This week we take stock of the full entrenchment of the Mirror World, where conspirituality influencers bask in the rays of confident delusion. After a little stage-setting on the heterodox mediasphere, we open with a snapshot of conspirituality Valhalla as we listen in on Joe Rogan and Chris Rufo talking about unhoused people as though they are children who haven’t been given good boundaries.
Then we’ll look at four instances in which the spectacle brokers meet reality. What happens when Chaya Raichik gets bodied by Taylor Lorenz? What happens when the Moms for Liberty have to explain themselves on 60 minutes? What happens when Destiny rejects Jordan Peterson’s bullshit? And what happens when the mack daddy of it all, Alex Jones, gets confronted by Sandy Hook parents, face to face? Does reality break through?
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It's the database that until the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, and we had the unfortunate consequence that there were so many side effects being reported, it was the gold standard for determining whether or not vaccines were safe.
And now as soon as it started to misbehave on the mRNA vaccine front, we decided that we were going to doubt the validity of the VAERS reporting system.
Okay, the VAERS reporting system has never been the gold standard for anything.
VAERS reporting is just if you want to report that there is some issue that you have after getting a vaccine.
That's it.
🎵 🎵
🎵 Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality,
where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence
to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today we have new merch!
We've got this t-shirt that says, our podcast went to its 200th episode and all we got was this lousy alternate universe.
And that's written in papyrus, so it's extra shitty.
Right.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes, which we put a lot of work into over on Patreon.
You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
and as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Well, Derek, Julian, we've crossed another milestone and the world is worse than ever.
So is that correlation or causation?
Well, 200, we have to say that 200 represents the main feed on Thursdays.
We probably have at least 500 considering briefs and bonuses and all the other stuff that we do.
That does mean that for 200 consecutive weeks, we have produced a Thursday episode.
Yeah, amazing.
Well, today, we are taking stock of the full entrenchment of the mirror world where conspirituality influencers bask in the rays of confident delusion.
So, after a little stage setting on the heterodox media sphere, we're going to open with a snapshot of Conspirituality Valhalla as we listen in on Joe Rogan and Chris Ruffo talking about unhoused people as though they are children who haven't been given good boundaries.
Then we'll also look at four instances in which the spectacle brokers meet reality.
Like, what happens when Chaya Rychek gets bodied by Taylor Lorenz?
What happens when the Moms for Liberty have to explain themselves on 60 Minutes?
What happens when Destiny rejects Jordan Peterson's bullshit?
And what happens when the Mac Daddy of it all, Alex Jones, gets confronted by Sandy Hook parents face-to-face?
Does reality actually break through?
Well, seeing as we're talking about reality and we're doing a little bit of backward looking and then forward looking or kind of state of the conspirituality landscape, let's talk about the Matrix films for a moment.
Yeah.
Because in the early days of the pandemic, I wrote this thing on Medium titled The Red Pill Overlap.
And it pointed out how both New Age yogis and reactionary right-wingers had appropriated the metaphor of taking the red pill.
Everyone by now is super familiar with this.
For the New Agers, it represented an awakening into magical thinking that transcended the limitations of science.
For those sliding deeper into right-wing politics, taking the red pill became about discovering the truth of an anti-woke, pro-America rejection of the left.
What they actually had in common was a superficial misreading of the metaphor.
Because look, in that iconic moment when Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the two pills, he's really offering him an opportunity to wake up to an awful reality, to be ripped out of a literal dream of pleasant and reassuring normalcy, as induced by a dominant power structure, into a grimy wasteland of intense human vulnerability.
And this doesn't really map at all onto realizing the limitless spiritual power of the mind, or that America has always been just swell.
In fact, that's the blue pill, people.
So sure, inside the computer simulation, the rebel heroes can do feats of gravity-defying kung fu.
They can dodge bullets while appearing as their ultra hip and stylish fantasy avatars in sunglasses and leather trench coats.
But they do that to fight oppression and dehumanization, so as to save what is a broken real world in which the laws of physics fully apply, and they're actually eating gruel and wearing sackcloth.
And this image that you're bringing up, we should add, is also often appropriated by MAGA and Elon Musk, but on the MAGA end, you know, Trump's face on Neo's body dodging the nefarious mainstream media.
So it's been Misconstrued in a lot of corners of the internet.
Now, during COVID, those who thought they'd woken up by embracing conspiracies or tuning in on the Instagram accounts of alien channelers, these folks were really the handmaidens of libertarian cruelty and remixed religious fundamentalism.
Because the real pandemic red pill was a grown-up recognition of how vulnerable we are to new and highly infectious viruses and what it means to do the best we can with limited knowledge as science tries to find solutions.
And that inconvenience and shared sacrifice is in fact not the same as authoritarian oppression.
But blue pill denial said, me and my friends don't have to worry about COVID because we work out, we eat well, we take responsibility for our health by guzzling unevidenced supplements, or me and my pals don't have to worry because we think positive and we say our affirmations.
It effectively said, we will be fine.
And let the poor, the immunocompromised, the elderly, and the newborns die on the altar of my libertarian freedom.
Conspiratuality podcast reclaiming the red pill.
Here we go.
So yeah, I mean, it's a full generation on, and it feels like the Wachowskis are more prophetic by the day.
I think that real film nerds will know that before coming up with that red pill, blue pill, fork in the road for Neo, They were completely piled on a little book from 1981
by Jean Baudrillard called Simulations and Simulacra, in which he argued that the end point of the age of
spectacle would be not only a collective inability
to distinguish the real from the artificial, but the annihilation of the possibility of the real
through the ascendancy of the simulacra to the seat of cultural authority.
So, that would be predictive of VR, of the parasocial defeating the social,
and of the Trump presidency buoyed up by QAnon.
And that collapse between the real and unreal is what we're looking at, I think,
from two different angles today.
The echo-chambered, simulated world of heterodox punditry, and then the rare instances in which everyone can see
the code trickling down like rain.
These are moments of reckoning and reality checking in which the spectacle is fact-checked or someone throttles its bandwidth so that we can see what's still part of the real world at the margins.
