#865: Chatting with Anna Merlan
Today, Jordan sits down for a chat with Anna Merlan, author of Republic of Lies, covering a whole host of issues, including the Conspiracy Cruise, bigot nuances, and the guy from the Sound of Freedom.
Nov. 1, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
01:10:14
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| Dan and George. | ||
| Knowledge. | ||
| Fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| You're on the air. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I am once again alone without my co-host, Dan. | ||
| Today, however, I am joined by renowned journalist Anna Merlin. | ||
| Thank you so much for coming on to the show. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Did you kill Dan? | ||
| I did not kill Dan. | ||
| Sometimes we've decided that doing interviews separate allows us to actually listen to people as opposed to the two of us just talking to each other the whole time. | ||
| It sounds like you killed Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's okay, though. | |
| I can ask you about it later. | ||
| Maybe next time. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| You see, he's the... | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| I've hitched my wagon to him. | ||
|
unidentified
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I can't kill him. | |
| He can kill me at any time. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I'm replaceable. | ||
| I don't know about that, but I mean, he could, well, you know, whatever. | ||
| Anyway, I'm just saying I'm rooting for you guys to fight to the death. | ||
| I think so long as we avoid volcanoes and the tops of which we should be good on that. | ||
| Famous last words. | ||
| Yeah, so, Anna, I mean, first off, you're currently a vice journalist. | ||
| You formerly worked for Jezebel. | ||
| I specifically reached out to talk about your book, Republic of Lies, which came out in about 2019. | ||
| 2019, yeah, like April, I believe, 2019. | ||
| So, you know, it became almost immediately irrelevant, and then it became really irrelevant. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the things that I found so interesting going back over. | ||
| Well, I mean, I suppose the best place to start there... | ||
| Is with the very opening, you went on the conspiracy cruise. | ||
|
unidentified
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I did. | |
| I did. | ||
| I was one of several journalists, actually, who went on that cruise. | ||
| The presence of journalists on that cruise went so poorly that they did not have another cruise for years. | ||
| And I heard that the next one, there was maybe going to be some kind of rule about not having journalists. | ||
| So we were very disruptive in a way that we did not intend to be. | ||
| And, like, really tried not to be. | ||
| I want to stress that we really tried not to be. | ||
| But, um, specifically, my now friend, Bronwyn Dickey, um, was there from Popular Mechanics. | ||
| A bunch of people on the cruise were very upset about the idea of Popular Mechanics being there because Popular Mechanics had written, like, a full book debunking 9-11 conspiracy theories. | ||
| Um, and so... | ||
| Oh, yeah, that seems silly, but now that I think about it, yeah, that makes perfect sense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| So they were very concerned about Bronwyn being there. | ||
| Less concerned about me, really, um, which was fine. | ||
| But, so... | ||
| It ended with all of the journalists. | ||
| It was me, Bronwyn, a photographer named Dina Latavsky, who is also a good friend now, and our friend Colin, who was there blogging for his wife's blog. | ||
| Anyway, we all ended up getting kind of followed around the boat at various times by people on the cruise who were intent on proving various things about us. | ||
| I still have video and audio footage of this husband-wife team. | ||
| Cornering me in the boat computer lab and accusing me of being in the CIA and then telling me I wouldn't necessarily know if I was in the CIA. | ||
| It was a really, really long week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| See, the thing about it that I don't understand is... | ||
| Well, first off, I don't understand cruises. | ||
| No. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| I don't understand the idea of not having an escape. | ||
| I can't recommend it. | ||
| That boggles my mind. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was not good. | |
| Then, for them to go seems mad because their conspiracy theorists are all climbing together on a boat in an easily isolatable circumstance. | ||
| Yeah, I was surprised. | ||
| They can all be found. | ||
| I was really surprised. | ||
| Also, two of them... | ||
| A husband and wife pair named Sean David Morton and Melissa Morton were actually arrested coming off the boat for financial fraud that they both eventually went to prison for. | ||
| So on a number of levels, it didn't seem like the best idea. | ||
| Yeah, it was also very expensive, and a lot of the both presenters and guests on the cruise were not in great financial conditions. | ||
| So I don't know that it was really a good plan for any of them, but they seemed to have a nice time. | ||
|
unidentified
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you. | |
| Yeah, well, I mean, I think what I find fascinating about it is that it speaks to the level of loneliness in the community, first off. | ||
| I mean, if you're willing to go on a cruise... | ||
| That's lonely. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the guests were actually there because they specifically wanted to hear either from Andrew Wakefield, who's sort of the father of modern vaccine conspiracy theories, or because they wanted to get an audience with Sean David Morton or Winston Shrout, who is another self-styled financial expert. | ||
| you know both of these people were practicing what I would argue was redemption theory which is sort of a branch of like sovereign citizen financial conspiracy theory stuff but a lot of folks on the boat were specifically wanting to be in their seminars wanting to take notes wanting to like figure out how to get out of what what whatever financial situation they thought they were in or were undoubtedly in. | ||
| And so for a lot of people, I guess, spending like $2,000 to go on this cruise and hear from these people seem like a wise financial choice. | ||
| And arguably, of course it was not. | ||
| Well, that's an interesting... | ||
| That's an interesting different angle on it because that turns it from a grouping of people who believe in conspiracies trying to connect with each other into more of a self-help guru bilking people out of money in the same way. | ||
| Yeah, it definitely felt like the rich dad, poor dad guy could be Sean Dad Morton. | ||
| Sean Dad Morton, there we go. | ||
| I've figured it out. | ||
| So, I had never... | ||
| I have never read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, despite my partner's relative has given him like five copies of the book, and so we have had many copies of this book in our house that we immediately put somewhere else. | ||
| So I had not read it, and I did not know what it was about until I listened to an episode of If Books Could Kill. | ||
| It sounds like the entire narrative, like the rich dad was not actually really... | ||
| Closely involved with the author's life. | ||
| Also, the author did file for bankruptcy at one point, I think. | ||
| Like, it's really, it's an incredible text. | ||
| Anyway, nothing to do with what we're doing here, but yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean. | ||
| Arguably. | ||
| It's, it is, it's adjacent. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure, sure, sure. | |
| That's the, that's the interesting thing that I'm, I'm connecting with all of this. | ||
| You know, the way that the, the cruise itself in 2015. | ||
| 2016, but yeah. | ||
| There's a typo in the book that I tried to have fixed in the paperback version, and it did not get fixed, but it was 2016. | ||
| Well, that's the version. | ||
| I know, I'm sorry. | ||
| So, yeah, but in this way, I see the people on this boat, on this cruise with you, and they're there for this social gathering slash self-help financial guru. | ||
| And I have to think that there is one or two of those people who wound up at the Capitol on January 6th. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| There's this winding road. | ||
| I actually don't know. | ||
| It's entirely possible, not to my knowledge. | ||
| Most of the folks on the boat at that time were not particularly political. | ||
| At the same time, as I wrote, several of them were really excited about Donald Trump. | ||
| So I don't know what ended up happening. | ||
