This week we’re looking at how folks who associated themselves with the magical and morbid QAnon memes about the “coming storm” that would destroy the Deep State have become that storm, mainly by talking about it, and are now in the position to congeal an even Deeper State characterized by more repression and control. They’re doing it both as conspiracists and as conspiracy theorists would predict: as rich guys pretending to be oppressed.
This opens up the question of “Have we been here before in the US, and what happened?” The parallels are uncanny. In the late 1920s, Henry Ford had his car dealers stick copies of The Dearborn Independent newspaper in the glove compartments of new cars. That was the rag in which he published excerpts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Today another auto baron, Elon Musk, busts out seigheils and posts Nazi memes whenever he likes. But only one of them got a White House office.
Show Notes
CDC Statement on Measles Outbreak
US Health Secretary Kennedy calls for end to deadly Texas measles outbreak
Copy of STORM is HERE Data
LIVE: Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing for FBI director
Kash Patel Wants to Work From Home for FBI. But Who Does He Live With? | The New Republic
Kash Patel privately agreed to hire an experienced deputy FBI director. Then Trump picked a loyalist | The Independent
How Dan Bongino Went From Infowars to FBI Deputy Director | WIRED
How Trump’s Justice Department has gutted the government’s ability to chase public corruption | CNN Politics
123: The Red-Pilled "Academic" Who Named Our Podcast — Conspirituality
Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy — The Public Domain Review
Conspiracy Theories Abounded in 19th-Century American Politics | Smithsonian
Wealthy bankers and businessmen plotted to overthrow FDR. A retired general foiled it.
Medical Mystery: What killed ‘Red Scare’ Sen. Joseph McCarthy?
FBI director considering having UFC train agents in martial arts, say people familiar with plan | Reuters
What We Know About the CIA's Midcentury Mind-Control Project | Smithsonian
FBI Records: The Vault — COINTELPRO
On campaign trail, RFK Jr. pushes 'bonkers' theory about CIA's 'takeover of the American press' - ABC News
Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style” Can’t Help Us Now
Rehabilitating McCarthyism
JFK, Richard Hofstadter, and the ‘Paranoid Style in American Politics’
Ford's Anti-Semitism | American Experience | Official Site | PBS
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Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky.
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The only thing that matters is what?
Chad, what matters?
Anyone?
Power.
Power.
You can see what I'm at.
Power.
That is all that matters.
No, it doesn't, Dan.
We have a system of checks and balances.
That's a good one.
That's really funny.
We do?
That's MAGA podcaster and walking human testicle Dan Bongino, sounding like a bloodthirsty elite sitting at a private cabal bar in Davos planning the overthrow of liberal democracy.
Or is he just being really honest about how things work and what his own goals are?
Is he resurrecting the sacred vision of J. Edgar Hoover to make policing great again?
Because after all, this ex-cop and ex-Secret Service guy is also the new FBI deputy director under QAnon-friendly influencer director Kash Patel, who's going to be working remotely from Las Vegas while living in a timeshare owned by a shady MAGA super donor?
This week...
We're looking at how the folks who associated themselves with the magical and morbid QAnon memes about the coming storm that would destroy the deep state have become that storm mainly by talking about it and are now in the position to congeal an even deeper state characterized by more repression and control.
They're doing it both as conspiracists and As conspiracy theorists would predict, as rich guys pretending to be oppressed.
And this opens up the question of, have we been here before in the U.S.? And what happened if we were?
Because the parallels are uncanny, at least some of them.
In the late 1920s, Henry Ford had his car dealers stick copies of the Dearborn Independent newspaper in the glove compartments of new cars.
This was the rag in which he published excerpts of the Protocols of the Altars of Zion.
And today, another auto baron, Elon Musk, busts out sigiles and posts Nazi memes whenever he likes, but only one of them got a White House office.
But first...
This week in Conspirituality.
Grab your popcorn, everyone, because we're less than a month into RFK Jr.'s tenure running HHS, and we've already stumbled into his first challenge.
A measles outbreak in Texas that has seen 146 people fall ill and one child die from the disease.
Everything might be bigger in Texas, but it is not isolated as 164 cases have occurred nationwide with advisories in several states.
While Bobby initially brushed the outbreak aside as normal, he backtracked the next day, releasing a statement via the CDC advocating for vitamin A administration.
Yes, vitamin A is used in treating measles, but let's be clear on how.
Doctors are advised to give two doses of vitamin A to children 24 hours apart to restore low vitamin A levels.
Now, this is also based on studies that were conducted only in Africa where they had a lot more malnutrition than they do in America, so even using it in this way is contested.
But that's it.
Excessive intake of vitamin A can be dangerous, and using it as any sort of therapeutic beyond this is actually risking further injury to the child.
Absent from Kennedy's initial statement was any mention of vaccines, it took another day for him to say HHS is supporting the outbreak with MMR vaccines from his government, not his personal, X account.
As you can imagine, the comments did not go well, with people like Joseph Mercola's partner, Erin Elizabeth, clapping back.
Even CNN has headlined news articles on their website that the measles is being used to cure cancer.
Everyone had measles back in the day.
Most of our parents, all of our grandparents, great-grandparents...
I'd rather have the measles and protection against cancer than deadly MMR. Okay, so it's not the measles.
It's just measles, first of all, but that's a regular error that I see.
