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Feb. 15, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

01:08:14

Are Flat Earthers A Threat To Democracy?

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome to the show Kelly Weill, a reporter for The Daily Beast and author of the upcoming book "OFF THE EDGE: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, And Why People Will Believe Anything" To support the show and access additional content, including the weekly Weekender episode, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Barbie really wants this dream house.
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	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
	I'm here, as always, with Nick Halseman.
	We have a really special guest today, Kelly Weil from the Daily Beast, who is the author of the new book, Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything, which is a fantastic book.
	Really, really good interview.
	You're going to want to stick around for that.
	Before we get into the news of the day, just a quick little programming note for everybody.
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	And now, Nick, we have to discuss the biggest day in the united states of america the the pinnacle of american culture that is of course the super bowl in which i am told the best team from the nfc and the best team of the afc meet and we all get together uh most of us who don't really care for the nfl anymore and talk about commercials and
	And let me see what the far right is up to.
	Just absolute racist sexual panic.
	Oh, well, wait, you know, I want you to know I got a lot more flexible during the game yesterday as they were stretching this connection between quarterbacks named Joe throughout the years.
	That was, you know what I'm saying?
	Like, I got some extra space in my vertebrae that way, you know, what they were trying to do with that.
	I gotta tell you, and here's the thing, I don't know that we've actually talked about this very much, but I'm one of those people.
	I grew up watching football.
	I grew up playing football.
	I've had a huge affinity for football.
	There was a certain point for me in which, you know, concussions, but also the culture of football really started rubbing me the wrong way.
	Of course, you have like just terrible masculinity, chauvinism, just some really awful cultural stuff.
	I got to the point where I don't really watch football anymore, except for, you know, like a cultural, religious affiliation, I'll watch the Super Bowl.
	I forgot how absolutely vapid and insipid the coverage of football is, and particularly the Super Bowl.
	It is a cultural just absolute abyss.
	I was shocked to be reminded of that.
	Yeah, I mean, it's been a while since I even, you know, with COVID we hadn't had You know, a reason to get together with anybody and watch the Super Bowl, which would be the only time I'd ever watched the NFL in the last, yeah, I would say 15 years.
	And I'm the same way.
	Once we started realizing what they were hiding about CTE, but just catastrophic injuries.
	And also, remember, I'm a basketball coach.
	So if you're at the high school level, you're like kind of like having to battle with the football team for like players.
	And it was disgusting and awful.
	And then you watch how they treat the players and how they think that that's good.
	It's so turned me off.
	I can't watch it anymore.
	Yeah, I turned it on last night and, you know, again, because it's a cultural touchstone.
	But it's also the reason why football has become the national pastime of the United States of America.
	It's it's a it's I'm sorry, it's an empire in decline.
	It's just it's it's watching all of the absurdities.
	I mean, it's a it's a literal football game that at this point the rock is coming out to introduce the teams with like catchphrases and these quick little snapshots of who they are.
	You've got, of course, bombers running over the stadium.
	You've got all of the ads, all of that stuff.
	It is... Wait, did you say bombers?
	Yeah, just like the stealth bombers.
	Oh, I missed that.
	They had stealth bombers fly over?
	Look how easily impressed you are, my friend.
	Wow.
	Yeah, see?
	That's my best Owen Wilson.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	That's also Mike Lindell, who is basically bankrolling the conspiracy culture on the right right now.
	Wow.
	Oh no.
	We don't want to imitate Mike Lindell.
	But I do think, and you know, we talked about this a while back, it was, you know, Donald Trump obviously exposed a lot of the rotten framework underneath the American experiment.
	And it was like him on the 4th of July going to Mount Rushmore, you know, the fireworks, the Eagles, the presidents, all of that.
	In the past, you might have seen that and you'd be like, yeah, that's America.
	What's the matter with it?
	And now you see it and it's just really grotesque and twisted and odd.
	Right.
	And watching the Super Bowl now at this moment after, you know, well, I about said after COVID, it's still going in the middle of all of our problems.
	It was really jarring and gross.