| I haven't kept in touch with any of the attendees. | ||
| I have continued to follow obviously a number of the presenters and have Yeah, it's a really good question. | ||
| I didn't think of that. | ||
| I'm curious if any of them ended up going. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| On the one hand, maybe. | ||
| On the other hand, a lot of those folks were pretty much convinced that politics were sort of like a ruse, an illusion, a veil through which we have to... | ||
| To see the true workings of things. | ||
| So it's entirely possible that they just... | ||
| Tell me when they start sounding crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, honestly. | ||
| So, you know, I mean, I see them... | ||
| I see these folks periodically when I go to Conscious Life, which is a big New Age festival in LA. | ||
| It's an expo. | ||
| And I usually go every couple years to kind of, like, see what's up and, you know, see what the latest trends are. | ||
| See what's up. | ||
| Just see what's up. | ||
| See what the trends are. | ||
| You know, like, one thing that I do a lot of, actually, is I will go to conferences or listen in on them online and stuff that, like, I often don't even end up writing about just to, like, see what the haps are. | ||
| And so I do occasionally see some of the conspiracy attendees at Conscious Life. | ||
| They do not remember me. | ||
| I have not played as large a role in their lives as they have in mine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Interesting. | |
| Yeah, no. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So you're more of just like an amateur lurker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, I also think... | ||
| What do you take from it? | ||
| From the fact that they don't remember me? | ||
| Not just like the trends. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Not just the trends and the like. | ||
| What do you take from being in that environment? | ||
| There's no sort of tactile emotional feel you have when you're walking through these... | ||
| Booths of lunatics. | ||
| Well, so unfortunately, I really enjoy being there. | ||
| I actually have, like, a pretty good rapport with the guy who owns and runs Conscious Life. | ||
| His name is Robert Quicksilver. | ||
| And for whatever reason, he seems to like me, despite... | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| And I like him. | ||
| I quite like talking to all of these folks, you know, despite... | ||
| The fact that I'm not here to report in a way that they would enjoy. | ||
| And I also don't know that they like me a lot personally. | ||
| I ran into some QAnon characters the time before last that I was at Conscious Life. | ||
| And later, they were talking about me on a podcast and agreeing that I had a very dark energy and they didn't understand what my deal was. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, okay, fair. | ||
| Anyway, sorry. | ||
| What do I take from being there? | ||
| So this last time, the last time I went was in February of this year, and I was really curious to see what effect COVID had had on the sort of broader New Age and conspiracy communities who all tend to come together at Conscious Life. | ||
| And ultimately, it has not had much effect in the same way that the broader world has kind of elected to forget the pandemic and move on as quickly as they can. | ||
| There was also not a lot of discussion about it at Conscious Life except for Del Bigtree, who's a big anti-vaccine figure who did like a keynote while I was there, who talked obviously a lot about, you know, vaccine mandates and lockdowns and the sort of need for, you know, political and legal revenge on the people who he believes inflicted the pandemic on us. | ||
| Playing the hits. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure, sure. | |
| Playing the hits, playing the hits. | ||
| He's very popular. | ||
| I can totally see him running for office someday. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, again, it's super interesting because I'm in that lecture. | ||
| There's several hundred people in the room. | ||
| I'm obviously, like, the only person wearing a mask, of course, as you might imagine. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| No, it's like nobody... | ||
| Ironically, revealing yourself by wearing a mask. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's true. | |
| And ironically, like, nobody had anything to say to me about it, you know? | ||
| Like, there have been times past where I have covered whatever conspiracy events while wearing a mask and have gotten super-duper harassed, and so have my colleagues. | ||
| But in this particular space, it was just like, I don't know, they just weren't there to fuck with me. | ||
| They were there and here from Del Bigtree. | ||
| So, like, um... | ||
| Everyone's just fucking tired, man. | ||
| We're just fucking tired of COVID. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Wear your goddamn mask. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| No, it was great. | ||
| It's really nice. | ||
| I definitely prefer, you know, being able to do my job without getting harassed. | ||
| So, no, it was great, though. | ||
| I really appreciated everybody's willingness to, you know, not inflict their choices on me or vice versa. | ||
| You know. | ||
| All right. | ||
| How, like, can you kind of, now I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of walking around this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Post-COVID world. | |
| And how everybody... | ||
| I mean, what you're describing I find interesting is that everybody's collective fictions are all kind of agreeing on, let's just put COVID behind us. | ||
| Everybody's collective fictions are intact and have been reinforced in whatever way was sort of politically and socially and financially useful by the pandemic. | ||
| So people who were... | ||
| There to peddle this idea of sort of perpetual sickness and promise, you know, miraculous health cures. | ||
| We're able to draw that from COVID. | ||
| People whose ideas about, you know, lockdowns and government overreach, you know, people who just wanted to ignore the whole thing, whatever they needed to take from it, they did. | ||
| So, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| It's always interesting. | ||
| It's always interesting to see what people are talking about, what people are selling. | ||
| There's always a lot of products to protect you from. | ||
| EMF frequencies and stuff like that. | ||
| So I was looking at that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just a good time. | ||
| There's very good samosas. | ||
| There's an Indian restaurant that does catering every year, and the samosas are incredible. | ||
| I brought my partner this year. | ||
| He actually ended up taking photos and publishing a photo essay on Vice because he's a photographer and was just wandering around the exhibition hall and was like, holy shit. | ||
| And ended up shooting a really beautiful series of photos. | ||
| So, you know, it's a great time for the whole family. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| But now, I suppose, then, let's bring it home. | ||
| What does conscious life do? | ||
| So, arguably, conscious life has always been a good way for certainly people like me to take the temperature of what sort of quote-unquote fringe things are entering the quote-unquote mainstream, right? | ||
| And as you know, As well as anybody, those terms don't mean anything anymore. | ||
| Post-Trump, post-pandemic, there's all kinds of things that have contributed to collapsing this idea of inside and outside, fringe versus mainstream. | ||
| going to events like Conscious Life always sort of helps me, helps remind me how little distinction those two things have, you know, where there will be relatively mainstream celebrities at Conscious Life and there will be very fringe ideas and they'll all be in the same room. | ||
| Like the last time I was there in 2020, Russell Brand was actually there because before he became a YouTube contrarian. | ||
| Oh, you're so bad. | ||
| So before he became a YouTube contrarian, he was interested in this idea of becoming maybe like a new age kind of motivational speaker. | ||
| And so he was kind of trying that out. | ||
|
unidentified
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He was, um, selling. | |
| So I went and sat in on that. | ||
| That was super interesting to watch him trying to kind of like revamp his image, you know? | ||
| So it's also a good way, yeah. | ||
| So you caught the proto-Russell Brand. | ||
| He was doing open mics before he started his show. | ||
| It was interesting, too, because so Russell Brand has written a book about sobriety, like talked about getting... | ||
