point where, you know, I think as we'll see, she's able to think clearly about how other people in these alternate realities can be met with compassion.
So, in terms of her backstory, you and Stephanie spent a good amount of time establishing how it all unfolded for her.
What may have stayed with you, Matthew, in terms of how she got involved in conspiracy theories?
She talked about a childhood interest in Bigfoot, in UFOs, in haunted houses.
Yeah, I mean, I can relate to all of that, right?
into certain cultural affinities in adulthood, you know, being interested in goth culture.
But then she ran into things like zeitgeist, which you're well familiar with, Julian.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can relate to all of that, right?
I was one of those kids in the school library, like, digging out the books about the unexplained
and listening to those radio shows about UFO abductions and how nobody really knows what's going on.
And then by the time you get to Zeitgeist, it's like, here's this very slickly produced and manipulative, you know, in terms of the music and the type of imagery that's being used and the quotes that just with no attribution that just kind of float free that paint this paranoid worldview.
And part of that was 9-11.
She talks about how in first interacting with a lot of this kind of content, she felt like she would get high.
Yeah, and that begins to foreshadow the, you know, the recovery style framework that she brings to this material today.
She also described, you know, Social isolation, being lonely, not having a lot of friends where she was living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and anything that sort of pointed towards blaming the government as making sense.
And she also talks about being taken in.
With regard to the 9-11 material, to the appeal to authority, because she came across these, you know, engineer experts, so-called experts, who were part of the truther community.
Oh, yeah.
But then, yeah, but then we'll hear.
We're going to run excerpts of this interview because it's really great to listen to her, but we've got this interesting moment that comes up here.
The Truthers also like to edit things.
They always use that clip of the firefighter saying, keep your eye on that building, it's coming down.
But they forget to include the loud cracking noise and the firefighter says, what was that?
Right before the firefighter says it's coming down.
So they purposely edit the crack and the guy saying, what was that?
They take that out of that sound clip.
You know, when I first saw the entire clip, I felt a white hot rage.
The weird thing is that all the realizations of the lying didn't come to like five or six years later.
You mean after hearing the full audio clip?
No, after getting away from the conspiracy theories, I didn't feel comfortable to actually examine 9-11 until around the 20th anniversary.
I was afraid beforehand that What if I found something out that proved the conspiracy theory?
So I didn't even go near that topic until years later.
Well, that's that's really wild how she after getting out, she just avoided the whole topic for fear.
It sounds to me like she would be sucked back in.
But there's something really interesting here for us, Matthew, and you referenced it when you talked to her, that there is this widely held Perspective that says if you're susceptible to one conspiracy, well, then you're probably going to be susceptible to a whole lot of others.
But here she talks about a disconnect between two different, you know, very common conspiracy theories and how this creates some niggling doubt for her, right?
What started it all was I had made a comment to a friend who had come out to visit me in California.
I just said something.
That Sandy Hook thing looks pretty fishy.
And the friend just said that they knew a parent who lost their child at Sandy Hook.
And so I apologized.
And when they went home, I found a series on YouTube.
And I just recently remembered the name of the person who did it, Miles Power.
And it was a series debunking 9-11.
He laid it all out, and he even had former truthers in there.
I was like, OK.
And they show you the damaged side of World Trade Center 7.
I don't need to explore Sandy Hook because I have a firsthand account from someone.
So I decided I'm going to not touch that.
And I went to 9-11 because I knew that that was kind of my My entry.
So I was like, I'm skipping Sandy Hook for now.
Let's do 9-11, because that's what led me to Sandy Hook.
Wow.
Incredible that there's this back and forth, right?
And almost like the two different beliefs or two different ways of trying to assess what's true start to influence one another.
It's almost like reality intrudes on that, perhaps more dissociative abstraction.
She's sharing her process of realizing after being skeptical about the Sandy Hook conspiracies that eventually she finds there was not only a mistaken perception of 9-11 but there was deliberate reality distortion.
I have this thought now listening to this again that I did not have during the interview, which is that it almost feels like she only had room for one story at a time, right?
That 9-11 was enough to be absorbing.
If Sandy Hook was more complicated, she was going to move away from it or she was going to...
And that suggests to me that it's not really about the content.
It suggests to me that there's an event that the mind wants to focus on because it's getting what it needs from that particular controversy.
Yeah, and not to overly belabor the concept or read too much into it, but it's interesting to me that she says, I'll skip Sandy Hook, we're going to do 9-11.
Right.
You know, like, like, we're going to stick with this drug.
We'll just keep doing this drug.
You know, it may be a stretch, but you know, this, this whole thing about, um, the rage that you described and about her coming to realize, wow, they've edited these 9-11 videos in a deceptive way.