And if you recognize that trope, it comes from Green Med Info founder Sayurji, who recently wrote a blog post for Children's Health Defense claiming that measles has many health benefits, including protecting against certain cancers.
I'm not going to fact check that nonsense now, but I do want to note that Kennedy penned an op-ed for Fox News on Sunday stating that he supports the MMR vaccine.
And this is kryptonite for the anti-vax community.
The rest of the piece was filled with false information like sanitation being the reason that the mid-century wave of measles died down.
Needless to say, Maha Stans had a meltdown the following day.
Feeling that they've been betrayed by their champion.
And I'm going to cover more of this on this Saturday for my brief.
What I'm really interested in right now is how Maha has been responding to this outbreak, as it appears that COVID was just a test run for the sort of crazy cognitive leaps that wellness folks are ready to go to in order to justify their anti-vax rhetoric.
Now, if you're wondering if measles...
Is really part of a plan to take down Kennedy?
Oh, yeah.
There's been a few of those.
But let's turn to the returning champion of pseudoscience grifting, former Dr. Peter McCullough, who works over at the wellness company, who had this to say about kids being hospitalized.
Don't be fooled by the reports of hospitalization.
So it's already been said that some of the kids in West Texas have been hospitalized.
Is recommended by pediatricians just to reduce spread of measles, not because the kids are sick.
And so in the published studies, the CDC has a report out last year.
About 40% of the parents say, okay, I'll have my kid in the hospital for a few days to try to reduce the spread.
60% just take the kids home and say, forget it.
The kids are fine.
Remember the Flintstones?
There's an episode where they get the measles.
They're all fine on the Flintstones.
Same thing with the Brady Bunch.
Oh, my God.
I was hoping you weren't going to preview that clip because, yeah, he invokes the Flintstones as a reason.
The Flintstones were okay?
The prehistoric family.
Yeah, we know that the Flintstones is all very factually cited.
The Brady Bunch is actually a common trope in anti-vax.
They've been using that for a while.
It was the first time I heard the Flintstones, though.
So that gem of a clip was shared by Holistic Heidi, who's actually got her baby in a sling across her chest, nodding along, holding up tinctures that she sells on her downline while McCullough is blathering on there.
Now, the wellness company has been spamming my inbox with supplement sales to protect against COVID, influenza, and bird flu for months, so it's not surprising that they've jumped on this measles bandwagon.
Heidi is just one of the many influencers taking this opportunity to try to make a little cash from aligning supplements to...
Preventing or helping with measles.
She also applauds red light therapy on her feed, I noticed.
And that brings us to Dave Asprey, who chimed in about measles from, and I'm not kidding, an infrared sauna.
Quick reminder, the death rate from measles in 1962 was two out of a million.
And since then, people we don't trust.
Like WHO, have said a high dose of vitamin A, real vitamin A, from animals.
Not that plant-based weird stuff.
Treats it very effectively.
In this clip, Asprey also goes on to talk about the fact that there are higher death rates from Tylenol overdoses than from measles.
And he doesn't mention the fact that a number of people who regularly use Tylenol experience a lot of benefits from it.
And there are many more people who use prescription drugs or even over-the-counter drugs as compared to people getting infected with measles.
So the comparison is just ludicrous on its face.
Tylenol toxicity is real, but the contraindications of potential problems are listed on the box, unlike all of the supplements that Asprey sells, which are many.
Finally, one more I want to bring up.
There's the Informed Consent Project, which is an Instagram handle that spreads anti-vax misinformation.
First off, the very concept of informed consent is a misnomer since everyone has to consent to getting a vaccine in the first place.
Yet Kennedy and a lot of Maha stans have used this terminology as if people were never given a choice.
And this is separate from places like schools and workplaces that require vaccinations to be there, which still give people the option.
They're never forced to take one.
And when it comes to children, this argument is often presented as if the baby has no choice, which is technically true, but pretty much about everything.
The baby has no choice whether they're breastfed or given formula.
The child has no choice in their nutrition for years, in fact.
And they're usually not given a choice if they're raised religious.
But I never see these sorts of arguments, and I don't really think they're relevant.
You raise your child as you raise your child.
So it's the parent's choice to vaccinate or not.
And pretending a baby should be given a say is just a distraction from the actual topic, which is the overwhelming evidence that supports vaccination.
I just want to say, Derek, this is such a crucial point because the consent argument is so craven.
It's not about the child's agency.
If it was...
to take responsibility for the things you're mentioning.
The full scope of what their own parental consent actually means as they raise kids with weird Maha beliefs or as evangelicals or as Trump voters or as people who believe that trans folks cannot be real.
Like parental consent is what happens all the time.
Isn't it also part of the paranoid sort of assertion that you're not being told the full truth about how dangerous these vaccines are?
So to have actual informed consent, you should be given this whole gish gallop of like, you know, ridiculous disinformation.
Yes, exactly.
And And it's also a ludicrous argument because a good doctor will explain everything to you.
But even if that doctor doesn't and is not a good doctor, you can go to the manufacturer's website.
You can check the inserts in the actual boxes because they have to, by law, list everything that could potentially go wrong.
You won't hear that from the Informed Consent Project, though, who spends a few slides that I shared on our Instagram feed spreading nonsense.
I first have to comment on their inability to make nuanced arguments.