| Sober from his various addictions and sort of entering a more spiritually evolved place in his life. | ||
| Then he became kind of a YouTube shouter, right? | ||
| And in between, he was trying this other thing. | ||
| And then, of course, now he has been accused of this incredibly horrible series of sexual abuse allegations from the height of his fame a few years ago, which has been super interesting. | ||
| To watch how he handles that on YouTube. | ||
| So yeah, I really, you know, I wish I could have seen into the future. | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that is one of the things that we've unfortunately run up against is like, you know, we've gone back into the past with Alex. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| We've seen Russell Brand come up and there's so many times now where you see figures from the present and you kind of, you know, it's almost an inverse truism that Alex was right thing is like, if it was on Alex's show, we should have fucking done something about it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a good point. | ||
| like Alex is so wrong that he's created a flex point in the timeline where if we just did the opposite of everything he says we'd be great there's a lot of foreshadowing certainly there's Yes! | ||
| But also, I don't know how you feel about this, but I would sort of say that generally, I feel like he really has lost his market share. | ||
| There are so many would-be proto-Alex Joneses out there competing for his space. | ||
| A lot of them are willing to... | ||
| For instance, like, say more extreme things about, you know, the Jews or white nationalism or whatever than he is willing to do or are smarter or are, you know, not banned from every social media platform. | ||
| So it's interesting to watch him sort of struggle to kind of regain his footing amid these new people who are essentially trying to do, you know, exactly what he's done and build the financial success that he's built because everything else aside, God, he's so rich. | ||
| He's so, so, so, so, so wealthy. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what I'm trying to say there, but it's always just interesting to think about the ways that he both created this incredibly effective business model that everyone else is trying to emulate and also sowed the seeds of his own destruction. | ||
| Well, I don't know about his destruction. | ||
| That might be exaggerated. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| I mean, there's a bit of, in my mind, a bit of, you know, he took a job opportunity just as much as he created an industry there. | ||
| He's a bullshit launderer. | ||
| And he's a racism launderer. | ||
| And he's a kind of way for people to get from, Fox News says taxes should be a little bit lower, to like... | ||
|
unidentified
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White people should be allowed to run everything forever. | |
| He's the pipeline. | ||
| And I think what we watch now is that, you know, there's not as much... | ||
| Distance you have to go between regular to white people should run things. | ||
| So Alex's market share is... | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's not as much need for the pipeline. | ||
| There's not as much need for the pipeline. | ||
| Increasingly, mainstream figures are much more willing to say things that would have previously needed to be laundered through a series of waypoints and middlemen like Alex Jones. | ||
| And so now you can just have, you know, the politicians doing the racist dog whistles themselves or the anti-Semitic dog whistles or what have you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, that is what happened. | ||
| That sucks! | ||
| It's just not great. | ||
| It's not great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm interested then, see, that's kind of the thing now where I ask myself, what does it take for us to go from, like, we all agree you can't say the N-word, and we know if you say the N-word what to do. | ||
| We've got it, right? | ||
| What is it going to take for... | ||
| Just racist, regular old dog whistles that mean the same thing to the people saying them. | ||
| What is it going to take for those to have the same weight? | ||
| Or is it just going to be a, we're always allowed to say like a diet version of whatever slur we want and society will be like, ah, he's probably fine. | ||
| I mean, it's gotten a lot easier, arguably, to do that stuff in recent years to, you know... | ||
| As has been discussed ad nauseum, there has been a return of a radically regressive viewpoint around things like gender, race, sexuality, that is not just happening in the U.S., it's happening across the world. | ||
| This sort of return of far-right populist leaders who are willing to pander to that base and say those things much more openly and overtly is coming back. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's just sort of no doubt that the rhetoric that is acceptable in sort of quote-unquote mainstream politics is getting more extreme all over the world. | ||
| And so this is the point where people don't like having me on panels because I always say that I'm not actually very optimistic about any of this. | ||
| I do think that we are just getting more politically extreme in the world. | ||
| We are just getting more polarized. | ||
| Things seem to be getting worse. | ||
| Things that I thought were sort of settled in the U.S., like the rights of gay people, for instance. | ||
| Like the idea that LGBT Americans sort of just generally deserve to be left the fuck alone. | ||
| Even the idea of something as simple as same-sex marriage being legal. | ||
| You know, I am seeing all of this stuff starting to come up for discussion again. | ||
| You know, as you are well aware, people like Alex Jones and others are laundering all of this really, really intense, concentrated panic around trans people specifically. | ||
| These are all things that would have been relatively unusual even a few years ago, and they're coming back. | ||
| So this idea that we always move in a direction towards sort of progress is just sort of not true. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not super optimistic about it. | ||
| I don't have any solutions. | ||
| I have sort of things we can do on an individual level, but I never end up feeling very optimistic about any of this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's nothing much to feel optimistic about. | ||
| But that's fine. | ||
| I mean, I wonder about that. | ||
| I wonder about our engagement with that, like, the language is getting more extreme or the like. | ||
| When it speaks to my previous point, I don't think it's more extreme so much as it's more... | ||
| Covert, yeah. | ||
| You know, like, people have been saying the exact same things about the Jews. | ||
| In mainstream society, for my entire life, just using varying degrees of humor. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| Would you disagree with that? | ||
| No, I don't disagree. | ||
| Have you read Mike Rothschild's new book called Jewish Space Sizers? | ||
| Yeah, it was very good. | ||
| And again, I thought it was really effective as a way of talking about how those dog whistles kind of wax and wane, and how at times there are more overt ways of talking about this stuff, and at times it becomes more veiled, but it's sort of always there. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, yeah, I don't know. | |
| I'm thinking about this, like, as a Jewish person who works in media, like, when people are willing to say the sort of overt thing to me versus the sort of slightly more veiled thing. | ||
| And yeah, it varies. | ||
| But, you know, there's always been people willing to say the overt version of the thing the entire time I've been working. | ||
| Sure! | ||
| No, I mean, I find it fascinating because I've read many books, you know, Rothschild's book, I've read Charlotte's book, and these are people who are entering spaces that are like almost two things. | ||
| They're curated forms of the racism for the audience. | ||
|
unidentified
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You, the journalist. | |
| And at the same time, like these... | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know what... | |
| These fictions that are meant to kind of intimidate. | ||
| At the same time that they're... | ||
| I want to try and explain in a way that makes sense because this is a difficult concept, right? | ||
| So... | ||
| When someone like Jeff Charlotte goes into an openly Nazi anti-Semitic space, you know, or Mike Rothschild goes into these spaces, these are spaces where people are allowing them. | ||
| So they're obviously going to be like, hey, we're not actually, like, kill all the Jews, Nazis. | ||
| That's not us. | ||