But just to note, you know, like, Baudrillard was super nihilistic.
His stance on Trump would be that once he's been president, there is no real presidency possible any longer.
The whole premise has been broken.
And I think we can get more concrete and run somebody that we're familiar with now very much through recent episodes, Andrew Huberman, through that same formula.
So, Huberman is a neuroscientist, but then as an influencer, he simulates an evolutionary biologist, a dietician, a relationship psychologist, a general practitioner, and a therapist slash coach.
And he's using the imagery of real credentials of scientists to perform a simulation of a caregiver while shilling supplements and fucking over his relationships.
And Baudrillard would say that Huberman and others like him are doing this so effectively in such a hyper-real way that the category of the real scientist no longer has any real meaning.
That for all intents and purposes, the real scientists no longer matter.
So that's why Baudrillard didn't actually like the Matrix movies, because he thought that the Wachowskis were still holding out hope for a non-simulation world.
But I don't think the three of us would say that the category of the real medical expert is now meaningless, because we are not French nihilists who get off on taking things too far, are we?
Baudrillard took the black pill.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like those Wachowskis, too optimistic.
Yeah.
All right, so speaking of deconstruction, one thing the first Matrix film did was draw heavily on the messiah or heroic savior archetype.
It's very appealing.
The whole film is about Neo realizing that he is the one.
Whereas that whole concept ends up being completely deconstructed in the second film, which drew boos and hisses from many viewers.
The Matrix Reloaded is a bit like the podcasts of today, as it turns out, with the host and the guest discussing free will and choice from different perspectives.
The important thing is, That Neo discovers he's not really the one, he's just the latest in a long line of typically self-important and rebellious puny heroes that think they can start a revolution.
Contrary to the right-wing fantasy, people like Chris Rufo and Jordan Peterson are not really the guru-esque Morpheus to the podcast host and listeners Keanu, blowing his mind with unassailable analysis and taboo but liberating truth.
They actually embody the character called the Architect, the father of the Matrix, who dispels Neo's self-mythologizing ergo, his white suit, stylish beard, and twinkling self-important eyes, his pretentious blowhard language, his endless array of filter bubble screens, his assertion and protection of the long-standing power structure, in the face of the irritating counterculture rebellion of those who've taken the real red pill.
And this leads us to the heterodox thinkers we're covering today, who posture as intellectual giants, galaxy brains with unique all-knowing insight.
Chris Rufo, for example, explicitly links the civil rights era of the 60s to today's woke politics through an all-pervasive rise of cultural Marxism.
This remixed Red Scare has become the corkboard upon which all other conspiracy theories can be connected and validated.
In this retelling, those struggling for democratic values and equalities today are really no different than those perverse and destructive, ungrateful commies, blacks, immigrants, and queers of the 60s who corrupted America's once-orderly greatness.
The pundits we're covering today are not plucky rebels.
They're actually servants of the empire who impose a paranoid reactionary lens on any advances toward real freedom.
This exact mirror world confusion applies then to the topic of skepticism.
Because a common posture amongst supposedly independent digital media figures is that they are more skeptical than the mainstream.
What they mean is that they are incentivized to be more reflexively contrarian.
Real skepticism insists on a higher, more careful standard of evidence.
It is more the province of scientific consensus than culture war topics.
Another telltale sign that they're not actually skeptics is that there seems to be nothing that any of their guests can ever say that becomes a bridge too far, no matter how conspiratorial, false, fantastical, or just batshit crazy.
In fact, the only way to become persona non grata in those circles is to refute a conspiracy theory or to get real about the dangers of Trump.
Now Derek and Matthew, I know you'll be giving excellent examples of how each of the personalities we'll look at today tend to short-circuit and blow a fuse when confronted with any actual counter-arguments that refer to reality.
And this is hugely ironic, because the heterodox brand begins about 10 years ago as a commitment to fearless engagement in difficult conversations.
But it has become increasingly conspiratorial and anti-woke and orthodox.
In the process, they drag the Overton window to the right with a political discourse that blends, in varying proportions depending on the show, extreme anecdotes about unhinged lefties with revisionist COVID grievance history and conspiracy And conspiracism, either about the secret corporate authoritarian agenda of Democrats, or in its fully blossomed form, how everything from queer theory to vaccines to immigration to climate measures are really about installing communism.
And of course, far from being brave and rational centrists taking fair and balanced aim at
whomever deserves it, their complicity in perpetuating this nonsense ends up enabling
the right-wing project of animating the most lurid, sensationalist, and bizarre caricature
of the left possible so as to overshadow the very real existential danger of the MAGA cult.
As we get into these clips, I want to give a framing here because we get a lot of feedback
about this topic.
So when Matthew, when you said about Andrew Huberman and the way he cosplays, in a sense, a lot of people will react and say, oh, he often admits on his podcast that he's an expert.
He's not an expert.
Yeah.
And he has guests on to fill in those holes.
And I've listened to a number of episodes and that, in a sense, is true.
But when he goes on to other podcasts, it's a different story.
And that's really important because all of the misinformation I've shared over the last year about him have come from his guest spots.
Now, likewise, what we're heading into, I often hear the feedback that Joe Rogan is a comedian.
No, take him seriously.
Now, in one sense, when a comedian is on stage, I think they have a certain leeway that should be afforded to them that doesn't necessarily spill over into personal beliefs.
So that sometimes causes friction, but I think it's really important to recognize.
This is different.
When you are a podcast host, the venue has changed.
Now, if you're doing a purely comedic podcast, that's one thing.
But to think that Rogan is doing pure comedy on his podcast, that hasn't been true for a very long time.
So, it's very important, I think, to look at these different mediums in which these thoughts and ideas are being expressed and take those into consideration for what they are.
So, when Rogan has an emergency vaccine episode where he has two known anti-vaxxers spreading medical misinformation, you have left The realm of comedy at that point, especially when you're getting 10 million downloads per episode, and I think we should really understand this Rufo episode in the same light.