It's actually something that Lee McIntyre, uh, who, you know, who I interviewed for an episode, uh, probably like two years ago now, a very well-received episode.
Some others we've also interviewed reference this, which is that people typically who are drawn to conspiracy theories are motivated by the desire to not be fooled.
So when they realize or when someone is able to show them where they have actually been fooled by the people hawking the conspiracy theories, or that they've been lied to, that can end up sort of taking priority over the investment in the conspiracy narrative.
Because now they're like, I want to, I want to go through to the next level of not being fooled, right?
Right.
And at the same time, we're not going to hear that Stephanie really benefited from any kind of top-down intervention.
Like, she doesn't talk about someone setting her straight.
It's really more about moments of interpersonal interaction that stirred her conscience, knowing that there were other people who were personally involved in the stories that, you know, she had only had internet gossip knowledge about.
Yeah, that's a very important observation about her process.
I want to point out my interview from a while back with Tobias Rose Stockwell, too, because he brings up the concept of trust proxies, that when you have people in your life who are experts, so if you have a vaccinologist or an epidemiologist, you're more willing to understand the efficacy of vaccines than if you're completely disconnected from anyone in the healthcare system.
And it seems like her friend there served as that trust proxy.
Yeah, and she really underlines that in what she said, right?
And it's what you're pointing to, Matthew, that there's this sense of empathy and personal connection that breaks through the more abstract internet gossip, you called it.
So it's not so much that someone intervened, but I do think that there's an important core value here around not being fooled, and that that actually has, there's some leverage there.
And you know, the episode with Lee McIntyre is how to talk to a science denier, and he's actually very, it's very much an interpersonal guide, more so than a street epistemology kind of approach, right?
Yeah, so what we're talking about is the mirror effect of not wanting to be fooled leading you towards conspiracy theorizing and not wanting to be fooled leading you out, actually.
Exactly. Yeah.
So, inevitably, Stephanie's journey leads her towards David Icke.
But she retains some kind of natural skepticism as she encounters his content.
And, you know, that focuses around the fact that his Holocaust denialism was not plausible to her.
You know, unfortunately, it also wasn't disconfirming of everything else that he said.
But then in particular, his attack on Satanists were hollow, too, for some pretty interesting reasons.
David Icke is so wacky that you can kind of just take his stuff with a grain of salt.
And his Holocaust stuff really did not sit well with me.
It never sat well with me.
So that was some of the stuff, you know, Credo Mottois and some of the early, like, pre-QAnon stuff, the stuff that would eventually feed into QAnon.
But I never, I never believed in, like, the satanic pedophile stuff because I'd always, like, I had friends who were Satanists.
So that never made sense to me.
Oh, my God.
She knew real Satanists.
And so she's like, no, that's not what they do.
That's incredible.
You asked her next if seeing David Icke as someone who had woken up to some scary truths was part of how she was able to sort of set some of those things she didn't agree with aside and tolerate him.
The way that he would talk about love being the answer and he kind of Folded in a lot of new age type peace and love and manifestation and stuff.
And that kind of resonated with me because just the idea of being good and spreading joy, even though he spreads destruction.
I mean, underneath it all, he's really, really, you know, hardcore right wing, but he's able to hide it with a lot of the new age vibrational frequencies and stuff.
This moment really jumped out at me because it hints at this passive-aggressive attitude that's long bothered me in wellness spaces.
So basically, a person takes on a righteous tone in which only their truth matters, but as soon as they're criticized, they fall back on, what, you don't believe in love and light?
I'm just trying to make the world a better place.
It really points to people's inability or unwillingness to engage in criticism and potentially constructive dialogue, and it's shielded as, well, I'm on the right side here, so you can fuck off if you want, sort of attitude.
It's also true with religious people, at least some religious people who make specific claims about reality, and then you try to engage and it becomes, that's just my truth, you don't have to believe it.
It's kind of like the stamp of what she's saying about David Icke, if you're willing claims about reality, however,
you should be able to defend those claims.
And as she's pointing out, Ike gets very slippery here.
I don't think he has a choice, because if Ike doesn't default to New Age refrains,
he just sounds like your psycho uncle.
There has to be a kind of community building part to that pivot.
Well, for that particular audience, right?
Because Alex Jones doesn't have to do any of that, right?
Alex Jones can't just be your crazy uncle and sell you supplements at the same time.
You can imagine with Ike, him in public, let's, you know, he's giving a talk to a group of ufologists, you know, it's a conference or something.
45 minutes it's scheduled for.
He's not going to fill up the entire time with horror stories about lizard people because no one would want to hang out with him at the snack table during the break.
So he can't, I don't think he can just scare people.
He has to minister to them also.
Yeah.
And that's actually a good distinction, right?