| We're the kind that can talk to you. | ||
| That kind of thing, right? | ||
| But when you're not that... | ||
| Their racism isn't the same. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, I wrote about that in my book because I went to a gathering held by the Traditionalist Worker Party and a number of other racist groups that were, you know, trying to have this whatever partnership. | ||
| They were trying to form an alliance and it didn't work out, obviously, because it never does. | ||
| These guys are incredibly, they are incapable of working together just as a species. | ||
| This particular group of guy, this particular type of guy, they just, they can't do it. | ||
| But yeah, obviously, you know. | ||
| When I was there, or when journalists were there in general, they present one version of themselves, and then in another setting, they are sort of overtly anti-Semitic, and they think we can't see them, but of course we can. | ||
| So some of it is being kind of aware of the ruse that they are trying to pull, right? | ||
| And incorporating that into your reporting, and being like, yeah, this is how they act in front of us, and this is how they act when they think we're not listening. | ||
| But again, journalists do fall for this all the time. | ||
| There's plenty of coverage of people like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos that was like, well, he's so polite. | ||
| You know, he has a suit on. | ||
| He brushed his hair. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, none of that suggests that their rhetoric is any less extreme. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, you know, they always talk about it in much more overt terms than they think we can here. | ||
| Well, and I find that to go even further beyond that, you know, I've spoken to people who've gone undercover in these scenarios, and there's a different version of racism for online dating websites that they present. | ||
| You know, this kind of puffed up over hyper-masculine version of racism that they'll present. | ||
| And so all of these different things to me showcase not so much a... | ||
| You know, oh, this rhetoric is more or less extreme than it ever has, so much as just, this is what we're doing in this time. | ||
| Right, what is the flavor that they're marketing in different places? | ||
| Yeah, watching racists try to date, like watching white nationalist men try to figure out how to find a woman who will be all the things that they want a woman to be, it sure is challenging. | ||
| Or watching, again, like, you know, there have been so many... | ||
| White women who have tried to become sort of racist influencers, you can talk about people like Lauren Southern, who just find, ironically, that the sexism in these spaces is so overwhelming that they don't get to do what they want to do. | ||
| You know, it's sort of funny. | ||
| Yeah, sorry, not really relevant, just sort of funny. | ||
| I mean, it speaks to the fact that if your fundamental position is, I hate women. | ||
| You're probably not going to get along with any of them in whatever context. | ||
| Your entire concept is, I hate them for being the thing they are. | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| That I'm not even defining clearly! | ||
| Well, it's fascinating, again, this particular group of guys, they're so homophobic, and they're so sexist, and I'm just like, God, how do you end up having any friends? | ||
| How do you end up having a family? | ||
| It seems tricky. | ||
| I mean, but that's why it again gets back to how do you get on that fucking boat? | ||
| How do you get on that cruise? | ||
| You have to be so lonely in a certain way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has to be so lonely. | |
| Well, my sort of observation generally is the people that were literally on the cruise and the people who are metaphorically on the cruise, right? | ||
| The people who are in the deep end of the pool. | ||
| All of them end up there because some... | ||
| The system of power, some part of society, they feel has failed them. | ||
| You know, like all the financial conspiracy theorists I talked to had tax issues or financial issues. | ||
| All the health conspiracy theorists have an issue where they believe that they have been harmed by mainstream medicine and the mainstream medical establishment. | ||
| You know, this is just really common, is that these people have an origin story of some kind. | ||
| You know, Alex Jones's is a bit of a mystery, even... | ||
| As much as we know about him and about his sort of, like, inglorious high school years and all of that. | ||
| But, I mean, all of these folks have something that they feel, you know, pushed them into the position or the space that they're in now. | ||
| And it's always a matter of just kind of figuring out what it is. | ||
| It's why I like asking people about, like, ask a lot of longitudinal questions of these folks. | ||
| Like, okay, well, what were you doing 10 years ago? | ||
| Like, how did you grow up? | ||
| And sometimes people don't have insights about themselves like that. | ||
| They're like, you know, I grew up really normal and now I'm incredibly racist. | ||
| But that's often not true. | ||
| Which is why you can also benefit a lot when you're writing profiles about people like this from asking folks around them and people who knew them to kind of pinpoint what happened. | ||
| Rather than talking to them directly because they're often not very reliable or self-aware narrators. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I... | ||
| What was it? | ||
| The debutante. | ||
| John Ronson's thing about... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't really listened to it. | |
| The... | ||
| The stories of the boyfriend or the ex-husband when she was younger. | ||
| He was just being like, you know, I don't remember her being that racist. | ||
| You know, I got these two fucking swastika tattoos covered up, but I don't remember her being racist for any reason. | ||
| And you're like, okay. | ||
| I gotta listen to that. | ||
| You're telling a very fun story. | ||
| God. | ||
| Talk about a guy who's had so much foreshadowing in his book. | ||
| When you read the version of Alex Jones, Yeah, I think that's, again, one of the things that... | ||
| I'm struggling with, and we're kind of struggling with, is when we go back to those, even those early episodes, you know, when we go back to the Y2K episodes of Alex, where you think, oh, this is what he used to be and before he became what he'd become. | ||
| And the reality is he's really just as racist, just as full of shit. | ||
| It's just that the trappings around the conversation at the time were such that he could get away with people ignoring them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He also seems a bit more self-aware at that time in that he... | ||
| So, like, there's a thing I've written about in the past where he has, like, a Halloween episode from when he was still on public access TV, like, way back in the day, where he is carving pumpkins and talking about black helicopters. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| It is legitimately very funny because it's so weird. | ||
| It's so sort of incongruous that he's doing this kind of wholesome activity while spouting this sort of insane rhetoric. | ||
| it's tempting to be like okay he was aware of how he came across and he's playing with this image which is also how people treated his behavior for so long as like a joke or a metaphor or like an act that he put on that he then shed behind the scenes but yeah as you point out as time goes on with the consistency of what he says and how he says it, you can be like, oh no, he really does seem to mean it. | ||
| He just had a slightly less genteel presentation as time went on, or he didn't have a, you know, whatever, a mainstream platform or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, we weren't, all too often we just weren't looking, you know, with Russell Brand. | ||
| You know, there are so many things I've read recently where people just have been like, well, you know what, in light of these recent allegations, I went back and I watched Russell Brand specials and I think he admitted to all of these crimes! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But back then you could just do a special about it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, especially when it comes to sexual misconduct, there's so many things. | ||
| That in the early 2000s just kind of flew. | ||
| There were so many ways that you could talk about women or talk about your preferences for very young women, you know, and it did not seemingly raise the eyebrows that it did now. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it's interesting to see what we are aware of that we didn't seemingly used to be as a society. | ||