Yeah, and so we can get into it, and in terms of describing the environment, the actual media landscape, I would say it's really this frictionless, open sandbox play in the simulation world's tightest and loudest echo chamber, which is you know, JRE. And I'm just going to look at the first 15
minutes of his recent episode with Chris Rufo. But Julian, you've said a little bit about
Rufo already, but maybe we should do an elevator pitch, a 101 for the few listeners
who don't know who this sadist is. Those lucky people, I'm about to burst their
bubble. So Rufo is a former yoga guy, as it turns out, and a former left-leaning documentary
filmmaker who, in the pursuit of that, spent a few years exploring poverty, addiction,
and homelessness, and then concluded it was basically caused and perpetuated by what he
calls ruinous compassion. Oh, yeah.
He then came to prominence as one of the most vocal opponents of critical race theory, which he claimed was being used in K-12 schools to actually perpetuate racist division, and in corporate settings to browbeat white people under the banner of diversity training.
He's an open propagandist who tweets in often transparently sadistic glee when his strategies for smearing individuals and distorting the cultural discourse are successful.
Like, he bragged about connecting critical race theory as a Marxist agenda in the minds of the public to any racist ideas.
He talked openly about coordinating the attack against Harvard president, former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, putting the word scalped Above a picture of her with the headline about her resignation.
Rufo has been instrumental at the behest of Governor Ron DeSantis in the hostile conservative takeover of a little progressive school called New College of Florida in Sarasota.
And his sadism has never been more fully on display than his performances there in front of the concerned and disoriented teachers, staff and students at board of trustee meetings.
He, along with Cynical Theory's co-author and prolific Twitter troll James Lindsay, also popularized the use of the slur groomer to refer to anyone in favor of educating kids about the existence of gay and trans people.
Rufo's fabrication of a cultural Marxist agenda underlying all culture war topics has made this trope so ubiquitous in digital alt-media Yeah, and so he appears on JRE.
on Rogan a few weeks ago, must have felt like slipping into a nice warm bath.
Wherever he goes now, he hears his own talking points echoing back as if they are self-evident truths.
Yeah, and so he appears on JRE.
What would you say, you know, this signifies in terms of his developmental arc?
Well, to me, this is Rufo finally stepping onto the biggest platform in the world,
which he himself has kind of shaped for years now, dare I say, groomed in terms of the narrative espoused now
by almost all of its guests and by the cluster of satellite podcasts
on which they all take turns appearing.
Rufo is succeeding.
I mean, just watch Leah Thomas' former swimming competitor Riley Gaines on Rogan the following week, because as it turns out, trans women in female sport is actually about the cultural Marxist agenda of the elites, too.
Okay, good.
It's good background.
Now, I said I'm going to limit myself to the first 15 minutes of the two-hour, 23-minute episode because They're just shooting the shit the whole time and like any little brown chunk is like a holographic turd that contains the whole like not in terms of content themes but in terms of fundamental technique and logic.
And I think I found within these 15 minutes a core contradiction that fuels the entire enterprise and assures that this anti-woke outrage machine just has to keep going because it's not about solving problems.
It's about masturbating over problems.
Yeah, I want to add, Matthew, both you and I did listen to the entire thing, and we would have had to have clipped so much.
I do want to throw in, I listened specifically to hear him basically pat himself on the back about Claudine Gay, which he did, but that actually was a very small section.
I think what you've identified is more important here.
So, the basic contradiction that I'm sussing out is that the woke are too permissive and disgusting, but they're also authoritarian control freaks.
It's like that old paradox about, you know, that we get from anti-Semitism, that Jews are disgusting, perverted, degenerate, drags on society, but they're also all powerful puppet masters controlling finance, journalism, Hollywood, and medicine.
Injecting CRT and heroin right into the veins of your children and then extracting blood when they pull up on the plunger, right?
So, Rogan and Rufo open this incredible episode by taking extended shits on unhoused people and people with substance dependency issues.
And the pretense is that they're talking about how drug decriminalization policies have worked out or not worked out in Oregon.
Where you live, Derek.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but there is an enormous unhoused population there and decriminalization has not coincided with necessary dependency support.
And more importantly, fucking housing.
Is that right?
Correct.
Oregon is in bad shape.
Rufo lives outside of Seattle and that area is also in bad shape.
But as of 2023, Oregon is experiencing the highest per capita unhoused rate among families and youth in America.
Portland also has the highest percentage of unsheltered families of any major city in the country.
Axios puts it this way, Portland is quote, the only major city to report that more than half of its homeless families with children were unsheltered.
So I will say that There is movement in actually appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars towards drug addiction services and housing, but in the two years I've been here, a lot of it is really slow right now, and I really hope that it does speed up.
Well, their entire orientation towards this is mockery and disgust, and the first takeaway that we get from Rufo is the following.
The big problem, though.
Is that the political left in the United States has lost the willingness and the capacity to say no.
This is something we've all seen, you know, we're raised a generation of kids where like saying no and imposing limits is something that you can't do.
It's this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits, but you know, some limits aren't necessary.
Some limits are important.
And so I think we're starting to finally see the consequences of obliterating limits.
And then now we're starting to say, you know, in a reasonable way, we should start reimposing some guardrails.
Houselessness is the outcome of a multifactorial blend of socioeconomic disadvantages,
along with high adverse childhood experience scores, unemployment, COVID, chronic illness, housing shortages.
These here are all collapsed by Rufo into this idea of liberating ourselves from all limits.
So let's put a pin in that.
Woke America is in decline because Democrats and progressives are intent on liberating ourselves from all limits, but just hold on because that will flip Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent.
That seems counterintuitive.
Well, where else can he go but to crude and reactionary straw man views on parenting?
Well, that's one of the things you find out when you're a parent that seems counterintuitive.
But one of the things you find out is that children are happier when you impose limitations
on them, which sounds so crazy. But they are happier and they have less anxiety, apparently,
obviously I'm not a doctor, because they're by having structure to life, it doesn't seem like
everything is like if they're in charge, like, oh my god, I'm fucking 12. And I'm in charge,
I have no idea what's going on. And I could stay out late all night, the world's chaos.
Which it kind of is in some ways, but by imposing structure on them it gives them comfort.