First, they write, Which is true in about one person per million cases, which is considered an exceptionally low risk.
And while it really does suck for that one, everyone else gets effective coverage.
Meanwhile, the Informed Consent Project writes, So a moment ago, they wrote, not making a nuanced argument that they can cause measles, which is a risk assessment argument.
Now, here's the thing.
Immunocompromised individuals and babies under one who get measles...
Do not get lifelong coverage, and they can get it again.
And this is true for all sorts of viruses.
My family has immunocompromised issues.
My sister got chickenpox twice when she was young.
It does happen.
But suddenly, however, informed consent has no room for confounding factors or risk assessment.
Here's the last one I want to point out, because out of all the coverage I've been seeing, this sentiment has been going on all across wellness land.
You must not know that it's a very mild childhood illness for well-nourished children.
That's the one.
That's where Maha stands have latched onto.
Well-nourished, right?
Echoes of COVID, right?
People died with COVID, not of COVID, which is completely false.
And yes, in the same slide sequence, they do say that the baby died with measles.
So here we are again, and I fear this is where we're going to be for a while.
If you get really sick or die from a virus, it's on you.
It's your fault.
You're fat.
You don't eat right.
You didn't have the right thoughts in your head when you were infected.
Now, as I mentioned, this Saturday I'm dropping a brief looking at the soft eugenics that Maha is promoting now, and this is just a perfect example of it.
It's not an outright plan to kill people, which helps define the term eugenics.
You know, that's to weed out inferior genes.
Soft eugenics, as I'm beframing it, is more of a shrug when an unvaccinated child dies from a venerable disease.
A shrug, but sometimes with a bureaucratic slogan like RFK Jr. attempting when he finally pretended to take this outbreak seriously and then followed by some sort of marketing pitch, i.e.
vitamin A. Because one thing I know for sure after five years on this podcast is that wellness influencers never waste a good sales opportunity.
Actually thinking through the consequences of their beliefs or showing the slightest bit of empathy toward families that are suffering, That just wouldn't be very maha of them.
And just to clarify, Derek, you're saying that soft eugenics involves this shrug in relation to deaths from preventable diseases.
But what makes it eugenics is that those deaths are going to be disproportionately, you know, presented in vulnerable populations, in racialized populations, in people who are marginalized.
People who are poor.
People who are poor, right?
Yeah.
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Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way.
about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
In a June 12, 2018 drop, Q posted two Fox News links about the House Intelligence Committee's campaign led by Devin Nunes to beat down the FBI's Russiagate case investigating electoral influence that favored...
Now, why did Q care about Kash Patel?
Patel is a former federal prosecutor.
He was the architect of a pivotal memo that alleged power abuses by the FBI in this investigation and undermined the credibility of the agency as a whole.
Now, getting flagged by Q himself opened up a whole new world.
For this guy, who in the midst of publishing three children's books about King Trump, went on to make 50 appearances on QAnon or adjacent podcasts saying shit like the following.
Whether it's the cues of the world who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I'm all...
And then stuff like this.
subject no yes and i'll and i agree with you he has he has and and you got to take a you got to harness that following that that q has garnered and just sort of tweak it a little bit that's all i'm saying and of course this too people keep asking me about all this q stuff i'm like what does it matter what i'm telling you is that there is truth in a lot of things that many people say and what i'm putting out there is the truth And how about we have some fun along the way?
There's so many people who subscribe to the Where We Go On, We Go On all mantra.
And it's what's wrong with it.
But then at Patel's confirmation hearing to be the director of the agency, he spent years bashing.
We hear this in response to Chuck Grassley, who RFK Jr. might be keeping alive with methylene blue IVs to ask softball questions like this.
Are you a follower or promoter of QAnon?
No, Senator.
In fact, I have publicly, including in the interviews provided to this committee, rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories or any other baseless conspiracy theories.
They must be addressed head-on with the truth, and I will continue to do that, and I will always continue to support Americans who support law enforcement, are military, and want to secure border.
So this is not, I was misquoted, I need to add nuance.
It was as if he were saying, fuck the record, the record doesn't exist, so here I am perjuring myself to become the top cop in the country.
And after his confirmation, Patel assured the agents under his command that his deputy would be a career man to compensate for his admitted lack of experience.
But then Trump appointed Q adjacent, Dan, the only thing that matters is Power Bongino, who we heard.
Now, reading from the Wired report, which I suggest subscribing to Wired because so many of the legacy outlets have been caught flat-footed during so much of this coup.
Julian, want to read this bit?
Dan Bongino has spent the last decade building a career in right-wing media based on his sycophantic support of President Donald Trump and his willingness to engage in endless conspiracy theories about everything from COVID-19 and the 2020 elections to the FBI, which he has said should no longer exist in its current form. which he has said should no longer exist in its The FBI is no longer a law enforcement entity, Bongino wrote on X in 2023.
It is an opera research firm for Democrats with an armed political enforcement branch.
He also wrote previously that he wants to disband the FBI and boosted conspiracy theories about its role in the Capitol insurrection.
I don't trust these people at all, Bongino wrote under a Facebook video about the agency last year.
So where did Bongino get his media start?
Again from Wired?
In 2013, he appeared on InfoWars.