Where someone like Alex Jones built his empire just off of a, off of a one way radio show, internet, you know, kind of, kind of live stream thing where, you know, he doesn't have to worry about how people are going to relate to him at the snack table.
Right.
I've got a side note here, which is that Stephanie during the interview did mention being, you know, somewhat immersed in the content of a pretty famous satanic panic influencer named Kathy O'Brien.
Now, I've been fascinated by O'Brien since seeing her cited by the Save the Children proponents in the yoga world back in the summer of 2020.
That's when that started.
Eventually, Sayerji gave O'Brien a whole hour on his podcast, and she's been this real bridge between the 1980s satanic panic and the anti-globalist conspiracy theories of today because her storytelling basically positions her as this Forrest Gump serial trafficking
victim, uh, you know, who's victimized by every major world
political figure, Nixon, Ford, Clinton, like everyone.
It's not funny, but that description is amazing.
Yeah, it's not, it's not funny at all.
I think it's, it's, well, it's really, it's the story of, of somebody
who's, uh, devastating trauma actually draws in the whole world
in terms of its political implications, right?
Like, it's the body of this person has become the kind of the book upon which the sins of the entire culture are written.
And it's a story that shows up with other satanic panic influencers as well.
They're not just describing personal hell.
They're also acting as these embedded reporters amidst the evil cabal.
Yeah, so coming up next, Stephanie actually says a little about why, despite being susceptible to 9-11 truth, QAnon-type beliefs fell flat, in addition to the fact that she knows Satanists, she also knew all about and supported the West Memphis Three, who, listeners will remember, we've covered, they were in prison for 18 years on false charges of murder and satanic ritual abuse.
I never could accept it because I was really big into the West Memphis 3 case.
One of the greatest days of my life was the day they were freed.
And, you know, I was just crying tears of joy that day.
I think a lot of it was my mom.
I never really got an answer from her, but she was always kind of witchy and kind of agnostic, so I never could accept those ideas of Dark magic and people manifesting evil, it didn't make sense to me because even if you're a practicer of it, you have to understand magic isn't real.
It's just, you know, a meditation type thing.
I don't believe in heaven or hell or God or Satan and I can't believe in Satan, you know, satanic abuse.
That just wouldn't make sense.
I find that really interesting.
I wonder if all people who practice magic would say that it isn't real.
You know, I never really thought about it as the meditative aspect.
I thought about actual sleight-of-hand magician's magic.
I've heard magicians talk about it like they know it's not real.
But there's this whole other culture of the witches and the channelers who I feel like very much believe magic is real.
Yeah, it reminds me of one of my favorite sort of phrases, which is that real magic is fake and fake magic is real.
You know, the kind of magic that actually works, it works because people know that it's a trick.
And that's what's so incredible about it.
But the thing that I hear in her quote is, Oh, and to your point, Derek, I think a lot of people who make claims about paranormal abilities really do literally believe, and a lot of the people who follow them literally believe, that those things are true in the world and have an impact.
But what I hear in her In her comments there in the clip is a reminder that everyone is engaged in a process, to use the terrible word, of sense-making, or the terrible phrase.
Everyone is trying to get the world to make sense in terms of their particular framework, their particular lens, their particular Needs, I would actually argue.
And so now we turn from Stephanie's backstory into the psychological insights that she has formed over time.
She introduces the topic here of conspiracy theories as being like a Band-Aid on a broken bone.
She says that in addition to feeding the longing for community, conspiracy theories may serve to cover over some deep pain that isn't being healed.
This is her very personal description.
And you asked, Matthew, if she was comfortable sharing her own history in this regard, and there's an abbreviation she uses here we should probably make clear for the listener.
Yeah, she refers to CSA, which is shorthand for childhood sexual abuse.
I know that I had been subjected to CSA.
As a kid, I don't know who the perpetrator was, but something happened and those kind of things tend to mess you up.
Even if you're not aware that they happen, things just get weird in your head and then Low self-esteem.
I made a lot of bad choices and I went in and out of abusive relationships and I couldn't control what I was saying or thinking and I came off as creepy and weird.
So all of those things just kind of formed in to one big mess, and I've heard from other people too who have gotten out that there was some trauma.
There was either a public traumatic event, which 9-11 was a public traumatic event for all of us.
Everyone who watched that that day Got traumatized, but there's also usually a personal trauma in that person's life.
These things make you more likely to latch on to conspiracy theories.
I've noticed that.
I mean, it's anecdotal from people I've talked to, but And also if you look, most conspiracy theories are about traumatic events.
I think it really shows that misinformation or bad ideas are really one part of the picture.
It makes me interested in something that maybe we could call post-hoc recruitment.
Which is, you know, where a prior condition or experience or a trauma history is explained, sometimes long after the fact by the idea, and then the person comes to believe that the idea was there first, or that it was causal.