And I find that's the case with human beings.
I find that the people that I know, even artists, even comedians and wild folks, the people that have structure in their life, like have families and children and have like workout routines or things that they enjoy doing on a regular basis that they're very dedicated to, Those are the happiest people.
They're the healthiest people.
They're the people that seem to feel like there's a purpose to life.
The purpose is your loved ones, your family, your community, the people you hang out with, the stuff you like to do, whatever it is.
Pickleball, whatever it is.
That gives people happiness and structure, and this idea that having no limitations and complete freedom, and you want to be just able to fly away on a whim, that doesn't promote happiness.
What are you trying to get out of this life?
Don't you want it to be as enjoyable as possible?
We've all had bad times.
They suck.
We try to avoid those.
Try to have the good times.
So we go from unhoused people and people with substance dependency to children.
Ergo, people with difficult, entrenched, multifactorial problems are children.
And it's not that the unhoused haven't been given houses, it's that they haven't been given rules to follow.
Of course, they're getting cited and ticketed all the time and arrested.
It's not that those dependent on substances haven't been provided with therapy and support, it's that they have just been allowed to take as many drugs as they want.
So there's like a zero understanding of addiction here.
It's as if Rogan is paid to not understand what he's talking about.
But Rogan's not a doctor.
Of course.
But that is what I was talking about earlier, like some fans will actually say, well, he qualified it.
But then he goes on to make social science statements as if they're definitive.
And I'm not going to deny that some of what he says about structure is correct, but looking at the context in which he's presenting it, it's absurd that his brain even went to that place.
But that's the problem with the experience that he's been having for years, I would say.
Well, I think we're getting to it, actually, because the Rogan-Rufo framework is not what happens to adults in society, but what happens to children in families.
And, of course, that's part of the picture, but I think we have to notice the reductionism.
Like, they don't know or care about how to aid the unhoused, but they definitely know when to tell their kids to shut off their PlayStations.
And, of course, that's all the same thing.
And so it's absurd that Rogan is fantasizing about 12-year-olds staying out all night, but I think he does it because he only seems to understand an unhoused person's crisis in terms of the family matrix.
So, if he was daddy of us all, we'd be sorted out because housing is a matter of compliance, as is not becoming debilitated by substance use.
Yeah.
And so this whole, this is like classic conservative, you know, parenting bullshit, which is basically like, if you don't impose really stern punishment and consequences, well, then your kids are going to turn out to be degenerates.
But it completely overlooks multiple things, including the fact that people in the kind of situation that they're mocking are experiencing incredible consequences.
And they're not in that situation or continuing to be in that situation because they're misbehaving.
Exactly.
So Rogan goes on and stitches it right up tightly here.
That can be applied to a society as well.
The way you raise children can be applied to society.
Like, you need structure.
You need rules.
You need love and compassion.
You need examples of good behavior.
You need all of those things.
And when you let people fucking cook meth in the middle of the street, that all goes out the window.
Imagine being 12, driving by a fucking drug den every day on your way to school.
You're like, oh my God, what do I have to look forward to?
So in this view, the family is the only unit of organization in which top-down control is permissible, because beyond that, as we know, it's all freedom all the time.
Bodily autonomy, bodily sovereignty, everything that the neglectful neoliberal state wants of its citizens.
So, that's the contradiction I'm pointing to, right?
There's this top-down I'm going to organize society as I'm running my household, but don't dare tell me what to do when I have to consider myself as being part of a larger community.
So the last thing I want to ping here is the framing of Drag Queen Story Hour, which Rufo has been going on about for years now, and which we'll be discussing when we get to Moms for Liberty.
It's not polite to say, but it's quite clear.
You look at even something that has been propagandized at length, Drag Queen Story Hour, you say, wait a minute, let's just break it down to the basic facts.
These are adult men dressing up in women's clothing, dancing and performing for other people's children.
That should be a red flag for people, but they've couched it in this language, like you're talking about euphemisms, very soft-sounding words, tolerance, inclusion.
But you're concealing from people the fact that it's like, actually, no, this is kind of uncomfortable.
And like, I wouldn't want to do that.
Well, not only that.
Do you want to talk about sex with other people's young children?
No.
Not in a million years.
That's like the thing you'd want to avoid like most in life.
There's no reason to talk to them about that.
There's no reason.
They're not interested in it.
They're little kids.
They're not interested, it's the adults that are interested.
So the question is, why?
Why are adults so interested in this?
What is the ideological goal, the personal goal?
Here's another magical flip.
So in the first sequence, we go straight from disgust expressed at the unhoused to disgust expressed at liberal parenting.
And then, within a few sentences here, we go from people performing in drag to talking about sex with children.
These have nothing to do with each other.
Rufo's brilliance, I think, is that from one sentence to another, he can merge drag performance with strange men in dresses talking to children about sex.
That's not what's happening at Drag Queen Story Hour in libraries.
They're reading storybooks.
So Drag Queen Story Hour is conflated with sex education, and then it seamlessly flows into, oh, they must want to do this disgusting thing for nefarious reasons.
And then he wonders who is sexualizing these contexts, these environments, and the children themselves.
That also plays into what they do with the anti-trans rhetoric because they constantly confuse gender with sexuality.
So when they present it this way, it's as if it's all the same thing.
And also the idea that children aren't interested in body parts or sex.
I mean, how about talk to the children?
My wife and I just watched Poor Things this weekend.
I don't know if you guys have seen it with Emma Stone.
So incredible.
Yeah, incredible movie, but also just really gets into sexuality in a way that is healthy to understand how humans think about it, and also the very misogynistic views that men have on sex, which Emma Stone's character obliterates throughout it.
Just such, I would ask Rogan and Rufo to watch it, but they'll probably focus on the boobs that are in the movie and not the actual meaning of what Emma Stone characters represent.
But that said, this is all par for the course with these guys.
Yeah, and as I was mentioning earlier, within this sphere, one of the very common tropes which we're going to see repeated more and more, I think with more intensity during this election year, is to draw on the most crazy-seeming, intense, sensationalist, Bizarre examples of something that you can then pin on, quote unquote, the left.