Where he spoke to Alex Jones about the then-recent shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
After Jones said, it's so over the top how authoritarian the Democrats have become in response to school shootings, Bongino replied that Democrats aren't crisis managers, but are instead crisis leveraging and using a national emotional crisis to get you to believe things that simply aren't but are instead crisis leveraging and using a national emotional crisis The Daily Show covered
Bongino pretty well this past week, but I'll just say that anyone who works alongside or promotes Alex Jones in every way, I'll say this on every episode we ever do, because you have to be a truly craven individual.
I don't know if Bongino still has a relationship with him, but to go into that show during the time...
I mean, that should be prohibitive from ever receiving any sort of position anywhere, as far as I'm concerned, but especially given the position he's just gotten at the FBI, which some people say is actually more powerful than what Kash Patel is going to be able to do.
Well, just so you know, Patel is totally aligned with Bongino's disband the FBI aim.
I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one.
And reopening the next day as a museum of the deep state.
And I take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.
Go be cops.
You're cops.
Go be cops.
Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders.
I mean, we're going to talk later about the actual appropriateness of whether or not Hoover deserves some sort of – what kind of memorial he deserves.
But notice that this is not about draining the swamp.
It's about transforming the swamp into an avenging swamp monster of domestic repression because – Of course we need 7,000 more cops.
So, I mean, for these guys, abolish the FBI means the absolute opposite of defund the police, because when they say abolish the FBI... It's not like they want to end state repression or they miss the fact that fascism always wants to sound like popular leftism.
They want the opposite of lawfulness.
And the purpose is clear as we watch the DOJ dismiss corruption case after corruption case against Trump loyalists.
Now, I think all the obvious metaphors come to mind.
Clowns are running the circus.
Monkeys are running the zoo.
The thieves are mining the bank.
I think it's way more than that.
So I wanted to do some history to gain perspective on the perennial nature of American political conspiracism and chaos and how much we'd have to change to obviate it.
I want to qualify what I said earlier to open my brief about getting the popcorn because in one sense...
Watching the schadenfreude that is happening with the anti-vax movement around Kennedy is entertaining because we've been saying for years that Kennedy is just an opportunist and he will switch when he needs to.
What I want to qualify, and it applies here as well, is this is an absolute fucking nightmare.
And so many people are going to be harmed by people like Bongino and Patel and Kennedy.
So I don't take those statements lightly, but I also do just think once in a while when you see a crack, you have to laugh and try to exploit it as much as possible.
Yeah, and this is the natural outgrowth of the kind of political extremism and the kind of attitude that all that matters is power.
Which essentially says anyone who's going against our side is in the wrong and is abusing their position of power, and so we should go after them so that our side can win.
It's not really about any of this law and order, checks and balances, neutral government agencies.
This is the soccer game.
Getting turned into MMA because we want to be able to win, so we're going to just start punching people in the face.
And wouldn't you know it, we've already paid off all of the refs, and so here we are.
Yeah, so Patel, Bongino, Hegseth, Gabbard, Musk, RFK Jr., the most powerful nation on Earth, now led by an actual cabal of conspiracy theorists and grifters.
White nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and the Zig Eiling, richest man in the world, and failed gamer.
We've been detailing the wreckage.
That's a big deal, by the way, in the gaming community.
I was going over that with my kid, actually.
He found that a riot.
So the question is, have we been here before, and has conspiracism and bullshit ever attained such power and prominence?
And I think we have a mixed answer.
So, way back before independence, They thought the Catholics would turn them over to the French or to Spanish control, and they thought that African slaves were planning violent revolution.
They probably had good reason for that.
In the New Republic, it was the Mormons, it was the Masons, might have been the anarchists.
Some group or other was always plotting, and political scientists, Joseph...
Usinsky and Joseph M. Parent called the Declaration of Independence the original American conspiracy theory because it reflected the longstanding belief that elites in London were on their way across the ocean to actually enslave the colonists.
Now, things got more tangled in the lead-up to the election of 1800. This is when the Federalist Party was accusing Thomas Jefferson.
He was up against John Adams of atheism.
Shock horror.
He was actually a rationalist deist, but also they were saying that he was an agent of the Illuminati Cabal, the 18th century book club basically founded in Bavaria on enlightenment principles.
They opposed religious influence over public life.
They opposed autocratic abuse.
Though they had some redistributive and communalist ideals, they weren't Marxists because Marx was born 30 years after the Illuminati were suppressed.
And they were themselves actually originally anti-Semitic because they didn't allow Jews to join.
But we live in a very stupid world, and so the Bavarian Illuminati have consistently been portrayed by conspiracy theorists as Marxist Jews.
And that reading has tangled the Illuminati up with this podcast's very own origin story, because one of the original framers of the term conspirituality, Charlotte Ward, is a conspiracy theorist herself who self-published a proto-QAnon rant called The Illuminati Party.
You can check out episode 123 if you want to look at the shady beginnings of our own theory here.
But in reality...
The Illuminati back in the States had zero influence at that time.
But it was boosted by various shitposters from Europe.
There was a guy named John Robeson.
I think he was kind of like a Chris Ruffo of his day.
And in his 1797 tract...
Proofs of a conspiracy, Robeson said that the Illuminati had infiltrated all Masonic lodges, and they were behind the French Revolution and the Jacobins, and they were targeting the youth with fancy ideas of equality.
So this is like a foundational anti-woke text.