	And then, of course, the fact that All of it is twisted up into the cultural war that the right needs.
	You knew for days and days they were going to be complaining about what they saw, whether it was commercials or performances and all of that.
	It has been essentially weaponized in every form, and this one was no different.
	Well, I'm glad to see you give it a rousing thumbs up and seal of approval, I guess.
	I actually had people over, Jared.
	I'm over COVID, man.
	I'm done.
	I'm through with it.
	You're done.
	We had it outside.
	I grabbed a TV and I threw it out in the back.
	And I got to tell you, that was actually a great way to kind of do it.
	I had never, you know, really done that before.
	We were somewhat socially responsible, distant, whatever, but not really.
	But we had the outdoor air.
	And yeah, so I actually did enjoy it.
	I enjoyed the whole process of having eight or nine people come over and cook for them and clean up for them.
	Isn't it amazing that you have to have reasons to do that?
	And that's one of the reasons why the Super Bowl is so important is because it gives us a holiday, basically, in which we can gather with other people and not be lonely humans.
	Well, but here's the thing.
	In this day and age, there has to be degrees.
	Like, how much are you willing to risk dying or getting sick to do that?
	And the Super Bowl, I guess, breaks that threshold, and I'm willing to do that.
	So I did you this is the interesting thing because when you're having people over or whatever for the most part you basically got it on mute you know if you're outside the sound isn't traveling as well did you turn on the halftime show did you turn the volume up did you did you oh yeah our neighbors were you know so I had this I have four speakers around the whole thing I can get in my Apple TV I can get the whole sound going it was amazing and it worked you know I mean the first time technology worked like flawlessly
	So we blasted that thing because we really wanted to hear it and watch it and we all sat down and watched because we had like different areas where a few people were over there and they're not watching it at all.
	A few people were really watching it because they were Rams fans.
	But once the Halftime thing started, yes, we all sat down to really just watch it.
	And you know, for me, it's like I was really into rap in the 80s, OK?
	So you're talking about like, you know, Run-DMC, Kool Modi, LL Cool J, those guys.
	So, like, I gotta admit, like, I'm a little bit off with, like, you know, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.
	I did see that documentary or that mockumentary thing or whatever it was about the rise of NWA, so I got a little sense of that, but I gotta tell you, I'm a little bit... I have a gap there.
	So this is a generational thing, because what I would do is I would drive around my little small rural Indiana corn miner town, you know, absolutely blasting a censored version of Dr. Dre's The Chronic that, you know, with the stereo speakers just like rumbling in the back of my just disgusting Pontiac Grand Am.
	So, like, this was marketed specifically to a lot of my generation, is what I would say.
	And, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording, sort of the little differences and similarities.
	So, you know, I was excited about this.
	Obviously, we're at the age where we're starting to be the marketing demographic that this is going to appeal to.
	And to be frank, there wasn't anything necessarily over-the-top crazy about this.
	There were good performances.
	There was some good setting, all of that.
	And I was actually shocked, Nick, afterwards to find, and it was a momentary shock because I know who these people are, I know what animates them and inspires them.
	I was really shocked to see that the right wing immediately had some sort of a panic from this.
	But of course they did, because it was a largely black-centric halftime show.
	And, you know, Charlie Kirk, who has made most of his money and gained most of its influence from just absolutely peddling bullshit culture war stuff, comes out and says, the NFL is now the league of sexual anarchy.
	This halftime show should not be allowed on television.
	And I have to tell you, I watched that show.
	I rewatched it because of how weird of a comment that was.
	That show was not like Sexualized it was not like overly sexualized like and and if you watch like halftime shows like there have been much much worse in that regard This was like a complete hysterical Reactionary panic and I think it tells us a lot about who they are and and the way that they see the world I mean, you're watching a couple of middle-aged dudes, one who's kind of a little bit hefty now, like, you know, rapping into a microphone.
	I didn't feel charged with any kind of sexual energy, to say the least.
	You know, Mary J. Blige was out there, and she certainly was not revealing in whatever she was doing either.
	Again, this is what they do.