Look at how crazy the left has gone.
Look at how sick and depraved the left is.
Look at how the left have no boundaries with kids.
Look at how the left wants your kid to see someone cooking meth in the middle of the street.
This is the direct result of their policies.
And it's so extraordinarily dishonest.
Okay, we were in the man cave and now we're leaving it because I want to consider what
happens when right-wing figures leave their echo chamber and have to face questions about
their work motives, scientific understanding, or beliefs.
But Derek, you mean when they have to pretend to produce knowledge as opposed to propaganda or content?
That's another way to put it, yes.
More to the point.
Because just in the last few months, we've seen examples of pivots, deflections, and loads of whataboutism from some of the most popular right-wingers in our society.
In at least three of these examples with Haya Rajchek, Moms4Liberty, and Alex Jones, they quickly came out in their own echo chambers after the confrontations were about to play, saying they were unfairly treated or that they really won the argument.
So let's start off with Washington Post columnist and recent guest of our podcast, Taylor Lorenz, who sat down with Haya Reicheck, founders of Libs of TikTok, which is one of the most toxic feeds that you will find on social media.
And we briefly discussed Haya with Taylor when she came onto the pod for episode 191, though this was before the interview we're going to roll.
Now, the two met at an outdoor cafe in Los Angeles.
Teller was masked because she's immunocompromised, but Haya showed up wearing a t-shirt with Teller crying on it.
And this was screenshotted from a vulnerable interview Teller gave a while back, and talk about how the troll goes from social media to real life.
She was trying to do that.
But Teller Maintain poison confidence the entire time and a lot of grace, I'll say.
She ran Hyatt in circles, like during this moment when she confronts her about her idea of free speech.
Why'd you delete all your old posts?
It was just a one-time editorial decision.
I stand by all my posts.
You know, I guess speaking of deleting posts, you still have a post up accusing the Valdi shooter of being trans.
Obviously that's been debunked.
Yeah, there's a community note on it.
Uh-huh.
So why not remove that post if you're so comfortable with removing posts?
Because there's a community note.
I think it's clear.
Obviously it was unintentional.
There was a watermark on it.
It was from an account.
It was going around.
And I'm glad there's a community note so people know that that was a mistake.
Do you believe if, say, a journalist posts something factually incorrect or wrong, especially
about someone else, you know, if somebody was to say something factually wrong about
you, do you believe they should remove that or do you think they should be able to keep
that content up?
Twitter is free speech.
You know, people lie about me all the time on there and they don't get taken down.
If you want It has to go both ways.
So you believe that people should be allowed to keep up wrong information about you and be able to keep that up?
Free speech is free speech.
Okay.
So I'm kind of curious how you square that with the letter that you sent this morning to vSphere, claiming that you were going to try to sue her for slander.
If free speech is free speech, then why are you threatening your critics with lawsuits?
Well, defamation is different.
So would you call misidentifying a shooter's sexuality defamation?
No, I wouldn't.
Well, Haya came with the WWE tactic of wearing the t-shirt with Taylor crying on it, and Taylor proceeded to play chess with her.
That set of moves is brilliant.
A lot of people have pointed out how poorly Raychek did in this interview, sitting across from an adult.
And of course, like here we hear that free speech is reduced to this sort of poorly understood meme.
Where there's no sense of fairness or reciprocity or even, like, legal definitions.
So, I think it's, like, a really good display of how the algorithmic logic of Libs of TikTok runs on a kind of, like, adolescent giddiness.
Like, watching her, I felt that if you gave a group of ten-year-old mean boys or mean girls this added tech tool for making fun and bullying each other, Like, nature would basically select for Haya Recek, who comes off as, like, the 10-year-old's vision of the cool girl.
And that's the feeling I get.
Like, increasingly, Twitter is this hit-and-run operation in the schoolyard.
Like, it's really as low and as crude as yelling out insults and then you laugh and run away.
You do your best to avoid having the recess supervisor hear you.
You also know that if you do get caught, it's not a big deal, like the worst that can happen is a three-day suspension from school.
You know, and if everyone is doing it, that's actually good because you know that the VP is less likely to intervene.
And I don't know, I just feel like Musk is around our age and so for him, it's still the 1980s.
I will say that Haya had a moment of self-reflection because the day after she went on this podcast with two guys and they were just trouncing on Taylor and Haya was actually like, well, I, you know, I was a little unprepared.
She's actually an experienced journalist.
And I thought there was a breakthrough that was going to happen.
And then Haya's next tweet was literally calling Taylor a lizard person.
Yeah.
Right.
So that tells you how much self-reflection these people have.
Now, no self-reflection is what we're moving into because we're going to talk about the Florida-based conservative organization, Moms for Liberty, which has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a far-right extremist organization.
So, Moms4Liberty was founded during COVID to push back against any sort of mandates, and they've been leading a nationwide book ban that aims to remove books that contain any mention of LGBTQ plus rights, critical race theory, and basically discrimination of, let's be honest, white people of any kind from schools.
And it's working.
There were over 3,000 book bans in America in 2023, which was up 1,000 from the year prior.
Now, a lot of the book bans are fueled by reviews on BookLooks, which is an amateur review site that's kind of akin to Goodreads, but the parents use it to identify books they don't want in school, which means that the parents don't need to actually read the books.
They just trust the right-wing trolls who post these reviews and then go about and then say whatever they want, as evidenced in this interview.
So, two co-founders, Tina Deskovic and Tiffany Justice, sat down with 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley, and here's how that went.
Conservative, anti-teachers unions, Moms for Liberty is part of the pushback against the diversity and inclusion movement.
Moms supports new Florida laws that limit lessons on race and forbid lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity through high school.
We love teachers.
My children have had the best teachers.
I've had the greatest teachers that have influenced and impacted me.
But there are rogue teachers in America's classrooms right now.
Rogue teachers?
Rogue teachers.
Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.
What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?
Let's just say children in America cannot read.
They often dodged questions with talking points.
You're being evasive.
21% of Hispanic students are reading on grade level.