So, I was thinking of three examples of this, like in spiritual contexts, political contexts, also one from our recent series on Iman Gadzi.
In a spiritual context, there's no secret that people have spontaneous peak or extreme experiences.
Your body explodes with realization, you walk around in a daze, you don't know what happened.
Sometimes trauma responses feel pleasurable.
It's very natural to want to understand or tell a story about what that experience means.
And if your spiritual context is Catholic, for example, you might pick up a book of Teresa of Avila and it will all make sense.
If the context is Buddhist, someone might say, hey, that sounds like Sartori.
But in both cases, the story is just like waiting there to intersect with the person's ineffable experience.
And that story might be the property of a community intent on recruiting new members.
Like, in the political sphere, Milton Friedman comes right out and says it.
He says, our job is to put the doctrine of deregulation out there into the water, so that when, you know, the shit hits the fan, it will seem like the best answer is already available.
So they make sure their consultants are in place, and then when Hurricane Katrina wipes out the public schools in New Orleans, like, they're ready there.
They're ready with their voucher plans.
And then that's just the way things are gonna happen.
It's just the way things should be.
I want to point listeners to what will be our first episode of next year, which is on Project 2025, because I think it's very important to recognize that what Matthew just laid out is happening right now with a lot of the biggest conservative donors and people working behind the scenes who are trying to get Trump elected.
So that is a very real issue that we have to contend with.
Yeah, so like a plan that begins to explain how, you know, otherwise disconnected or, you know, unconscious drives are manifesting, right?
And then going back just over the last two weeks, Julian and I studied Iman Godsey, the 23-year-old YouTuber who produces these conspiracy theory-laden video documentaries, but they're really extended advertisements for his, like, business coaching sales funnel.
And in the program that we looked at, he's trying to scare the shit out of preteen boys and what he says school is going to do to them.
And he might be redpilling some of them, but what becomes clear from the thousands of comments on YouTube is that he's speaking to an already alienated demographic.
Kids in the comments are saying, I can't talk to my parents.
I can't talk to my teachers.
Nobody understands me.
So, Godsey isn't doing anything special here beyond capitalizing on this already existing malaise that can and should be addressed at the root of our relationships just in general.
Yeah.
These are good examples, Matthew.
I mean, I would add that the, I think there was a phenomenology in terms of the first thing you said of both trauma coping mechanisms and preexisting tendencies towards, you know, we might say things like paranoid ideation or depersonalization and ideas of reference where you start to think everything that's going on in the world is really a message to you.
Right.
These have, these have significant overlap with descriptions of religious or spiritual awakening, which to me is why Conspirituality even exists at all and in their milder forms these psychic phenomena show up as preoccupation with perhaps epiphania or synchronicity, hidden patterns of meaning and a sense of self-important
Revelation.
I think it's a good point about bad actors like Friedman, but then also people like Alex Jones and 1000Q Influencers and the Heritage Foundation, as we'll discuss with Project 2025, all seeding the ground with propaganda and toxic ideologies, which then will be stumbled upon by people when they're hurting and disillusioned or they're looking for a scapegoat.
And then when we come to someone like Godsey, We see how every influencer profiting from conspiracy-laced content is really exploiting some kind of valid complaint or pre-existing vulnerability.
In his case, this is micro-targeted very specifically, but it's really a turbo-charged refinement of an already almost definitionally self-selecting dynamic.
And Stephanie's Pretty cautious in terms of observing that unresolved trauma played a role in her conspiracism, as well as many others she has known, she says.
But she stops short, like I hear you wanting to do, of stigmatizing or withdrawing agency from trauma survivors.
She actually says it's not that they're more gullible, it's more that...
It does kind of cook you a little bit, and you're fragile when you're traumatized.
And you might not be thinking skeptically.
You might not be thinking critically.
You might not be able to discern what is true and what isn't.
But, you know, that's not everybody.
It does kind of put you in a special place of vulnerability.
Okay, so all of this brings us up to 2016.
And then some really interesting comments she makes about how feelings of political disenfranchisement can make conspiracy theories attractive, especially if they give a person an excuse to check out of certain civics rituals like vaccination or maybe even voting.
The other thing that looking back on it that I noticed was, you know, and this was before 2016, wasn't buying into necessarily election conspiracies or vaccine conspiracies.
But I remember thinking, there's no point in voting because the president is already chosen.
And I also was afraid to get a flu shot because I thought that they had like nanobots or tracking devices.
In them, so even if you're not buying into election conspiracies or vaccine conspiracies specifically, your paranoia and your disenfranchisement is so encouraged by these conspiracy theories that Oh, my vote doesn't matter.
That's like with the anti-Semitism, too.
these things embed themselves in your head and you don't even realize it until later.