	They have to create the controversy then to rail against it.
	Well, and let's be very frank about what this is.
	You know, a little wormy white dude like Charlie Kirk talking about, you know, a performance by a bunch of black entertainers and calling it like sexual anarchy.
	I mean, it is white sexualized panic, right?
	It's the idea that at all given moments a black man is some sort of a sexual predator or a sexual threat in some way, shape or form.
	There's a weird psychosis that is taking place here and to watch them in it's a Rorschach, right?
	It basically was a performance that they were going to react in this weird, panicked, reactionary way, and it reveals way more about them than it does about this performance or culture or anything else, really.
	You know, part of me feels like it's even less of like, you know, trying to stir up the deep-seated racist, you know, tropes we've seen.
	More so, or maybe, whatever, I don't have the balance, is the notion of, I don't get this.
	I don't know why this is a real monumental moment of time.
	And so I'm like, I'm out.
	I'm not in the in crowd.
	I don't know what this is and I feel like I'm pissed off because of that.
	You know, I'm not cool enough to know what this means.
	By the way, I need your help because, so here's the thing.
	Even though I know who Dr. Dre is, I obviously know Snoop Dogg.
	I know Eminem.
	Kendrick Lamar I know a little bit too.
	So I was sensing, without really knowing details, this was a monumental moment to have all these people together rapping interchangeably, right?
	By the way, the sets were amazing.
	But, like, to have that happen, I could sense it without even knowing what that was.
	Can you fill that in?
	Now, for one thing, I was thinking, did Eminem, was he produced by Dr. Dre?
	Is there a connection?
	Yeah.
	So there was a moment, of course, where Dr. Dre brings up Snoop Dogg as sort of like his accomplice.
	Right.
	And that's how that worked in real time back then.
	And then Snoop obviously takes off on his own, you know, with his own solo act.
	And after that happens, Eminem sort of gets brought up under Dr. Dre.
	OK, that same like label or whatever.
	OK, that's the connection.
	I wasn't sure why that because he's Detroit.
	It felt like Dre and Snoop are L.A., which is why we're here, which made sense to me.
	Right.
	Like, you know, I mean, listen, I go far as far back when I remember like Ice-T rapping about West Coast rap, which, by the way, Ice-T is now on the cover on the thing of like Cheerios box.
	Like, you know.
	Right.
	Well, I got to say that is actually part of this whole thing.
	Like when when this was starting to take off in the 1990s, particularly where I was from, right?
	Again, this very, very white southern Indiana town.
	This stuff was provoking fear, right?
	Because it was so far outside and it very threatening and it had its own sort of almost almost like a punk rock sort of aesthetic, right?
	And sort of Rapping about the things that they were and, you know, culture was pushing back.
	They were obviously censoring stuff.
	Like the only, the only copy of the chronic that I could get a hold of, which it's so funny that I had a copy of the chronic, you know, that age, like it was a censored Walmart version because the Democrats and the Republicans agreed in the 1990s that you had to censor these things lest the country be absolutely destroyed.
	Thank you, Tipper Gore.
	Right.
	And so now you reach this point.
	And my second favorite tweet from all of this, of course, was Sean Spicer, who's another wormy little white guy.
	Right.
	And he tweets and he says, Dear at NFL and Pepsi at Pepsi.
	And by the way, he does this because he wants to have this canceled.
	Right.
	Because the right wing, you know, is so anti-cancel culture.
	They want there to be economic reverberations for this.
	He says, what was the message of the hashtag halftime show?
	There was no message.
	It was a bunch of people rapping over one verse of popular tunes.
	That's all it was, and that's all that happened there.
	It would be the same thing if Aerosmith came out and said, don't want to miss a thing.
	There's no difference there.
	It just so happens that this was a white Conservative reactionary reaction and it has everything to do with how they actually see the world But they don't want to admit it, you know They don't want to admit that they're actually prejudiced in this way because like we were talking about they don't want the quote-unquote world to change But guess what the world has changed.
	You're not you're not putting that back in the bottle Well, it's fascinating to me because there's two ways you can react to that, from that position.