| Oh, the shocking nature of, like, I remember growing up and my parents being... | ||
| Like, uncomfortable with The Simpsons. | ||
| You know, those first seasons where it was very good. | ||
| And then I go back and I'll watch like a movie from the 90s, like American Pie or something. | ||
| It'll be like, are you shitting me? | ||
| This whole thing is sexual assault. | ||
| What is going on with people? | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Also the very overt sort of homophobia and how often a joke about somebody being gay or being like effeminate is a major sort of plot point. | ||
| Yeah, man, it is so interesting. | ||
| Like, how old are you? | ||
| I'm 37, so yeah, the same period of time. | ||
| The stuff that was sort of popular when we were in middle school and high school, it is incredible how poorly a lot of it has aged. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know what's crazy? | ||
| Holds up? | ||
| Air Bud. | ||
| Air Bud holds up. | ||
| I've never seen Air Bud. | ||
| That dog can play basketball, and there's nothing in the rules. | ||
| He just jumps right in the air. | ||
| He jumps in the air and he hits the ball with his nose and the ball goes in the basket. | ||
| He doesn't bite it? | ||
| He doesn't ever bite the ball? | ||
| No, he's too good! | ||
| He's Air Bud! | ||
| Listen, man, I don't know. | ||
| I haven't seen Air Bud or Space Jam. | ||
| There's a lot of reference points that I'm going to miss, but good for that dog. | ||
| Hopefully, hopefully, I mean, I think they're on a, maybe they've made 15 air blanks. | ||
| Have they? | ||
| He's done many sports. | ||
| I believe he's done judo. | ||
| I think that's possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Air Bud is like the earnest of our- How old is this dog supposed to be at this point? | |
| Not to be insensitive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to say 40. Okay. | |
| I don't know how long dogs live. | ||
| So that actually comes back to that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Does it? | |
| Everybody on the cruise has an origin story. | ||
| And I keep finding all of these origin stories, and even in the book, you know, these origin stories come from a very real place, a kernel of reality that is... | ||
| I guess kind of thrown them out of whack or broken their brain in some fashion. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You know, like people talk about how the government and the financial people ruined all of my taxes. | ||
| But at the same time, there are people who have just lost their own because it's been seized or whatever. | ||
| It is a thing that can happen and does happen to people. | ||
| I'm interested as to how we would react if the difference between somebody who'd really experienced this behaving this way and somebody who has not experienced it behaving this way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is something that comes up a lot when you write about conspiracy theories, is that systems of power in the U.S. and in other countries are genuinely unjust. | ||
| The government has committed outrages and cover-ups and human rights abuses that we didn't find out about until years later, right? | ||
| I write about this in the book. | ||
| Conspiracies held by, for instance, Black Americans tend to be rooted in actual stuff that has happened to Black people over, you know, the last, say, 200 years, right? | ||
| So a lot of conspiracy theories that are specifically held in Black communities, even if they are not literally true, make a sort of logical sense. | ||
| Like the idea that the levees were purposely blown up during Hurricane Katrina echoes an earlier disaster where levees were. | ||
| Purposely blown up during the, I want to say it was 1911, Great Flood, triggering, you know, one of the greatest mass migrations in American history, right, of Black people who had to move to the North because they were literally in danger of drowning. | ||
| And some did. | ||
| Whenever you're talking to somebody who is, again, in the deep end of the pool, you know, it is very common for people to say to me, like, how can you possibly trust the government? | ||
| How can you possibly believe the FDA, this or that? | ||
| And, you know, the answer is, I don't necessarily. | ||
| It's not inherently unreasonable to trust the government, to believe that you were being lied to about something consequential. | ||
| But at the same time, for some folks, conspiracism becomes a sort of reflexive default viewpoint rather than something where they are actually acting based on evidence. | ||
| You know, it can become... | ||
| I never believe the official story, no matter what it is, no matter how much evidence there is to support it. | ||
| And so it can become... | ||
| Almost debilitating for people in a way because their level of distrust makes them completely unable to see anything other than fear and suspicion. | ||
| So, but yeah, I mean, there are plenty of people who have become conspiracy theorists because things have happened to them or their communities that are genuinely outrageous and are the subject or, you know, are caused by... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sorry, that's not a good answer. | ||
| No, I understand. | ||
| I mean, I suppose my deeper question is, isn't it incumbent upon, let's say, the government to not do conspiracies first? | ||
| That would be good. | ||
| That would be nice. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Are we ever capable, you know, like the conversation about conspiracy theories often revolves around debunking conspiracy theories or how to keep people from going down these pathways. | ||
| But are we ever even capable of avoiding them if we just have a government that does do conspiracy? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It can be really frustrating to listen to the sort of conspiracy theory discourse and have it be centered around people talking about needing to, like, quote-unquote deprogram folks, right? | ||
| And often that point of view is being pushed by, you know, people in very, like, mainstream institutions, people in... | ||
| Right. | ||
| People in positions of power who don't understand why anyone would ever believe in a conspiracy theory because they don't personally have to. | ||
| They are not people who have ever been disadvantaged. | ||
| They are not people who have ever been screwed by the government or some kind of system of power, and so they don't understand why people have these viewpoints. | ||
| One thing that I always say is that I think the level of conspiracism in America and in many other countries is almost like a form of collective trauma where there have been so many lies for so long that it has driven some people kind of out of their minds. | ||
| Like they are completely unable to sort of adjust to a world where not everything is a lie. | ||
| And so there have been moments in American history where there has been an attempt at reconciliation. | ||
| And truth telling. | ||
| So the Church Committee in the 1970s was a really good example of that, where this was when Americans found out about MKUltra, about the sort of outrages committed by the FBI against civil rights groups, you know, and individual civil rights actors like Dr. King. | ||
| It was a moment when... | ||
| This was the U.S. government saying, you know, we have done these terrible things, but now we are going to do better. | ||
| But instead, it actually sort of created more conspiracy theories because the logic went, you know, if they can admit to doing this, what else are they lying about? | ||
| You know, the JFK assassination was sort of the same thing with the Warren Commission, which, you know, was fairly rushed, did sort of come to what is seemingly a foregone conclusion. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There have been plenty of points in American history where even an attempt to tell the truth has just resulted in people feeling more suspicious. | ||
| The way that the government talks about UFOs and aliens and sort of what we know as a country institutionally about UFOs. | ||
| I mean, there are so many examples of this. | ||
| I think that's what the conspiracy theorists can teach us, though, is that I don't give a fuck about the truth. | ||
| People are interested in consequences. | ||
| If not, perhaps many people far more so. | ||
| With so many of those things, yes, they have admitted to doing stuff, but then the FBI just keeps getting to do the stuff. | ||
| Again, tomorrow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then they just do it again. | ||
| And then, like, you can't apologize to me and then do it again. | ||
| This is sort of... | ||
| Then you've only confirmed the conspiracy, that you do conspiracies. | ||