And this is incredible, Matthew. It just struck me as a really sophisticated
analysis that she has here that includes psychological insights. It includes kind
of structural and political observations. How did that land for you that when she says
the relationship between paranoia and disenfranchisement, I just felt like bells
were going off in my head? I guess I didn't really consider before the sort of the dynamism
between the two and how feeling like it's it's it would be an endless sort of feedback loop,
right? To feel paranoid would be, you know, coherent with not feeling like you had any.
It feels like demagogues maybe drive it in a different direction, right?
is the sort of definition of disenfranchisement.
If you can't do anything about your situation, why wouldn't you become more paranoid?
It feels like demagogues maybe just drive it in a different direction, right, where
they use the paranoia to create a scapegoat and then to try to get you to be politically active.
But at the same time, I've always puzzled over how there's something
about the faux populism of the right that gets people to vote against their best interests.
And that seems like that's part of the disenfranchisement, even though they're showing up in droves
to support someone like Donald Trump or like these two guys who just got elected in.
Right.
in Belgium and Argentina, there's a way in which how they've been indoctrinated to perceive
what's going on actually is disenfranchising, even though they're voting for who they want,
right?
One of the things I found really admirable as well in listening to Stephanie was hearing
how as part of her political awakening, she really starts examining the difference between
unfounded conspiracy theories like the ones that she's been immersed in and real conspiracies.
So she mentions Cointelpro and MKUltra, as well as the murder of Fred Hampton.
Yeah, and it really shows that when you look closely, you just don't need to make anything up.
When, you know, these histories are staring you in the face.
So, I mean, it really begs the question as to why people do make things up.
You know, we're surrounded by terrible stories.
And I have this suspicion, I can't prove it, but I think that the fictionalizing impulse I mean, it could be misdirection, it could be people covering their tracks, it could be, you know, bad actors doing their thing, but I think there's something in it that is provoked by despair at the lack of accountability.
Like, we know that genocidal colonialism is like the founding policy of the Americas.
Nothing happens.
It takes decades for basic statements of regret to emerge.
We know how Fred Hampton was killed.
Happens.
We know that Tuskegee happened.
Nothing really happens.
We know that the Roman Catholic Church covers up sex abuse for decades and very little happens to change the balance of power that facilitated it.
We know that Jeffrey Epstein was up to, you know, whatever he was up to and nothing happens.
We know that corporations and oil companies have undermined environmental science for decades.
We know that from the 80s onwards, you know, boomers presided over this massive increase in wealth inequality, you know, while driving democracy off a cliff.
And no one did anything.
So, like, I think that...
Conspiracy theorizing can also be an attempt to assume responsibility, to press for accountability, and to try to explain why there never seems to be any adults in the room.
And I think it's entirely sensible to expect that if governments and institutions cover up injustices exposed by simple facts, that just from a communication standpoint, a person would begin to exaggerate.
Or they would begin to tackle the secondary mystery of why is nothing being done?
And then they might come up with the answer, you know, oh, well, maybe the powers that be actually want things to be this way.
Yeah.
So, Matthew, I really get the flavor of what you're saying.
And I'm very sympathetic to this ennobling line of reasoning.
But there's something here that doesn't quite add up to me.
There's almost like a psychoanalytic or a Jungian collective unconscious quality here.
And what I mean is, it sounds like you're describing the phenomenon of conspiracism As if it is somehow continuous with all this knowledge.
But the problem is that most 9-11 truthers, for example, don't actually know about Fred Hampton.
They're not preoccupied with the genocide of Native Americans.
By the logic I hear you laying out here, we'd expect conspiracists to have a lot of progressive left-leaning social justice concerns, but that doesn't tend to be the case.
You know, when we look at Catholic sexual abuse, I think the preoccupation with satanic pedophilia is an almost deliberate deflection away from the real problem of religious power, rather than wanting to hold those responsible accountable.
The problem of people having been indoctrinated into believing that celibate priests were somehow holy and that anointed class was special access to God's wisdom and love, when often they were even more lost and confused than their parishioners, seems to me sort of more to the point.
This is something similar going on here with Epstein, given his close ties to Trump, that, yeah, I'm just having a hard time squaring all of this.
Fair enough.
I mean, this thought for me started with seeing how documented and reported out instances of sexual abuse in religious communities.
were met with silence and non-accountability, and how those same communities became very vulnerable in some instances towards pushing the exaggerated narratives of Satanic Panic reboot content during the pandemic.
Yeah, I guess that's why I'm saying there's a psychoanalytic quality, which I appreciate, right?
Where you're sort of saying this feeling needed an outlet because the way that it should have been expressed and it should have been tended to was not available and so it found this other form of ideation, right?
Yeah, and I also think that there's something psychoanalytic maybe, but also something very natural
and human and maybe even artistic about it.