You're being evasive.
What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into?
What is your fear?
I think parents' fears are realized.
They're looking at these books where sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages.
Well, I'm really glad that we have some people coming to the rescue against the authoritarian, censorious tyrannies of the left.
Oh, wait, hold on a second.
What's actually going on here?
You know, coming up soon, we have a really good episode about libraries with a guest expert, Heath Umbright, who will be walking us through the facts that Moms for Liberty hold in contempt.
And just as a brief preview, they're challenging books they haven't read.
Often from out of state, overwhelming library admins with countless petitions.
They're using terms like pornography to describe age-appropriate sex ed and anatomy books.
They're pretending that public libraries are somehow places where kids are allowed to roam free without parental supervision, whereas really public libraries are just public space where parents are actually responsible for what their kids pick up.
as they would be anywhere.
And then also, you know, Moms for Liberty rides sidecar with Hia Raichek as, you know,
libs of TikTok posts, you know, the stuff that they want to mock, and then libraries receive
these illicit or these bomb threats.
So, we're gonna hear Heath correctly point out that when parents are catastrophizing
about their children's access to sex ed materials that are not meant for them, the sexualization problem
is actually their own.
But with regard to this moment, Derek, in 60 Minutes, like, I appreciated the drubbing,
but unlike with the Lorenz interview, it's clear that it's edited heavily for TV broadcast.
And, you know, you and I just did this CBC National interview, and we were in the chair
for like two hours.
We know we're going to be boiled down to 45 seconds each, so I would like to see the raw file because it's hard to believe that they were that There was also some reporting narration over this visual sequence that you won't see, listener, but we'll post the link, in which one of them is holding up a copy of a 2019 graphic novel called Gender Queer.
The novel is for young adults, and it's by a writer named Maya Kobabe, and it has been viciously targeted by anti-LGBTQ groups.
And I kind of wanted to hear what they were saying, because of all of the reviews I can find of that book that aren't written by Moms4Liberty types, they all gush over it as this watershed moment in coming-of-age fiction.
I don't know, maybe I'll do a bonus episode, like, reading series with that one, along with the other book that Libs of TikTok really ripped apart, which is called Let's Talk About It, The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human.
It raises, I think, a really tricky question, which is like how to counter this kind of disinformation, right?
This kind of very, very bigoted and ideologically driven disinformation effectively so that people who might otherwise not know better, I'm thinking of sort of normie parents who might be, you know, pushed into some sort of moral panic by getting shown things that are actually not true
or that have been distorted in some way to make them think that their kids
are being exposed to something inappropriate.
Yeah, this is where I will call on all book publicists to get out in front of this bullshit
and put your authors in front of the appropriate media so that authors can actually own the content
of their material before it gets distorted by fascists.
One bullet point you didn't bring up, Matthew, but we'll be talking about next week
is the fact that libraries are places where unhoused people go because they can get some services
there.
So exactly.
There are many layers to what this attack is really about.
But guys, next, Jordan Peterson.
Oh, fantastic.
Who recently hosted on his podcast, Stephen Kenneth Bunnell, who is a live streamer and political commentator who is by Destiny.
And we're not going to discuss the entire two and a half hour podcast because to be fair, Destiny is a social democrat and Peterson hosted him in a sort of reach across the aisle conversation.
So unlike the other examples, Civility was displayed and concession points were granted by both parties during different points of this interview.
But when they got to COVID vaccines, mandates and science around COVID, things got really heated.
Also with climate change, but we're not playing that clip.
Decoding the Gurus just did a short decoding of that section, though, that's worth checking out.
So at this point, When they start talking about COVID, Peterson jumps from topic to topic.
He got pretty caught up with this notion of excess deaths in Europe.
And once Destiny pushed back, Peterson started running in circles around different topics.
And there's a long clip where Peterson says the COVID vaccine isn't even a vaccine.
And by the end, Destiny has Jordan concede that there's some crossover.
You'll probably be familiar with the entry point that I've chosen.
What do you make of the VAERS data?
There's more negative side effects reported from the mRNA vaccines than there were reported for every single vaccine ever created since the dawn of time.
And not by a small margin.
So it's not just the excess deaths.
I agree.
It's the VAERS data.
What is VAERS data?
It's the database that until the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, and we had the unfortunate consequence that there were so many side effects being reported, it was the gold standard for determining whether or not vaccines were safe.
And now as soon as it started to misbehave on the mRNA vaccine front, We decided that we were going to doubt the validity of the VAERS reporting system.
Okay, the VAERS reporting system has never been the gold standard for anything.
VAERS reporting is just if you want to report that there is some issue that you have after getting a vaccine.
That's it.
What do you mean that's it?
What the hell do you think it was set up for?
To report adverse events.
Why?
To track and see if something was related to the vaccine.
Right!
Why?
So most people, most people didn't even know VAERS existed until after the COVID vaccine.
Once people know that it exists, of course more people are going to engage with it.
But what happens... So it's all noise?
No, well, it could be or couldn't be.
So what do you do when a bunch of stuff... Well, first of all, you might begin by suggesting that maybe it's not all noise.
Correct.
So when all of these things are admitted to VAERS, what they do is, from there, they investigate.
All VAERS does is, I might go and get a vaccine, and maybe in three days they'll go, hmm, I've got a headache.
I'm going to go ahead and call my doctor and make this report.
And they'll say, okay, well, it's an adverse event after vaccine.
Doesn't mean the vaccine caused the headache.
And now that more people know about this... I didn't say it meant it!
I'm just saying that VAERS is not the gold standard of determining if a vaccine is working or not.
Compared to what?
You mean like the ones they should have done to the goddamn vaccines?
Oh, yes.
You really think that you're in a position to evaluate the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines, do you?
Then what are you doing?
I don't trust them.
That is correct. Yes, you really think that you're in a position to evaluate
the scientific credibility of the trials for the vaccines, do you?
No, I don't. So I have to trust.
And what are you going to do?
What I don't trust. I have to trust the blood.
I have you. First of all, you have to trust third parties to some extent.