| Yes, this has been an interesting thing, specifically with the FBI being like, okay, well, at one point, you know, we... | ||
| We've harassed civil rights leaders and created, you know, COINTELPRO and tried to make absolutely certain... | ||
| What's murdering Fred Hampton between friends? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Come on, we've all been there. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, right up to the surveillance of Black Lives Matter demonstrators and people at Standing Rock. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it's pretty clear that some of the core things have kind of stayed the same. | ||
| Yeah, so, you know, when people say, how can you possibly trust the government? | ||
| Like, I don't. | ||
| I don't expect anyone else to. | ||
| But that can be really challenging at moments like the pandemic and COVID, where you want people to trust sort of basic public health advice to be able to protect themselves. | ||
| And that was what was sort of so heartbreaking about the pandemic, is that people died of misinformation. | ||
| People got sick and died who didn't need to because they had so much trouble trusting. | ||
| The quote-unquote mainstream or the official narrative. | ||
| I mean, that's a tragedy. | ||
| Or, you know, when we talk about Alex Jones, people who had so much trouble trusting the quote-unquote mainstream or official narrative that they felt empowered to harass grieving families, you know, who lost their loved ones at Sandy Hook or at other times from other mass casualty events. | ||
| You know, these are folks whose beliefs have led them to... | ||
| Incredibly dark places where often they make other people's lives worse. | ||
| And I mean, it's almost a mirror of that. | ||
| Insofar as those people who are responsible, you know, you have the government responsible for so much inaction. | ||
| I mean, depending on whether or not certain reports about Kushner are true. | ||
| Downright murder of Democrat cities, because that might help with voting. | ||
| Like, these are things that people are not held accountable for. | ||
| Then we also have people like Alex, who is not held accountable for the boys. | ||
| One of the things that keeps coming up is that idea of there aren't enough guys. | ||
| We keep seeing the same fucking people over and over and over again. | ||
| And it's because... | ||
| They apologize, and then they get to come back. | ||
| I mean, even in the case of Alex Jones, I can't count the number of people who email me or tweet at me and are like, I thought that he lost this huge amount of money. | ||
| I thought he was held liable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right? | ||
| I mean, you and I have talked about this a little bit over email, is just the idea that, like, what people see going on with him right now is kind of a level of impunity. | ||
| Or you can be held liable for this massive judgment, but it will take a very long time for that to catch up with him in any way that really matters or makes a difference. | ||
| If you have a legal system that is so bald-faced in the favor of the wealthy, if you can read a story that says at the very least 10% of the Supreme Court is purchased by him. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| How can you possibly? | ||
| And we're just like, eh, let's keep going. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| No backsies! | ||
| No backsies! | ||
| It's so wild to read just this incredible series of reports from places like ProPublica about the Supreme Court and just be like, oh, I guess we're not going to do anything about that. | ||
| And so the problem is that it makes people even more cynical about participating on any level, right? | ||
| Like for so many people, they just say like, okay, I'm done participating. | ||
| I'm not going to vote. | ||
| I'm not going to read the news. | ||
| I'm going to decide that everything is fake and everything is corrupt and I'm just going to, I don't know, do whippets under the covers. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how you respond. | ||
| But that can be bad, too, right? | ||
| Is to tell people, like, well, everything is rigged, so you might as well not participate. | ||
| You might as well not even try. | ||
| And that kind of, like, defeatism and sort of nihilism is something that I worry about because I think that's what they... | ||
| Want, right? | ||
| You know? | ||
| They. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sooner or later, you get to a they. | ||
| Because there is human intention behind the things that occur. | ||
| And that's the fucked up part. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, some of them. | |
| It's just, it's so diffuse. | ||
| You know, it's so many mid-level decisions that generate, you know, like, oh, well, it's not just that a surgeon general can say something. | ||
| It's that... | ||
| Down along the line, there are a million different decisions, a million different conversations that happen with people passively accepting the existence of these people in places of power. | ||
| Yeah, it's really interesting to me. | ||
| I guess, too, it's a way to avoid having to talk about whether we can impeach a Supreme Court justice. | ||
| Maybe nobody wants to touch that. | ||
| Maybe nobody just wants to wade into that. | ||
| And so that's what's going on here. | ||
| I genuinely believe that a hard, Maybe one of the hardest parts of discourse right now is it feels like saying the truth about a thing that's occurring is accelerationist. | ||
| 10% of the Supreme Court is owned by one man. | ||
| That is a true statement. | ||
| I don't know what to do with that beyond... | ||
| If a conspiracy theorist said that, you'd go, okay, calm down. | ||
| There's not accurate reporting on this. | ||
| There's not enough. | ||
| Now it's just that it's true. | ||
| It's just a true thing. | ||
| Which man? | ||
| Sorry, I'm trying to... | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Clarence Thomas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's Leonard Leo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, that guy is also the architect. | ||
| Well, again, that guy, oh man, the Leonard Leo thing. | ||
| They just did a story where he's got 40, let's call it a small number of mostly white male justices in power gathering together to make larger decisions about judicial policy for the future of the entire country. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Without the input of anybody. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| I mean, this is what people worried about with Bohemian Grove and what is actually happening in places that are probably not Bohemian Grove is this idea that, by and large, things are happening out of our view and out of our control. | ||
| I understand why people feel that way. | ||
| I do think... | ||
| So this can be... | ||
| This is going to sound like a subject change, but this can be frustrating for me because when I was first working as a reporter my first few years, I lived in Dallas. | ||
| And one of the first things I got assigned to do was cover redistricting, which is super boring. | ||
| Like a redistricting meeting is like it was often just me and the city council members on the redistricting committee in the room because it's so boring and it happens on a weeknight and you just sit there praying for it to end. | ||
| It is so important. | ||
| It was so important in determining who could vote and whether their votes mattered and stuff like that. | ||
| That is incredibly sort of consequential, unsexy, and also is the place where people's disenfranchisement starts. | ||
| There's no one there because that's how it happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| I mean, there's a part of me that says that, yes, that's what government should be. | ||
| Government should be so incredibly boring that there should be nothing sexy about apportioning. | ||
| There should never be an interesting apportionment of grain subsidies conversation. | ||
| That should never happen. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But now we view government as a contact sport, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's infuriating. | ||
| Well, and so people like, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who do such insane and extreme things that they get stripped of their committee assignments, in a way, she's like, great, now I don't have to do any of the boring stuff, and I can spend 100% of my time... | ||
| Yelling about whatever it is that she's yelling at or people like George Santos. | ||
| You know, George Santos is probably not doing a lot of actual work, but he has a lot of time to, you know, get in front of the cameras and act nutty. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's one I can't quite get a read on the plan. | ||