Like, magical realism becomes a thing in literature.
Garcia Marquez says to himself, you know, can people not see the everyday tragedies of love?
You know, can they not feel, you know, all of this cruelty and betrayal around them?
And so, instead of just realistically portraying the tragedy of the daughter who gets overlooked in marriage,
like a modernist would do, he has her bake the wedding cake
while she's weeping into the batter, and then suddenly everybody at the wedding party
is weeping uncontrollably.
And I think the conspiracy theorist might sometimes be looking for the metaphor
that highlights something true and important that the culture has just buried.
This is beautiful.
It also echoes something Charles Eisenstein has said about conspiracy theories.
So we're in tricky territory.
Well, I also wonder, Julian, you said something a moment ago, which is what they should have focused on.
And I agree with that sentiment, but we have a pretty bad track record of actually focusing on things that we should have culturally that would be for the betterment of everyone.
And we keep running into this situation where people are putting their energy
toward things that actually make things worse for everyone.
Okay, so at this point, Stephanie has brought up MKUltra, the police murder of Fred Hampton,
and these are examples of real conspiracies that she started to now
measure up against the faulty ones that she had believed in the past.
But it's more than that, because she also shares how activating the political and economic lenses within herself that are usually missing in the conspiracy community,
and using those as part of her evolving skepticism actually makes all the difference.
The history is just so distorted by classism and racism, and you don't really see those things
when you're in conspiracy theory world, because, you know, it's just evil.
There's there's no understanding of the mechanics.
And that was the thing that always got me confused.
Noam Chomsky is kind of talking about some of the same things that these conspiracy theorists are talking about.
And I didn't realize that there's a difference between systemic, like there's a difference between hyper normalization and loose change.
They're talking about some of the same things, but in hyper normalization, it's reality based and it's talking about systemic.
When you're looking at systemic, there's no one to blame, and that's why conspiracy theories don't bother with that.
I mean, a lot of conspiracy theorists, they're at the right building, but it's the wrong apartment.
They're almost there, and then they fall off the edge.
You want to talk about 9-11 conspiracies?
Let's talk about the building code.
That's boring to people.
They went with the 1968 building code instead of the 1938 building code, and that allowed for them to have fewer staircases.
that allowed for more rentable space because you got to make those bucks.
There were legitimate 9-11 conspiracies that contributed to deaths that day, but you're not going to hear a conspiracy theorist talking about the Port Authority and the building codes.
Port Authority is excluded from Those codes, because they're a bi-state like corporation.
So then when you're looking into that, that leads you to why are they exempt?
And why were these things not looked at?
Because they even said when they were building the towers, oh, these towers could withstand a Boeing 707.
Well, that's a 707.
The planes were different.
They imagined the plane hitting the building as an accident.
Never as an intentional full speed that if the planet continued at that height, it would have fallen apart.
It's fun for me personally to actually find not just the reality of 9-11, but I was saying on Twitter, like, hey, conspiracy theorists, truthers, like I'm challenging you.
Here's your conspiracy.
Let's talk about classism.
Let's talk about capitalism.
Let's talk about how the need for more rentable space contributed to a lot of these people dying that day.
And that's not interesting.
Let's let's talk about CGI planes instead.
One of the best moments of the interview, in my opinion.
But when she says conspiracy theorists are at the right building, but the wrong apartment, it just echoed Naomi Klein's sentiment that they get the feeling right, but the facts wrong.
And her whole Her whole idea is around 9-11 and the actual conspiracies.
It reminds me of a more recent example which I unpacked on Monday's Patreon bonus episode about the founder of Unjected, the anti-vax dating website.
She just published a book.
She lives on Maui, so it was about the wildfires and it was about the conspiracies.
It's called Burn Back Better.
Oh, man.
And in the actual marketing copy for the book, she lists a series of questions that are all answerable in the same way that Stephanie unpacked.
Like, look at the building codes.
She asked them as saying, oh, there's something nefarious happening here.
And what I did in the episode was I went through and I actually answered them.
In the same respect, because the people in Hawaii, the officers, got things wrong because, in large part, there wasn't enough funding for emergency services.
And so the infrastructure wasn't in place to act properly because we live in a country where the right has continually defunded these programs.
So the answer is staring you in the face and she's saying, oh no, it's because they're microchipping or whatever the fuck she says.
It doesn't matter.
But like that particular moment right there just captures so much of the paranoid thinking that actually has logical answers.
Yeah, I can't get away from unjected, though.
That was that was all really eloquent and on point, Derek, but unjected, I'm thinking.
Yeah, I'm stuck on there, too.
Like, I don't know whether you analyzed during the Patreon bonus.
I might have missed it.
Like, who is there a worse possible branding term that she could have used for this?