Now, this wave of conspiratorial paranoia entered some very high places.
The Fuhrer against Jefferson reached its peak in 1798 when the president of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, he gave this sermon.
He's a stodgy congregationalist.
He's a supporter of John Adams.
He opened the sermon by quoting Revelations.
One hilarious thing about conspiracy culture is that it eats itself because That's what happened to Timothy Dwight when he was accused of being an Illuminati member by a rival Episcopalian pastor.
I saw him dancing with the devil in the moonlight.
He too shall become accused.
It's amazing that everything old is new again, right?
All of this anti-woke stuff, you just keep going back through these different eras and you're like, oh yeah, it's always been about the same accusations.
Same in wellness land.
I am working on a project that slightly covers this, but bigger picture, I've thought of some sort of book that would just...
Pretty much be an overlay of 19th century charlatans with 21st century.
There's so little difference in the messaging and what they sell and how they approach mainstream medicine.
You know, that could come with like a pack of cards for a party game where you have like, who said it?
And it was like, you know, Samuel, what's his name?
Hanuman or like Mark Hyman, right?
And you just put them side by side and see who comes up.
And then you can mix that up with, you know, Cards Against Humanity.
It'll be great.
So Dwight gets double-crossed, and that puts the election into the bag for Jefferson, but the Illuminati Phantom has continued on forever, morphing generation by generation.
130 years later, in the middle of the Depression, oligarchs from Chase Bank...
Goodyear, Standard Oil, GM, and the DuPont family believed that the U.S. had been infiltrated by elite atheist and communist forces, or so they thought, or so they said, and so they attempted to orchestrate a military coup and install a literal fascist dictatorship against President FDR to undermine the aims of the New Deal, which were trying to save people from starving during the Depression, which oligarchs probably had a big hand in.
I'm not totally clear on the history of that.
But they seeded their allegations in newspapers around the country that FDR was on the brink of death and totally incompetent.
He did have poliomyelitis, but he lasted in office another 12 years because he was a...
Very stubborn.
They said that he wanted to be a dictator.
So does this sound familiar?
I mean, except that today's Democrats never came close to offering any new deal.
And that tells us how far towards the right the Overton window has drifted with this stuff.
So this was called the White House Putsch, and those guys wanted a coup, but they screwed it up because they didn't try to seize.
Maybe Musk has, as I've mentioned in a previous brief, because that's what he's doing now.
He's just seizing the nerve center.
There's no military or sort of political entanglements going on there.
The White House push people thought that going straight to the military to recruit a traitor would work.
And so they went to a guy named Major General Smedley Butler, who is a Quaker, and he said, no thank you, sirs.
And then he ratted them out to Congress.
So here's a nostalgic bit for you.
This is Butler himself describing how he stood up to the fascists.
I appeared before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of the American people under subpoena, to tell what I knew of activities, which I believe might lead to an attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship.
The plan, as outlined to me, was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff or as a club, at least, to intimidate the government and break down our democratic institutions.
My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions.
I want to retain the right to vote, the right to speak freely, and the right to write.
If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe.
No dictatorship.
He also said, by the way, if they get somebody to raise 500,000 troops, I'm going to raise 500 of my own and I'm going to go and lick them.
Okay, so Julian, we're going to go down the historical march here.
We're not catching everything, but...
I think we've got to do a little bit on the Red Scare.
You've boned up on it.
What kind of power did the Red Scarers consolidate?
Quite a bit.
You know, the Red Scare actually refers to two cultural moments in American history during which conspiracism and scapegoating were wielded from within the government.
These are in 1919 and then again in 1950, and these are the communist panics.
They have thematic similarities to current events, as well as what I will call a kind of demagogue lineage that is worth noticing.
So listeners, stay tuned for that.
The first Red Scare happened in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
In 1919, there were huge labor strikes in the U.S., as well as what were called race riots in the press.
But actually, this referred to roaming groups of white supremacists terrorizing blacks in at least 36 cities, as well as most egregiously in a rural county in Arkansas.
And what it meant is that some of those black communities fought back and protested at what was being done to them, and that got framed as being race riots.
There was also a series of letter bombs that targeted prominent businessmen and anti-immigrant politicians, and an anarchist group called the Gallianists was behind that campaign.
One recipient of such letter bombs was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and he ordered that the DOJ enact a series of raids, which arrested over 6,000 people on suspicion of being communists or anarchists, and he would end up deporting over 500 mostly Eastern European Jews.
Now, speaking of lineage, Palmer would appoint a 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover as the head of a new intelligence unit that oversaw and enacted these raids.
Hoover would go on to head the FBI for 48 years.
And he used that office to target political subversives, homosexuals, and suspected communists, as well as civil rights activists.
Hoover, I would say, remains the heavyweight champion of weaponizing the justice system in illegal ways that violated civil liberties.
He was especially active during the 60s in using covert surveillance to build huge dossiers on civil rights and antiwar activists, as well as many people in public and political life.
Now, J. Edgar Hoover was 13 years older than a 38-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin who showed up in D.C. in 1946. Hoover would play a minor role as a mentor and friend to Senator Joe McCarthy until the latter's very famous speech in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, which would lead to America's second Red Scare.
So Joe McCarthy, by 1950, had a political career that was floundering.
His brashness and his outbursts of rage made him quite unpopular amongst his peers, as did his blatant dishonesty and showboating for the press.