| George Santos? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Santos seems to be... | ||
| There seems to be very much a kind of, in the moment, one step ahead of... | ||
| He's a bit of Aladdin to me. | ||
| I'm seeing a street rat kind of escaping from guards at all times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's about to jump off a ledge and land into... | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious what's going to happen when he does eventually get convicted of some of these things, because he's certainly going to. | ||
| If he's just going to, like, hole up in his office and refuse to leave or what. | ||
| Anyway, I don't know. | ||
| I guess we'll see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I Yeah, I don't know. | |
| With the law, the legal system as it is, I don't even know. | ||
| I don't trust it to do anything, which is the problem. | ||
| The legal system moves very slowly, right? | ||
| I mean, again, that's something we're seeing so much. | ||
| With the Alex Jones stuff is that these families are bogged down in appeals and motions and sort of gentle, lawyerly ways of pointing out like, hey, this guy is spending all of his money very overtly in public while our clients have not been paid the judgment that they are owed. | ||
| That stuff happens so slowly. | ||
| And these folks can do so much in the public view or can do so much damage if you see it that way. | ||
| While those processes are playing out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, but that's where the, that's again where the real kernel of the conspiracy comes in, is because I hear that justice moves so slow, and I see that it moves so slow for people with money. | ||
| And it moves so startlingly fast for people without that. | ||
| It certainly does. | ||
| You know, the amount of time that you can spend in jail awaiting trial on a petty theft charge and how quickly you can get there is, yeah, it's pretty striking. | ||
| It's not great. | ||
| So, it's coming to a place now where I see this disconnect wherein... | ||
| I see people, of course, you know, and it comes back to one of the opening, you know, lines of Republic of Lies here is that, you know, you felt a little bit bad for them. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And a little bit, you know, that idea. | ||
| And I totally understand that. | ||
| And I think everybody feels that way to some varying extent or another. | ||
| I'm asking myself now, why is it that I don't want the people who are willing to do something about this perceived unreality on my side? | ||
| Why am I looking at the January 6th protesters and saying anything other than why would people do this for fiction when the truth is so fucked up? | ||
| Why is it that fiction works and the truth won't get people to storm the Capitol? | ||
| Whether or not that is a legitimate or reasonable idea is out of... | ||
| Who gives a fuck about that? | ||
| My point is these are people who saw a perceived pedophile billionaire government and went, fuck yeah, let's go. | ||
| I want those people on my side whenever I see a billionaire pedophile government. | ||
| I think that you should never underestimate people's willingness and desire to engage in mob violence. | ||
| Ultimately. | ||
| So you're not going to get it on, like, you're not going to mobilize people. | ||
| You do not, in fact, have to hand it. | ||
| You do not, in fact, have to hand it to the January 6th guys. | ||
| No, they did not have a plan. | ||
| They were not coming out in the streets to, you know, demonstrate in favor of an idea. | ||
| They wanted to, and they did, commit mob violence and then were very surprised when they got in trouble for it, which continues to be super interesting to me. | ||
| But no. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it's a good thing that we're not constantly out in the streets throwing fire extinguishers through windows and, you know, stealing Nancy Pelosi's desk files over other things. | ||
| You know, maybe that's a good thing. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I respect that. | ||
| It's not that I think it is a good move. | ||
| It's that I find it strange. | ||
| To live in a world where, you know, it is accepted and honest truth that a third, you know, growing up, a third of our government is the judicial branch. | ||
| And it is accepted and honest truth that that is completely corrupt. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| And that's just, and there's nothing that can be done about that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can anything be done about it? | |
| I mean, theoretically. | ||
| Theoretically. | ||
| But we have a president who won't do that. | ||
| No president coming in our reasonable future. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Supreme Court's not going to hold itself accountable. | ||
| Congress can't hold it accountable. | ||
| So we have all three branches of government unwilling to hold themselves accountable or each other accountable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which kind of dismantles that whole, like... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess what we're talking about fundamentally is the difficulty in making sort of a systemic change that feels like it actually matters. | ||
| And I can say, like, oh, well, you know, that stuff happens, but it happens very slowly. | ||
| But I don't know that it does, necessarily. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Again, this is why I don't get invited to, like, think tank panels and whatever, because I'm not somebody who thinks that we can just vote our way out of this. | ||
| Or fund whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There are some things that I am optimistic about on a personal level. | ||
| There's this University of Cambridge study that I talk about all the time where these researchers created a game to teach people how misinformation spreads and you act as a misinformation peddler. | ||
| The game is called Bad News. | ||
| And you use all these different tactics to promote lies. | ||
| And after people played the game, they were better at identifying... | ||
| Fake headlines, right? | ||
| They were just better at sort of assessing news. | ||
| And so that tells me that at least on individual levels, people can get better at figuring out when they're being lied to or manipulated, which ultimately, like, that's a small thing, but that's a good thing. | ||
| It's good that people can learn those skills, especially younger generations. | ||
| Like, it can only help if folks are not as easily manipulated in the future as maybe some of the people out on January 6th were. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, I suppose the problem I have with that kind of as a... | ||
| I mean, it's not bad. | ||
| Obviously, it's a good thing. | ||
| It's just that part of why people are susceptible is because it's not my job to notice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's not my job to be able to parse news. | ||
| That shouldn't even be a thing I have to do. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| I should absolutely not have to parse news. | ||
| That shouldn't be a job that exists for me. | ||
| Those are famous last words. | ||
| That's a fundamental aspect of the system that is fucked up, is that before I even get to figure out who I am, I am under attack by people who are capable of weaponizing information. | ||
| And it's going to get worse. | ||
| I mean, as things like deepfakes get worse, as, you know... | ||
| AI gets more sophisticated. | ||
| Like, it's only going to get harder to sort of trust what's in front of you. | ||
| I've been doing all this reporting lately in the sort of Latter-day Saint world, and I was listening to a conservative podcaster. | ||
| Fantastic reporting, by the way. | ||
| I was listening to this conservative podcaster who was talking about one of the sort of scandals that we've been reporting on, and he doesn't know whether or not to believe it because it doesn't line up with his kind of political priors. | ||
| And he said something. | ||
| I was really struck by where he said something like, you know, I believe that AI is going to become so sophisticated that someday we will have to, um, he was basically saying that he would have to trust in the Lord in the future to decide what was true and what was not in the news and what was manipulated and what wasn't, that he was just going to have to go by the guidance of like the spirit and what was sort of in his like spiritual judgment. | ||
| And that's terrifying to me that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because that's completely different from what he's doing now. | ||
| I mean, fair enough. | ||