Like, who wants to sign up for that?
Anti-vaxxers, I actually say that early on, like for that community, there is something you can see of the very small, she claims 100,000 users when their data was leaked by a hacker because she didn't turn on the right privacy in the back end.
Yeah.
There was 3,500 members.
Okay, yeah.
But considering they're there and they are active on social media, apparently there's niche communities all over the world, Matthew.
I'm just picturing the guy at the bar who's like, yeah, I tried online dating.
I was on unjected for a while, but then I found that I was rejected on unjected because someone told me I projected all of, I mean, it's.
That's where my brain goes.
But yeah, what she's doing here, I think, is there's almost like shorthand in there
that illustrates a level of being able to go back and forth between these levels of context
that I'm just really, really enjoying in terms of the interview.
And I agree with Derek.
This is one of the best moments.
She references hyper-normalization, which is a term I believe coined or at least used
very effectively by Adam Curtis, who's this BBC documentarian that does fascinating work.
Is that right, Matthew?
The turn she takes now, we've kind of foreshadowed it a little bit earlier on.
Stephanie has this way of thinking about being immersed in conspiracy culture, as well as her process of getting out of it, as being very similar to addiction.
Right, Matthew?
Yeah, and I found this really interesting, but I'm not an addictions expert, and I'm sure those folks will have more to say about it.
But she not only describes the general benefits and pleasures of the conspiracy theory as an idea, she speaks of the conspiracy theory almost as a substance and a ritual that catalyzes neurochemical responses.
So she relates the bursts of pleasure that, you know, finding something out or discovering the secret within the conspiracy theory, that those are like dopamine hits and that You know, following a theory down its rabbit hole of detail and revelation is like punching a button on a slot machine.
Like, it won't always pay off, but it's really, really sweet when it does.
And so, I began to get this picture of the conspiracy theory not just as a sociopolitical release valve, you know, or as like an offloading technique for, you know, unresolved, you know, non-accountable social traumas, but as a kind of drug that encourages its own reproduction.
So, I don't know, does that meet the definition of an addiction?
Does it have a chemical element to it that has deterministic properties that are hard to pull apart?
So that's beyond me, but I find it to be a compelling sort of metaphor that increases my empathy around the whole issue.
And it also explains why we talk about the rabbit hole as a downward spiral with one theory leading to another, but usually Each one getting more extreme.
Like, what if the pipeline towards purer and purer forms of psychological pleasure, but also aggression, is like having to drink more every day to numb out?
You know, and I think it also has implications for recovery.
Because some of the group activities she describes at the end of the interview sound like, they sound like, you know, AA meetings.
And, you know, they share their struggles and they share their concern over relapse.
Yeah, I think the metaphor has a lot of value, at least for me.
One way that I hear it is that it's more psychological than a literal physical dependence.
Although the comparison to the slot machine is interesting, right?
Because we're already in this territory of behavioral addiction as opposed to substance addiction.
Right.
And the dopamine explanation describes the anticipation of maybe this time, maybe this time I'm gonna hit the jackpot, right?
Right.
It's an experiential description of an obsessive relationship to hidden knowledge.
As well as an identification with, perhaps, the empowered and courageous self who's discovering the supposed truth that others don't know or they don't dare to face.
I can imagine how that exhilaration could be a compulsive antidote for feelings of helplessness or disorientation or inadequacy, as she's alluded to.
Interestingly, addiction is something we really haven't touched on this podcast.
I've always wanted to, but it's such tricky territory.
Even when you say the difference between a behavioral or psychological and a physical dependence, some people would say, well, there is none.
I ran into that when I was writing my book on psychedelics because I was interviewing a lot of people who were coming off of benzodiazepine addiction, for example.
When I would write about it or talk about it and I would post it on social media, there's a whole community of people who say, it's not addiction, it's dependence.
Because their feeling is that they were brought into these substances unwillingly from their doctors.
And so you had one woman I interviewed who started on Xanax and ended up being on 16 medications Because she got constipation because of this one and then she couldn't sleep because of this and she just kept getting more and more and it became a dependence and I find that very fascinating to actually try to unpack and I feel like it's something we should unpack but we'd really need the right experts to discuss this topic because there's so much going on there.
Definitely, because addiction as a framework as opposed to dependence implies some kind of desire for a particular experience and for that experience to be enhanced.
And what you're saying is that dependence develops in these circumstances non-consensually.
Yeah, and just trying to get back to basically homeostasis, right, of just functional adults, and they're unable to do that, and that's where the dependence model comes in.
Right, got it.
Yeah, yeah, and it would be good to explore with the right person too, because I think addiction is very much, it has all of these overlaps with spirituality, with religion, with You know, sort of moral judgments, as well as with a kind of opportunistic influencer culture that, just like with the word trauma, uses the word addiction in a variety of perhaps manipulative or distorted ways.