Like, for example, he gatecrashed a series of hearings about 74 Nazi SS soldiers who had been convicted of slaughtering unarmed American POWs in Belgium.
And he advocated on behalf of those Nazis.
What?
Yeah, yeah.
He was being fed false information about them having been tortured and all of their convictions having been coerced.
By a Nazi sympathizer or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so he just inserted himself into these proceedings, and he dominated so much that his name appeared more than anyone else in the record, including the head of the committee.
And then he announced very publicly that he was quitting the subcommittee in disgust because of the way things were going.
But he'd never been appointed, and he wasn't even asked to attend.
It didn't stop him from putting out a press release.
When he took to the stage for his famous speech at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy had actually prepared a quite mild speech on housing policy, but he ended up improvising a barn burner about the threat of, here's the phrase, enemies from within.
It's incredible that that just gets repeated verbatim as though nobody remembers anything about anything.
I mean, didn't Vance use...
Wasn't that exactly the phrase he used in Munich?
Yes, and Trump used it as well.
But you say remembers, but remember, we're about to abolish the Department of Education.
I mean, to remember, you've had to have studied it.
Yeah, and alongside Enemies from Within is America First, which has its own awful history that goes back to Nazi sympathizers as well.
So when he talked about Enemies from Within, McCarthy brandished this paper.
With his notes for the housing speech on it.
But he said, I have in my hand a list of the 205 communists who have infested the State Department.
And this created a national stir in newspapers across the country.
McCarthy recognized that this reaction was favorable to him becoming more famous.
And he met it with escalating rhetoric.
More false claims as he traveled around the country.
He became a poster.
Absolutely.
As the crowds grew larger and more responsive to him, his speeches also grew longer.
And he told reporters, I can't show you the list because I left it on the plane.
He also began calling out the Secretary of State and the President to do more to root out communism.
And if they did, he would share the list with them.
So the narrative became that he alone had special knowledge of a vast conspiracy of communist infiltration that had reached the highest levels of American government.
Yeah, totally familiar.
Then he goes on to attack unions and labor organizations too, so very, very familiar.
Oh yeah, because all of that is just a front for communism.
It turned out that the supposed list he was referring to was based on a three-year-old document that was compiled for the House Appropriations Committee, and that listed people thought to be loyalty risks.
In terms of security for various reasons, like they may have been inclined toward communist ideas, or maybe they at some point in their lives had gone to one communist party meeting, but also they may have had fascist sympathies, or they may have done other suspicious things like befriended Negroes, or be suspected of homosexual activity.
McCarthy took that report and distorted it into saying that everyone who was listed there was a confirmed communist, even though many had already been cleared or fired or simply no longer worked for the government.
McCarthy was very effectively exploiting the early Cold War zeitgeist because Stalin really was terrifying, and Soviet spies really had been found out in the late 1940s.
And Russians actually had recently conducted their first nuclear weapons test based in part on secret information that had been leaked from the American nuclear program.
Yeah, and part of what he claimed is that commies in the US government were slowing down the US nuclear program.
If there were no communists in our government, why did we delay for 18 months?
Delay our research on the hydrogen bomb, even though our intelligence agencies were reporting day after day that the Russians were feverishly pushing their development of these bombs.
And may I say to America late that our nation may well die.
Our nation may well die because of that 18 months' deliberate delay.
And I ask you, who caused it?
Yeah, so you might tell from his very annoying speech that he was also the victim not only of his grandiosity, but also of acute alcoholism that exploded during this entire paranoid time.
So, like, enormous number of stories of cocktail-soaked...
He often would interrupt proceedings and divert discussions off topic.
He exhibited behavior that was described at the time as, you know, these are all quotes from reports at the time, inexcusable, reprehensible, vulgar, and insulting.
You know, and as I remembered his substance use issues, I went back to see whether or not it was war-related.
Like, that's...
Part of my family history because he was an army airman and he had the nickname Tail Gunner.
That's not a great position to be in.
I was thinking of like Masters of the Air type drama.
But no, he was stationed for 30 months in the Solomon Islands.
He flew 12 light missions as a tail gunner and they let him empty his ammo out at Coconut Trees on a bet that he could be the guy who shot the most bullets out of a tail gun set up in history or something like that.
No empathy-worthy war story there.
He also gets to Congress in part by exaggerating his military record, and he beats out Bob Lafollette Jr., who's the son of the famous Wisconsin socialist, by falsely claiming that Lafollette was a war profiteer because he invested in the stock market and didn't go to the Second World War by falsely claiming that Lafollette was a war profiteer because he invested in the But actually McCarthy himself invested in the stock market during the war.
This is just a complete wreck of a man who did an incredible amount of damage.
Yeah, and biographers will point out that he joined the war toward the end largely because he knew that it would advantage him in terms of political camp.
Right.
Yeah.
So thus begins McCarthy's frenzied tenure at the House Un-American Activities Committee and the type of hearings that would earn comparisons to the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.
The next four years would see hundreds of people imprisoned, 12,000 estimated lost their jobs.
People were called before the committee based merely on suspicion and asked to explain and defend themselves.
If they pled the fifth, they were imprisoned on contempt charges for between six months and a year.
If they agreed to testify, they were pressured to name names of other possible communists so that others could be subjected to the same interrogation, an ever-widening web.