	You could be like, well, I don't know these people, I don't know the music, so, you know, I have to shrug.
	Or, you can say to yourself, I don't know this thing, I don't know what's going on here, and fuck you for doing it!
	You know, which is basically what they're saying.
	But part of that, I don't know what this is all about thing, and we talk about this, like, this is, by the way, the Jews in here, this is the Wicked Son during Passover Seder when we Discuss the four different sons.
	He he doesn't know what's going on and he's angry about it versus I don't know and I'm just kind of like, you know, the dumb one, you know, I'm saying I I assume that you have this moment too.
	And this is something I still chuckle about the moment that I knew that I was getting old was the first time that SNL announced their host and their musical guest and I didn't know either one of them.
	Oh, interesting.
	You know what I mean?
	And I was just like, I'm way past that.
	And there's a moment, and I say this a lot, which it actually has had to become sort of a reoccurring slogan that I have to tell myself, a mantra, if you will, which is, this isn't for me.
	And that's okay, right?
	Because so much of our culture now is based around the idea that everything has to be around you.
	And, you know, another thing from the Super Bowl, which I think is really telling, Was that so many of the commercials were that it was basically one of two themes.
	One is that things used to be better, right?
	Which is bringing in nostalgia ideas.
	We have a Sopranos ad which won over everybody, right?
	That was like the big winner in terms of ads.
	You have an Austin Powers ad in 2022.
	Yeah.
	In 2022 AD, the year of our Lord, you have an Austin Power.
	That one felt tired like three seconds into it.
	Oh, that was a brutal ad.
	Then there's this weird, and I think it was a Bud Light, maybe it was a, no, it was a Michelob Ultra because they're all interchangeable at this point.
	That was like a weird Big Lebowski pastiche, right?
	And you know, we were talking about this, there's this weird rocket mortgage ad, which all of this brings together to say that America used to be better, and it sucks now.
	And the only way that it can possibly be better is if you spend your money on crypto or gambling.
	And those are the only means anymore.
	And tech is there to maybe make life a little bit better for you, but basically everybody can screw off and pound sand.
	It was a really bizarre cultural moment, and we're taping this on Monday.
	It was a bizarre cultural moment last night.
	Yeah.
	It was very, very strange and telling, I think.
	Well, all my friends who are my age, we're all watching these things, and I can't tell you, like, two or three times we all turn to each other once whatever commercial was over, and we're like, oh my God, we are now, like, that demographic.
	We are now this, like, middle-aged whatever they're trying to sell to.
	You're the man!
	Capital T. Capital M. You're the man now.
	Yeah, it was very stark.
	And the music, too.
	Every music was some retread 90s song, I felt like, from that era.
	Nick, there was a moment.
	I don't know, because you might not have heard it, because I think your volume or, you know, people were talking or whatever.
	I was grilling.
	I missed it.
	There was a moment where the game was going to commercial.
	And you know how like, and again, this is one of the reasons I hate the NFL and all of this like mainstream sports culture.
	Everything, there has to be music all the time, right?
	There's just sounds and flash and all.
	I sound so old right now.
	But there was a moment where there was like an instrumental sound and I was sitting there and I was like, is that, is that Where's My Mind by the Pixies?
	Muzak'd up as like a transition to commercial, and absolutely it was.
	It was the Pixies, Where's My Mind, Muzak'd to a commercial.
	And you're right, it is that thing.
	And by the way, we're going to have Kelly Weil in a second to talk about Flat Earth.
	This is us seeing the curvature of the Earth.
	That we are getting older and that there is a future ahead of us that doesn't include us.
	But the problem here is that These reactionary people and even ourselves like some radicalism and some radicalization has to do with the fact that the America that you and I grew up in is gone.
	That is evaporated and we're moving ahead one way or another.
	Well we need to talk about this for the next episode too or for the live show we will because there's so many things we think about where like like gay marriage for instance in 1950 would have been like you know an abomination you never will never have that.
	Most people would have said, why would two guys or two girls want to get married?
	Nobody wants that.
	There's no such thing as this, right?