I'm curious, Matthew, in talking to Stephanie for the length of this rich interview, is there an arc that she described that tells you something about a possible path out of conspiracism for, you know, that's sort of applicable perhaps to a wider group of people?
I think she really focused on the roots of isolation and disempowerment.
And that it is a natural response to create a story or to invest in a story that transcends isolation and disempowerment.
But both the isolation and the response are abstract.
They're imaginary.
And what she ultimately comes around to in a bunch of different ways is that friendship is a primary answer because it isn't abstract, because it fosters a ground for solidarity where people can say to each other, We actually share these real concerns and in that conversation, that's the secret knowledge.
Yeah, I got that from listening to her too.
And along those lines, it turns out she's been working on projects to help people find their way out of conspiracism and towards some of that much more nourishing secret knowledge that you've gestured toward, right?
Yeah, yeah.
She started an organization for former conspiracy theorists called Doubt.
We'll put all of the details in the show notes.
So that stands for Discussing Our Unusual Beliefs Together.
That's great.
Which is cool.
Stephanie has also been a driving force behind two podcasts.
One's called Even the Podcast is Afraid and Southern Oddities, and both of them focus on the mysteries of true crime, paranormal, the unexplained.
Yeah, so full circle.
She's created supportive communities and then creative outlets still rooted in these sort of more wholesome, fun, curious interests.
Yeah, so she's done a talk for like the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix.
That's up on YouTube.
It's titled, What Conspiracy Theories Steal From Us.
And I expect that, you know, she's going to be doing a lot of other public education as well.
That's right.
Yeah, that's a really good talk.
And during the interview, she explained that part of her approach is to point out that there is actually an appropriate and healthy anger.
That people, you know, she almost thinks should be in touch with about having been lied to by those who propagate these conspiracy theories.
She also says she hopes by telling her personal story and encouraging others who've exited the rabbit hole to do so as well, that people who hear those stories might have little openings to be pulled, at least to some extent, out of their conspiracism.
Yeah, it's kind of where we began with the excerpts, that she describes moments of empathetic connection through sharing personal stories, and that that in itself breaks through the reality distortions.
I mean, it did make me wonder about how sometimes this can backfire, like, you know, the listeners of Alex Jones might, well, they did.
They mercilessly harassed Sandy Hook parents, you know, who told the truth about their tragedy.
Oh, God, yeah.
You kind of look at someone who, how deep are they?
If they're right on the edge, I think they can be pulled back.
And I have a friend that is kind of with that foot on the edge.
And I've been working on this friend very slowly and not necessarily on the conspiracy theories.
But on making them a better person, on just little tiny things like, oh, I want you to tell me one good thing that happened to you today.
And once you can kind of get to a healthier place, the conspiracy theories will usually go away on their own because they're just covering up something deeper.
So, you know, all of this reminds me of that principle from post-cult therapy, which is that you restore the relationship, the friendship first, because that's what the group or the ideology or, in this case, the conspiracy theory couldn't offer.
Like, you don't debunk.
You go bowling or, you know, do some community gardening with a person or something like that.
Yeah, I really agree with that and I think it's really great advice on an interpersonal level.
It's another one of these areas where there's a little bit of a tension between the one-on-one interpersonal dynamics versus the larger project, which I think culturally does include debunking, it does include trying to Trying to deal with the disinformation crisis, for example.
And you know, I have a friend who's very, he's a very close friend who's very susceptible to conspiracies.
And I often say to him when he sends me something, I say, have you, have you tried just typing that phrase into Google with the word debunk after it to see if people have debunked this?
Because there is a lot of stuff out there and you seem really curious, you know?
But yeah, typically that with him.
One-on-one, especially because then he feels like I'm sort of overpowering him in a way.
What works better is to change the subject and say, how are you doing, my friend?
What's going on today?
You sound stressed, like what's stressing you out?
Is there anything that you can do today that would feel good to you?
Yeah, arguing out the conspiracy theories is kind of fruitless.
Yeah, but you're pointing to this issue of scale, Julian, and the difference between interpersonal and sort of social techniques.
And I do think that there's possibly the seed of a policy lesson in this approach.
And I think we're going to be getting towards it actually next week with a conversation with Annika Nilsson, who's an anthropologist.
who studies why people become invested in alternative health.
Actually, why people with chronic illnesses become invested in alternative health.
Yes, right. I do think that the broader policy lesson might be that you can debunk misinformation all you want.
You probably don't have any choice.
But that may not be as effective as nurturing the kind of civic friendship of something like Medicare for All.
Like, Medicare for All actually says, on a social level, let's go bowling together because the most important thing we can enhance in our lives is, you know, a sense of shared space and care.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