| That is sort of what he's doing now. | ||
| It's fair enough. | ||
| I guess I'm worried about a future where people are even more comfortable saying, this doesn't feel true to me, so I'm going to deride it as fake, and I'm worried about an informational ecosystem that becomes so chaotic that it is reasonable for people to feel that way, that they can't separate truth from fiction. | ||
| There's a couple of really good books by... | ||
| A journalist named Peter Pomrentsev, who briefly worked for, like, a hipster, kind of alternative news channel in Russia, and came to kind of understand that what he was actually doing, what he and his colleagues were doing, was sort of, like, doing the acceptable form of opposition to the establishment, that essentially, like, the Kremlin was still ultimately sort of determining what they were allowed to do and report on. | ||
| And we're sort of still in control of the information ecosystem, including the sort of so-called opponents, right? | ||
| So he's written two books about kind of like state-backed disinformation and how it works and how it looks. | ||
| There's also a really interesting book about, completely separate, but about the kind of counterculture in Germany right when the Berlin Wall fell. | ||
| And so a bunch of people in the sort of post-punk scene... | ||
| in Germany who had been out like demonstrating against sort of the wall and the kind of repressive government it turned out were actually secretly in the Stasi and were actually being paid by the secret police and so a bunch of people who were again in the kind of you know Seems | ||
| bad. | ||
| Seems bad. | ||
| I do want to talk about your reporting on Tim Ballard. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| I've been following this, and it's one of the most emblematic stories of our time, I think. | ||
| The most famous anti-child trafficker in the United States is, of course, trafficking children from time to time. | ||
| He is not trafficking children, per se. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| What is going on? | ||
| You have to qualify that. | ||
| So what I will say is the reporting that I have done with my colleague Tim Marchman indicates that he is being accused of sexual misconduct and the women suing him for sexual misconduct while on these missions have said that the attorney said that he was functionally trafficking these women who are accusing him of sexual misconduct. | ||
| And so, you know... | ||
| That is the accusation that they are making. | ||
| But, yeah, certainly you can say that somebody who was a crusader against certain types of, you know, sexual violence is being accused himself of sexual misconduct, which is certainly very interesting. | ||
| Not least of which to go along with the, I mean, Mormon revelations of fame. | ||
| How would you describe it? | ||
| So... | ||
| Second coming of the prophet Ephus? | ||
| No. | ||
| He is said to have spoken to the prophet Nephi, who is a figure in the Book of Mormon. | ||
| So what we know, again, is that Tim Ballard, the former head and founder of Operation Underground Railroad, whose work we have written about ad nauseum for the past three years, Seemingly believed that his anti-child trafficking work was to be used to lead people to the covenant, as he called it, to lead people to Mormonism. | ||
| And seemingly, according to people who talked to him about this, who heard him talking about this, he believed himself to be kind of a messianic figure. | ||
| Who was meant to, you know, do all of these extremely, like, large and revelatory things in society. | ||
| He was also supposed to recently announce a run for Senate, which we had every indication that he was going to do that, and then all these sexual misconduct allegations started coming out, and he has not done that. | ||
| So I'm super curious if he's going to run for Senate, or if that's not going to happen anymore. | ||
| Right, if he thinks he can just, you know... | ||
| Post through it, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, because this was supposed to be the Senate run was something we've been hearing about for years, that he was doing this anti-child trafficking work, that he saw himself as having a future as a senator and maybe the president of the United States, and, you know, that he was going to do all these, like, huge inconsequential things and become an enormous kind of very famous public figure. | ||
| And I am super curious if he tries to enact any of those things now that he is facing so much pushback. | ||
| I am interested to see how much the Mormon Church wants it out there that this dude thinks he can talk to dead souls. | ||
| And whether or not that's a totally okay thing for people to do in Mormonism. | ||
| And whether or not that's a totally okay thing for people in elected office to believe. | ||
| I have no idea what the Mormon Church... | ||
| I'm not Mormon. | ||
| You know, I've been kind of learning about the faith as I go. | ||
| I mean, but the church did issue a statement to us, to me and Tim Marchman at Vice News, kind of denouncing him, saying that he had leveraged his relationship with a senior apostle in the church, President M. Russell Ballard, who's in a very high position in the church, saying that Tim Ballard, they're not related, they have the same last name, but they're not related, had kind of Happens a lot in Mormons. | ||
| Actually, yeah, there are a bunch of overlapping last names where occasionally I'll get an email from someone and be like, oh, I know that you're LDS because you have the, yeah, it's a, you know. | ||
| Anyway, saying that he had inappropriately sort of leveraged his friendship with M. Russell Ballard to promote his own financial interests and to, you know, conduct sort of morally unacceptable behavior is I think what they called it, but they didn't specify what that meant. | ||
| It could have been referring to sexual misconduct. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| So, yeah, trying to get statements from the church about this has been super interesting. | ||
| Yeah, that's such another aspect of this that I find both, like, so completely obvious, so horrifically disgusting, and almost kind of pointless in a way, is that reflexive knee-jerk, like, we're not willing to say what anybody did, we're not willing to take responsibility for anything, we're just giving you a statement that we're no longer associated with. | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| Yeah, well, so, okay, a couple things. | ||
| One is obviously... | ||
| You could just say, fuck that guy! | ||
| That's available! | ||
| I mean, arguably they did to the extent that it is, you know, permissible to say that. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| A religious institution is an enormous bureaucracy, right? | ||
| And so we're super aware that when we get a statement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it's gone through, like, layers and layers of... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Legal vetting, you know, discussion, like that every word has to be agreed on by a bunch of people. | ||
| So, you know, it's hard to get a statement from an institution. | ||
| There's been all this discussion lately about whether or not Tim Ballard has been excommunicated from Mormonism, which is a rumor that has been going around for years. | ||
| It is actually not something that we can conclusively prove or disprove because the church will not issue a statement about it. | ||
| That's not what they do, like, most of the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| He would have to issue a statement about it, which he's not going to. | ||
| So that's been super interesting, to report on something where certain things are simply not knowable, unless the main character tells you, which, in this case, he hasn't chosen to do. | ||
| Well, thank you so much, Anna, for joining me. | ||
| This has been an absolute delight. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Obviously, your book is Republic of Lies, and your currently advice, is there anything else? | ||
| Anywhere else that people can find you? | ||
| I mean, I suppose you can find me on Blue Sky if they ever let people join, and I'm still on Twitter for now. | ||
| Yeah, and occasionally on German TV talking about aliens. | ||
| I was interviewed by a German television station about aliens, and so occasionally I get a rush of follow requests from random Germans. | ||
| So do not follow me on Instagram, but if you can't sleep in Germany, you might see me on TV. | ||
| That'd be fun. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Look out for that. | ||
| We have German wonks. | ||
| They'll probably be here. | ||
| I'm sure you do. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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