	There was like a push to the thing.
	That's what I'm saying.
	The prejudice of it was so complete that the idea wouldn't have even have been imagined to some people.
	Yeah, but my point being that, you know, over time, you know that that will ultimately became legal, right?
	Like that is what the, what's that called again?
	The something's not the razor or whatever the we've mentioned.
	The over the window.
	And so as a result, like, you know, here we are now.
	And of course, you know, like, how about this?
	You're talking about Dr. Dre and how, you know, how violent these lyrics and whatever.
	It's like the Ramones were treated like some pariah that was going to take over and kill everybody if you let them play their, you know, play their album in your house in 1980, right?
	Now it's light rock, right?
	The clash is like easy listening at this point.
	So that's the point of like the progression we get there.
	I want to explore this more next in the next episode but like it's that progression that like you know you think brings us progressively forward and we move forward in a positive way but then you start to look at the reactions that we're seeing now and what's taken over and what Kelly is talking about in this interview coming up and you start to wonder well just as easily we could go the other direction.
	Yes and that is the whole point is And I want to make this very, very clear.
	When you and I watch something that isn't quote unquote for us, right?
	So like when SNL has like a host and a musical guest, I don't know who either one of them is.
	I don't then stamp my foot and say something needs done about this.
	Right.
	Right.
	Like I that would and there is a part of you, I think that once your favorite things To be constant and rule culture, right?
	So, like, the Internet's all about this.
	If you like something and somebody says that they don't like it, you go to war with them, right?
	All of a sudden, you're like, no, that is great.
	And how dare you question that?
	That is a very, I think, human impulse.
	But us saying, you know what?
	I think that we're getting older and maybe we're not like the cool sort of revolutionary force or, you know what I'm talking about?
	Like, we're not the driving momentum part of it.
	The difference is saying, oh, that's cool.
	They've got their own thing.
	I hope they enjoy it and I hope it does good things versus there should be a law and a cultural reactionary revolution that stops it, which is what the right wants.
	Yes.
	They literally want to influence education and history and culture to try and freeze it The way that they are comfortable with which is again is a white patriarchal type thing.
	Thank God you're here because I was trying to make a point less eloquently you know a couple minutes ago about that exact thing you can you know because either by the way the other response could very well be well I don't know this man I know these people but I like it.
	Hey, you know, something new.
	Look at that.
	By the way, do you think if Dr. Trey called Charlie Kirk up on stage to give him a high five, he would do that, right?
	In a heartbeat!
	Are you kidding me?
	We keep talking about that, which is these people are people who wanted to be part of popular culture and they couldn't get there.
	Ben Shapiro is a failed screenwriter.
	Donald Trump is a failed celebrity.
	You know, I don't know what Kirk wanted.
	I assume he thought he should be doing something because he loves getting up on stage and doing these types of things.
	A hundred percent, he would get up there in a moment if he could.
	No doubt.
	Yeah, and we gotta talk about more of this because I gotta tell you, Nick, I thought there was some dystopian shit last night.
	That rocket mortgage ad, which was basically like, corporations are buying family homes and you'll never afford one.
	Get rid of all your childhood dreams.
	That was...
	That was bleak stuff.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I told you before we recorded that, like, I got to tell you, if I was on that campaign and I was a writer, I probably would have written that.
	That's exactly what I would have been like, rocket mortgage, Barbie, like, perfect.
	Let's get, you know, she's going to try and buy her house and she needs to find a mortgage company to help finance it.
	Like, you know, it made sense to me in a way, but also I was kind of retching.
	And by the way, there, there's something else there, which is really interesting.
	And this will lead into our really, really good conversation with Kelly Weil here in a second, which is, You know, it is a really effective ad campaign because the psychology at the heart of it, which says you dreamed of something as a child.
	Guess what?
	You're not going to be able to get that unless you rely on this tech company, right?
	That's a very visceral psychological appeal.
	I mean, that and that's what that's what advertising is going back to Edward Bernays, which is Freudian fears.
	And it's it's it is an effective campaign.