When you go outside- I don't have to trust- Of course you do!
You do every day!
When you turn the keys on your car, you hope your engine doesn't explode.
When you're drinking water, you hope that the public water or whatever tap or bottled water you got it out of isn't contaminated or poisoned with cholera.
I don't do that as a consequence of consensus.
No, of course you do.
No, I don't.
I do that as a consequence of observing multiple times that when I put the goddamn key in the ignition, the truck started.
Why do you know it's going to start the 50th or the 100th time?
Why do you- Don't play Q with me!
I'm not playing Q!
That is my favorite Jordan Peterson conversation of all time because Destiny is so much younger than him.
Destiny is, he's become really, he's ubiquitous these days, but he's nowhere near as well known.
And he's sitting face to face with this bully who is yelling at him and getting really unhinged.
And his ability to just keep giving it back and keep actually delivering the strongest possible
argument in response and refuting him with equal kind of intensity,
it's powerful, the fact that he wasn't intimidated and he could just do that.
And I wanna point out, it sometimes sounds like we've speeded up Destiny talking,
but that's how he actually delivers information because he's a live streamer on Twitch.
That's where he got his start.
So he knows how to deliver that information really quickly, which also I think trips Jordan up in some ways because he has to catch up and try to make sense of what's being said in a completely different medium than he's accustomed to.
Yeah, it's a real JFK Jr.
kind of rhythm.
I don't know, 300, 400 words a minute or something like that.
But, you know, Derek, I got to speak as the staff Canadian here.
I don't know about civility, really.
You know, for Canadians out there, you might hear this as Jordan Peterson entering his Don Cherry era.
It sounds very like like Canadian Legion Hall, salty, circa 1955.
Guys, everybody else, look up Don Cherry.
Look up Don Cherry and Google Don Cherry best suits and then you'll get the connection.
Anyway, I think the real value here for Peterson fans is to just feel him yell in the Willy Wonka Joker suit.
He's extremely passionate.
It's like we always say about charisma and performance.
And Destiny really gets his blood up.
I actually worried about his blood pressure there a little bit.
And I think that that will scratch the kind of existential itch that Peterson followers have, that this is their man, the guy who knows how much is at stake, the man who can bring the real wrath.
And we can, you know, we can talk about how fast destiny starts talking there, but really everything is set up from one short question, right?
Yeah, right.
What is fairs?
What is theirs?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Walk into this trap.
Yeah.
Now, with regard to Peterson, here's my prediction is that down the line, this rage mode is going to have to increase in compensation for continued cognitive decline.
Like, when we come to even bigger issues, there was this bananas segment on climate science in which Peterson claimed that we don't know where all the carbon comes from.
Like, it feels like his social function will be that of a kind of cursed Dylan Thomas type, like to rage against the dying of the light.
We also have no idea whether or not the Nazis were left or right wing, right?
Exactly, right.
He's going to make his money through extending out this one long scream against a changing world, against chaos that he cannot reorder, that he cannot reorder, that cannot be reordered.
I don't think he'll be able to reorder the world for his followers.
I think he's going to play the role of the good and wrathful warrior who preserved his integrity by going down with the ship.
And I think the follower test will be, like, at what point will he just look and sound like Abraham Grandpa Simpson?
Like shaking his fist at the woke Jell-O cup on his nursing home food platter thinking it's twerking at him.
Last up, we have one of the worst human beings on the planet, Alex Jones.
He is the godfather of conspiritualists.
His ability to monetize supplements by selling conspiracy theories really has set the stage for so many of the people we cover on this podcast.
And the fact that men like Mickey Willis and J.P. Sears continue to call him a hero is just fucking disgusting,
especially given how much they talk about the importance of children.
They're championing a man who has caused irreparable damage to so many families, which was brought out brilliantly
in the new HBO documentary, The Truth vs. Alex Jones.
That's what we're clipping from.
I highly recommend watching it, because before it came out, I had read that it vindicates the Sandy Hook parents, and I do believe that is true, with the caveat that the people who really need to watch it never will.
Watching Jones' courtroom behavior where he stares at the parents of the murdered children that he's called a hoax since the day it happened, December 14th, 2012, and he basically mocks them in their grief, is one of the hardest things to witness.
I mean, I watched it with my wife.
She doesn't really know anything about Alex Jones, and she was just mortified.
Now, while the first trial was going on with two of the Sandy Hook parents, Jones would be streaming his InfoWars show, calling it a show trial, and claiming he was a martyr, even calling one of the parents slow before showing up to court that day.
Yeah, so that's Neil Heslin, and he actually implied that Heslin is autistic.
And of course what he's picking up on and stigmatizing is that Neil looks and sounds traumatized by the ten years of hell that Jones put him through.
This is a guy who you can't really imagine ever smiling again, like if he smiled his face would crack apart like a plaster freeze.
So Jones, I think, has to invent a deflection for that because his millions of viewers can see this guy's face.
And you know, of course, what autism signals to that audience, that ableist audience, that, you know, here's a weirdo damaged by vaccines.
But then, speaking of flips, during a recess scrum, the camera catches Jones pretending to apologize to Heslin or to rationalize what he said.
And he does so by saying that maybe he, Alex Jones, is autistic and therefore the implication is not in control of himself.
So, setting aside the ableist flip-flop there where autism either makes you stupid or a compulsive liar, it's this perfect glimpse of Jones' core technique, which is to attack in one breath and then play a victim card in the next.
So the lawyer would bring all of that up in court, what he was doing on his show that very morning, the day before.
Jones would deny it.
Then he'd play the clip right in front of everyone.
And even then, Jones still appears unfazed.
Yeah, so back to our Matrix opening, this is something that happens over and over again.
And it gives this sense of whiplash.
I think it's the perfect example of how Jones, and then a lot of the world, apparently, lives in two realities.
That what he says on set can't possibly be held to account in the real world.
Like, he doesn't connect those two things.
Somehow he exits the studio, he gets on his private jet, he flies to the courthouse, and He didn't really go anywhere.
And that is his definition of the First Amendment.