It would come out later that J. Edgar Hoover was actually feeding information from his files to McCarthy during this period.
Now, unrelated to this witch hunt that really yielded no positive results in terms of finding spies, actual Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried in 1951 by a 23-year-old prosecutor named Roy Cohn.
Wow.
And Roy Cohn enters our lineage here because by 1952, he would become chief counsel for McCarthy's investigations.
Here's a quick trivia question, guys.
Who was his assistant counsel?
RFK Jr.'s dad.
No.
Yes.
Yes, assistant counsel.
And they had a terrible, very public power struggle in those positions.
Wow.
And hated each other.
So just as Joe McCarthy mentored a young Roy Cohn in The Ruthless Art of Lies and Intimidation, so too Roy Cohn would later mentor Nixon White House aide Roger Stone, as well as a young real estate heir named Donald Trump.
Incidentally, Cohn's work for Trump overlapped with his defending mafia bosses in court before his eventual disbarment on other grounds in 1986. So McCarthyism, as it would come to be called, was increasingly unpopular, thanks in no small part to Edward R. Murrow's dogged TV broadcasts exposing its dishonesty and unfairness.
The hearings would flame out in 1954 when McCarthy turned his attention to the army and their lawyer turned the tables on him very effectively, denouncing him on live television.
McCarthy himself would die just three years later from hepatitis worsened by alcoholism.
He was 48. Co-occurring with all of this was something called the Lavender Scare, as well as that infamous Hollywood blacklist that films have been made about.
And in the Hollywood blacklist, actors, directors, screenwriters, and others accused of using the movies to advance their communist agenda were holed before the committee.
But the Lavender Scare refers to how the prevalent stereotype of homosexuals as deviant threats to decent society...
Overlapped with the stereotype of the godless and effete communist intellectual.
And this combined with the really unfortunate truth that gay people in high security jobs actually were vulnerable to being compromised by blackmail from foreign agents due to social stigma.
Thanks to McCarthy, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired and thousands harassed or denied employment due to suspicion of homosexuality.
Subpoenas for members of the film industry resulted in many being barred from working until the early 1960s, and some, like a group referred to as the Hollywood Ten, were jailed for refusing to testify.
This all followed an official pamphlet from the late 1940s, which incidentally was written by Ayn Rand, who wrote The Fountainhead and other libertarian classics.
This was called The Screen Guide for Americans, and it advised producers as follows.
Don't smear the free enterprise system.
Don't deify the common man or glorify the collective.
And don't smear the profit motive.
So, Jeff Bezos, eat your heart out.
Right.
So, what was Joe McCarthy's special sauce, aside from, like, bourbon?
Deflection.
Conspiracy theories substitute invisible, complex systems and forces with specific individuals or groups on lists you leave on the plane or in the bar.
McCarthy was there to demonize socialists rather than tackle the inequality that they were protesting.
But the socialists and communists he attacked had their own version of conspiracism that explained how capitalism worked against.
The people.
They weren't wrong.
Anyone inspired by Marxism will say that capital in a general sense conspires against human interests.
Right, and thinking holistically at that time, if you're inspired by Hayek, you would say full state control over resources would also conspire against human interests.
Interestingly, Hayek had his own words for people like McCarthy because he pointed out how conservative economics and rule often led to conspiratorial thinking.
Yeah, and a lot of people who were being swept up in this panic...
Were really anti-fascists.
They were people who had maybe gone to some kind of socialist or communist meeting as part of their political consciousness, as part of their labor organization, or as part of them being really concerned about what was happening in Europe in the 30s.
Because it was, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Which, of course, then extended into all of these other groups that may have been smeared as having ties to the Communist Party.
So I'm going to suggest, I mean, this is not a new idea, but conspiracism has like two forms.
There's a folk wisdom form that I would call appropriately suspicious that allows people to sense the injustices of vast and abstract systems and understand their oppression through storytelling.
That's going to be incomplete.
It's going to have holes in it, but it has an effect for them.
But then there's a fascist form, which appropriates...
And that's how it pretends to speak for the folk, right?
And when it really works, the people will wind up thinking that Elon Musk is saving the money.
They'll think that Donald Trump is working against the deep state instead of being the deep state, right?
I think this problem of folk wisdom getting stolen or scrambled and weaponized by the powerful might be underappreciated.
And I've been thinking about this in terms of how that goes back to a famous book that we refer to all the time.
It's really good, but it might not exactly have prepared us for this moment.
And I'm talking about 1963. Hofstetter writes The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
And it's a really compelling theory that's widely considered to be the original study of conspiracy theories.
He says there's this recurrent paranoid style that moves in waves of different intensity throughout American history.
He suggests that it is, quote, American
political life has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.
There is a style of mind, not always right-wing and its affiliations, that has a long and varied history.
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
Well, I can think of another word, which is fascist.
But I think that would have politicized the theory in a way that he didn't want to go.
Hold on a second here, because you're referring to this as horseshoeing.
Do we not think that there are styles of thinking, ways of engaging in logical fallacies, ways of ignoring evidence, ways of having paranoid links of association that can show up anywhere along the political spectrum?
Or are you saying that those types of conspiracy structures are uniquely reactionary?
If you want to take the political biases and valences out of the cognitive traps that you're talking about, when you wind up psychologizing the issue, when you strip it down of politics, that is similar to the effect of...