	But I have to tell you, when you see through the veneer of it, that is Terrifying.
	Which, by the way, speaking of a segue, is what leads people to look for conspiracy theories and comfort with conspiracy theory cultures, which is something that we're going to talk about here in just a second with Kelly Weil, the author of Off the Edge.
	We'll be right back.
	Alright everybody, we are back with Kelly Weil from The Daily Beast, who is the author of the new and upcoming book Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything.
	Kelly, thanks so much for joining us.
	Thanks for having me.
	So, listen, we're living in this weird era of conspiracy theories, strange beliefs.
	They're being used for so many different ends at this point.
	It is an absolute necessity that people understand this stuff.
	But before we get into the nuts and bolts of all of this, from one person who has been obsessed with conspiracy theories, what they are and why they work and what they do, I got to ask, how did you get into this line of work?
	Um, I have always been looking at weird stuff on the internet just as a personal interest.
	And then, um, it became much more of a professional interest going into the 2016 election.
	Suddenly my lurking and weird forums became something that was professionally necessary.
	So, um, my interest in conspiracy theories and particularly flat earth emerged out of that work that I was doing day to day when monitoring the far right.
	And when it came to Flat Earth in particular, I was actually monitoring extremist forums and I saw a lot of people who were going from preaching these really virulent views to just talking about how the earth was flat.
	And for a while I thought they were kidding or this was some in joke or they didn't fully believe it.
	And so I dug deeper and I found that they were really committed to this Impossible belief.
	And I've never fully detached myself since then.
	Well, does that make sense to you?
	Because, you know, we all had this belief for thousands of years up until we didn't, right?
	Like it kind of almost makes sense that people would fervently believe it even now.
	Or is that crazy?
	You know, it is and it isn't.
	It's pretty easy to convince people of flat earth theory.
	But what you need to understand is that for thousands of years, we've been pretty firmly on the globe model.
	And that's because even though the evidence of your own eyes can suggest that Earth looks kind of flat when you're, what, you're 5'10 off the ground or something like that.
	But we can tell by pretty easy observational evidence, like watching a sunset, that Earth is round.
	So this hasn't been a prevailing model for a long time.
	But what's crept back in over the past 200 or so years Are people who are saying disregard the scientific evidence, disregard the very simple experiments that you can do with the horizon, with shadows, with stars, and just trust what you can see with your own eyes.
	And as we know, our own eyes are misleading.
	They're limited.
	But that has given people enough fuel to really buy into this fringe theory.
	You know, one of the things I really appreciate about your book is not only sort of the contextual and the modern investigation of this stuff, but you get really into the batshit history of flat-eartherism.
	And I got to tell people, to pick up this book simply for these backstories, we're talking about ridiculous periscope experiments.
	Straight up liars and grifters.
	At one point, there is a person writing not only a novel, but composing bizarre, rousing songs about flat-eartherism.
	And I got to ask you, as you started getting deeper and deeper into the history of this thing, I mean, you have to be charmed by it, despite the fact that it really is kind of being used for nefarious purposes now?
	You know, in some ways, yeah, I did have to be charmed, especially our our sheet music writing author, a wealthy English woman named Lady Elizabeth Blunt.
	She was just an eccentric who just can't help but warm my heart.
	But it is very interesting seeing these archetypes of, I mean, for lack of a better word, kind of weird people emerge and evolve over the years and So often when I was reading about someone who was working in 1850, I could sort of graft that personality into conspiracy theorists I know today.
	One of the originators of modern flatter theory.
	He was initially a kind of lefty fellow who ran a failed socialist commune.
	And I'm like, man, do I know so many guys who are just, he was like, Like Huffing, not Helium, I'm gonna forget the name, but I think it was a dental numbing agent.
	It's like, okay, so this guy is vaguely leftish, kind of a slacker, doing drugs, and decides that he's gonna get into Flat Earth Theory.
	Like, that's someone that I know today.
	So, you know, you can see that this theory is harmful, that it's wrong, and you can still be charmed with individuals, It happens to me in my historical work and meeting people in modern day settings.