Yeah, I mean, it's also consistent with a worldview in which you imagine that an absolutely gruesome and terribly tragic school shooting...
Could have been a PSYOP pulled off by crisis actors and that the parents who are just devastated are actually part of some kind of plot.
This sense of unreality I think is running through everything when we talk about Alex Jones.
Right.
It's terrible.
And just so you know, in case you haven't seen the documentary or haven't been following this story, this trial was not assessing Jones' guilt.
That had already been established.
The jury was only there to penalize him.
So in this first trial, he was fined $50 million.
And of course, a month later, a second trial that took place in Sandy Hook would result in a penalty of a billion dollars.
Now, This is all ongoing.
The families of Sandy Hook agreed to settle for $85 million in November.
Jones countered with $55 million in December.
As of last week, a mediator has been assigned to speed up the final verdict.
Can I just interject here, because my all of my sort of bells are going off right now, as I think, as I'm reminded of the Rufo and Rogan conversation about consequences, about boundaries, about punishment, about what it takes to create exactly create happy and highly functional adults.
And this is also happening like we're talking about all of this right now, while the biggest story in the news is Trump trying to avoid accountability as well.
Yeah, exactly.
And unfortunately, even during the entire trial, Jones was saying he's bankrupt, saying all these things, and the family was like, it's not really about the money.
We just want to show off the goddamn air.
And the show is still on the air as of recording, and it probably will be for a while.
But the clip I'm going to play with Jones puts this entire spectacle into perspective.
The title of the documentary, With the Truth, couldn't have been more appropriate because the very concept of truth doesn't seem to be remotely possible in Jones's brain.
So right before this clip, Jones' lawyer asks him about his supplements, and Jones literally goes on a sales pitch about how great they are, looking at the jury!
And the camera pans to the jury, and then to the parents, and they're all like, what the fuck is going on right now?
Now, the reason this wasn't a trial to assess guilt is because Jones had refused to provide discovery materials to the court.
This also happened in the latter trial in Connecticut.
So what he does here is especially egregious.
Jones' lawyer, who I have to say is a big fan of InfoWars, he believes Jones is an American hero, has an agenda in mind to reduce the fines, and that's what you're going to hear right now.
Let's discuss email.
How much email does InfoWars routinely get?
I mean, I know when we looked to comply with the discovery, which we complied with, it was over 10 million that they had to search that was still in the inbox, unopened.
How many employees would InfoWars have to have, in your view, if you were to actually read every message, every email, every tip that's sent in?
It would take 10, 15, 20 people, we'd go bankrupt, which we are now.
Your Honor, I have a couple of motions I'm going to need to take up outside the presence of the jury.
I don't know if you want to do that now or wait until he's done with his direct.
All right.
We're going to just sit tight for a second.
We're going to take a break.
All right.
Thank you.
All rise.
I don't know what's going on, Your Honor, but I need to bring a couple motions.
They're for jury instructions.
Mr. Reynold just absolutely solicited direct testimony from Mr. Jones that he is bankrupt.
Mr. Jones has testified straight into the record that he's bankrupt.
Which is not true. Mr. Jones just intentionally did that in violation of your order to attempt
to poison this compensatory damage verdict to try to tell this jury that he's broke when he's not.
The second is that he absolutely Mr. Jones just fully testified that we complied with discovery
but we both know Mr. Jones did anything but comply with discovery and did that for four
years thumbing his nose in the face of this court in rank contempt.
Mr. Jones you may not say to this jury that you complied with discovery.
That is not true.
You may not say it again.
You may not tell this jury that you are bankrupt.
That is also not true.
It seems Absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth while you testify.
Yet here I am.
You must tell the truth while you testify.
This is not your show.
Do you understand what I have said?
Yes or no?
Do you understand what I have said?
Yes, I believe what I said was true.
So yes, you believe everything you say is true, but it isn't.
Your beliefs do not make something true.
That is that is what we're doing here.
I also want to point out that shortly after this clip, they go to Jones's lawyer.
In his office, and when the verdict was handed down at $50 million, he's kind of laughing it.
He's like, well, it was a little more than we wanted, but at least Jones will still stay in business, so we're not worried about that.
After saying he was bankrupt to the court, so just to put in perspective what was going on in that moment.
There's a real relief that I hear, or that I feel in hearing Judge Maya Guerra-Gamble say, this is not your show, to the person whose entire life is a show.
But there's another moment in which we hear from one of the parents, Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse was murdered that day.
And I'm thinking that maybe we can give the last word to her.
In some way, you've impacted every single day of my life, negatively, almost since Jesse's murder.
Alex has been asked to stop, and he hasn't.
He's still doing it today.
So you're not going to stop?
I don't even think my pleading with you up here is going to get you to stop.
It seems so incredible to me that we have to do this.
That we have to implore you.
Not just implore you.
Punish you.
To get you to stop lying.
Saying it's a hoax.
It happened.
It's like surreal what's going on in here.
I think everyone in here probably feels that way.
You said, Derek, that we watch Jones facing the parents, and in this instance he's Shaking his head and, you know, raising his eyebrows and pulling innocent faces like he's saying, no, no, you've got it all wrong.
It wasn't me.
It's like he's a 10-year-old boy who really, really thinks that he can keep the lie going, like he's got a bet on it.
He's still all in.
And it's one of those moments in which the microcosm of Scarlett Lewis's very private grief, her incomprehension and pleading, seems to be this window into the macrocosm of a shared moment, I think, in which everyone is grappling with this heartless simulation, begging for reality, some sort of real connection, real understanding.
In some way, I think there's a little bit of all of us in her, although we haven't suffered what she has suffered, because we're all staring at Alex Jones, who seems to embody the worst of the internet en masse, and we're wondering whether he'll stop.
But somehow, like, Lewis doesn't stop just there and she doesn't leave it hanging because she's quoted repeatedly throughout the documentary actually expressing empathy for Jones and hoping that the trial ushers in an era, as she describes it, of truth and forgiveness.
I don't know how she managed that.
Like, she's definitely not a peace and forgiveness crisis actor.
So, I don't know, maybe that bears more evidence-based investigation.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.