Horseshoe theory in politics, because what it does is it ends up sort of like stripping away the material conditions or, you know, the social forces at play.
And it concentrates really on like, oh, you know, are there cranks among us and what are we going to do about the cranks, right?
And that's, you know, kind of, that's what he did.
It was very compelling.
And it was a kind of centrist position.
And for those of you who want to look a little bit deeper at it, there's a great article by a guy named Jesse Robertson in Jacobin where he says that what he ends up doing is he reflected the tense and self-assured anxieties of the mid-century liberal establishment.
The unruly energies of the masses had to be reined in by even-handed technocrats.
So the idea is, if you keep the cranks in check, the ship of state can sail on with the adults firmly in charge.
But excuse me if I'm wrong, Julian.
The question more was, couldn't this type of thinking exist anywhere along the spectrum?
Yeah, absolutely.
Where I think I would agree with you, Matthew, is that...
Conspiracy reasoning and rejection of science, for example, when we start talking about something like vaccines, it ends up being more easily exploited by reactionary agendas.
Perhaps than a lot of left-wing agendas.
But yeah, I think there's an area of study that might include cognitive psychology and philosophical reasoning that looks at logical fallacies and understanding how difficult it is for most people to sort of get their operating system I think there's an area of study that might include cognitive psychology and philosophical reasoning that looks at logical fallacies and understanding how difficult it is for most people to sort of get their operating system up to the level
It's not that anything can ever be free of politics, but it's not necessarily politically slanted one way or the other.
Yeah, I think you're right that you could probably quarantine some of the cognitive patterns, philosophical issues out, and you could study them in a sort of a pure way.
I think a better way to say it is, there's a question there about which is downstream from which, right?
Is the tendency towards conspiracism downstream from political valence, or might it exist prior to and then political?
Stuff gets layered on top of it.
When I think of a sort of genealogy of conspiracism, if I were an anthropologist, here's my basic understanding, is that I think it's very common for people to feel as though there is generally something wrong about how we are organizing ourselves, about how...
Power works about who is held accountable for what, about how resources are distributed.
That's not an uncommon feeling or sensibility at all.
And it would only increase as the bureaucratization of the nation-state increases.
It would only increase as population density increases.
It would only increase as the complexity of cities increases.
And so that very common feeling, I think, is what gets appropriated and hijacked by reactionary forces.
And one of my favorite phrases is they turn it into the socialism of fools, right?
That if you can figure out how to blame somebody...
You know, some group or some outgroup or the marginalized for the problems that you have.
Then you get to kill two birds with one stone if you're in control.
You actually attract people who have grievances and they want to fix their problems, but you also end up further marginalizing the people that you want out of your society, and you can continue to accumulate wealth.
And so there's like a two-step process.
I think there's, you know, the conspiratorial feeling of suspicion seems to be like pretty natural to me.
And I think that gets mobilized.
And what we mostly talk about is ways in which that instinct gets weaponized against people, against their best interests, right?
Yeah, I mean, there's clearly a hinge point there, which is that the same kind of cognitive process that's involved in – Prejudice, right?
That's involved in generalizing about a group of people as being bad and suspicious and dirty and poisoning our blood, etc.
It's the same kind of reasoning that is susceptible to conspiracism.
Exactly, exactly.
As a child, you see somebody unfamiliar, you're going to have a particular reaction until you're taught not to, right?
Yeah.
And that's hard.
That's hard.
And a nativist, a nationalist, a white supremacist can take that, you know, first response and they can weaponize it.
They can remind that person of their childhood alienation from the other and they can say, you know, go for it.
That was right.
That was your true self.
You really knew your whiteness then.
So, yeah.
So, anyway, I agree with you both that, like, you know, there's going to be...
Hofstetter's problem is going to show up in a bunch of different places.
But I think my point in bringing him up is that because his book has governed the way in which conspiracy theories have been analyzed, really for the last 40 years, there has been a de-emphasis upon the historical conditions, for example, that, you know, people describe as being central to the play, the role of conspiracy theories and fascism, right?
Like he's not making a political argument.
I just think, you know, especially at this point in history, it's, it's good to have the politics on board too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that what Hofstadter and his students assumed, and I think I did too, I think many of us did, was that there was enough liberalism and dignity and proceduralism and maybe access to therapy and maybe training and avoiding cognitive was that there was enough liberalism and dignity and proceduralism and maybe access to therapy and maybe training and avoiding cognitive fallacies that could stand Um, There's a sense that there were norms, there were shames, a sense of propriety that would...
Never tolerate Kash Patel perjuring himself for the top cop job in the country.
I mean, the premise of our episode here is, well, what's different this time?
How did the absolute cranks gain the most power?
That has not happened.
That is new.
I think we have to figure out how to talk about that in some way and what it means.
The norms that were supposed to protect that from happening are really soft guardrails.
That just can't really push back against, you know, stored up resentments, you know, that go into what I'm calling folk wisdom conspiracism.
So when, you know, Jesse Robertson says that the idea that the unruly energies of the masses had to be reined in by even-handed technocrats, no matter which side of the line they fell on, I hear that as kind of a post-war mistake that we're living with the consequences of.
I don't think you can rely on enforcing norms.
We'll see what happens at the State of the Union this week.