	Well, is it clear to you when you meet people and sort of get the sense of who they are that they are functioning people in society that are not, you know, the people who you'd find with severe mental problems that would need help to function, right?
	These are people who can function day to day.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And I mean, listen, any community has a range of functions.
	Certainly, Flat Earth speaks to people who are feeling vulnerable or who are seeking some kind of assistance.
	But so many Flat Earthers I met are really normal.
	Some of them are quite smart, you know.
	I met a guy who was doing amateur rocket launches in steam-powered rockets that he rode.
	And that's pretty tough.
	You've got to have a pretty solid basis in physics.
	You can't be an idiot doing that.
	So that's something that struck me in so many of my conversations with flat earthers over the years is they're not dumb.
	They are selecting the information that they choose to accept as true.
	And I think that's that's something that a lot of people do.
	It's not just flat earthers.
	Yeah, something I talk about a lot on here is, you know, I come from a family that is absolutely drowning in conspiracy theories.
	And, you know, my first introduction to it was the New World Order conspiracy theory, which my family totally believed in because they were part of an evangelical movement that had, you know, the fire and brimstone.
	But when I started investigating it, what I found was that the New World Order conspiracy theory was an explanation for neoliberal globalism.
	It was the reason why economics were changing.
	A lot of what we're looking at here with Flat Earth, I was wondering if you could put it in the context of why this came about and what the use of it was, because obviously conspiracy theories are about giving an alternative explanation to events and contemporary moments and changes.
	Can you talk about where this thing came from and why it landed on this really, really bizarre narrative?
	Absolutely.
	And you're totally right that the function of a conspiracy theory is to offer an alternative narrative when people feel like the available information is lacking or it doesn't affirm their priors.
	I think flatter theory has always worked sort of as a reaction.
	It's an anti-science theory.
	It's very often a very intensely religious theory, although there's no reason it strictly needs to be.
	But one of the things that helped flatter theory thrive when it started emerging in the 1800s was It was coming out parallel to a world where science was gaining increased hold and increased significance in people's lives.
	New theories of evolution were becoming more and more credible and centered, and it was forcing people to re-evaluate their position in the world with relation to who are we as a species, who are we in relation to our theology, and Flat Earth Let people push back on that and say, no, science is not only is it wrong about the, uh, you're descended from an ape thing.
	It's wrong about everything and maliciously.
	So the scientists know earth is flat and they're covering it up.
	So even from its origins, flat earth worked as a, uh, as a reactionary force.
	And I think it's continued in that vein.
	Um, like I said, there's no,
	Strict reason Flat Earth needs to be very religious, you can apply the theory in just geological terms if you'd like, but you go to a Flat Earth conference and most folks there are quite religious, they're biblical literalists, and the current incarnation of Flat Earth theory lets people believe a very religiously centered universe where there's probably no such thing as outer space, there's just this
	Very contained area that is strictly God's domain and it really brings the universe into a small and easily graspable focus point.
	Yeah, and on the science front, I was going to ask about this because, you know, when I was doing research, what I found was, and it's weird because when you think about science, it just seems like it's sort of this Objective empirical idea that has no class borders.
	It has no economic borders.
	But in fact, science is a very regimentally like, you know, dichotomy.
	There are a bunch of people who understand this.
	They have specialized knowledge.
	They go and get educations.
	They're schooled in these things.
	And then you have a lot of people who kind of are being oppressed by that idea or they feel detached from it.
	And I was wondering if you've noticed like sort of a socioeconomic Part of this, people who have either been, you know, quote unquote, left behind or feel like that they don't have a place in the modern world.
	Like what what what what is the makeup of a person who is willing to believe this kind of stuff?
	I think social, excuse me, I think social isolation is often a component to people's Flat Earth belief.
	A lot of people arrive at Flat Earth because they don't They don't feel embraced by the available answers and they don't feel like they fit in with available narratives.
	And Flat Earth isn't just a conspiracy theory.
	It offers community.
	And I think that's really lacking for a lot of people who get into it.
	So people will buy into Flat Earth and very quickly set up like a YouTube page for themselves.
	They'll become a minor personality in this In this community that takes place very largely online and they make new friends.
	There's all these dramatic entanglements in the flat earth world.
	So, um, I'm not sure it's always so much socioeconomic.
	I mean, I, I, um, I've met plenty of flat earthers who are comfortable paying quite a good deal to travel to conferences, although obviously that's a self-selecting set.
	Um, but it's, uh, it speaks to people I think who feel isolated, um, and, Look for both alternative answers and alternative communities.
	So, you know, there's a party trick I might do, you know, to entertain where I might talk a little bit about, you know, the lunar landing and, you know, how that might be, you know, not really that really didn't happen.
	And people laugh.
	It's kind of, you know, a little bit of a joke.
	You wouldn't do that, obviously, to Buzz Aldrin directly.
	You're talking around this a little bit.
	I am.
	Well, listen, she doesn't know my extensive background in some of these things, but the reason why I set that up is because I'm wondering if in this world that we live in, in the society we live in, can Flat Earthers sort of exist as a kind of quirky subset of people, or is this nefarious?
	You know, it's interesting, and I think my answer has changed a bit over the course of my time with them.
	I also think Flat Earth has changed a bit You know, when I first encountered Flat Earth, I did think it was a bit quirkier.
	I thought it was kind of funny.
	You know, obviously wrong, but it's Flat Earth.
	You can laugh a little bit.
	And now I think that it doesn't coexist very nicely alongside the rest of reality.
	Sure, I mean, to my point earlier, a lot of Flat Earthers are very nice people.
	They're smart enough you wouldn't really know in conversation.
	But I think it's such a, unlike other conspiracy theories, like if you believe chemtrails in the sky or whatever, it's such an all-encompassing worldview, literally, that you gotta chuck out a lot of your mutual reality that you previously shared with other people.
	You gotta chuck out a lot of that common ground.
	And I do think, although, you know, you can, I can easily hang out with flat-earthers, I do it all the time, you, It becomes harder to coexist in a shared setting.
	Can you tell us about chemtrails too?
	Sure.
	Chemtrails is the theory that when you see an airplane go across the sky and there's the white trail behind it, what that really is, is condensation.
	That's all it is?
	I've always wondered.
	I've never known.
	I don't know what to believe about it, but that's all it is?
	Condensation?
	Yeah, it's like just normal Condensation, probably whatever terrible greenhouse gases are coming out of planes all the time.
	But what Chemtrail believers will say is that it's it's chemicals that are meant to control the population, their mind control drugs, their, you know, agents of genocide, whatever.
	And, oh, I mean, let's control clouds or something like that.
	I don't know.
	You know, it's funny.
	So many of these things do have like some There is cloud seeding, you know, for people during droughts.
	Sometimes you can seed clouds to get some rain going, but that's not actually what happens.
	You know, Kelly, I really appreciated that in the beginning of this book, you have a little bit of an anecdote where you're talking about conspiracy theory thinking, and you admit that after a few drinks, you're more than willing to talk about how you believe that the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh probably included more conspirators than McVeigh, uncharged accomplices, which, by the way, is a belief I happen to hold as well.
	I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about sort of why, and on one hand, there are conspiracies out there.
	There are things, obviously, that happen.
	But, like, the difference in this.
	So, for instance, you and I holding that belief doesn't mean that we're then going to get recruited into QAnon groups and communities that are preparing for military coups or white supremacist, extremist, malicious separatists who, you know, are preying on those people online.
	I was wondering if you could talk about, like, what the difference is between looking at these things, seeing them, and these activating sort of things that are happening, particularly on the far right.
	Absolutely, and to your point that conspiracies happen, of course they do.
	Any coordination between people, you know, I'm gonna conspire with my husband to make a nice dinner tonight, like, big deal, right?
	But it's, There's a fairly strict definition of conspiracy theories that I reference right up front because otherwise I feel like all kinds of meanings can get dragged into it.
	And when we say conspiracy theories, I mean a deliberate plot carried out with malice and covered up after the fact.
	You can believe that conspiracies happen because they do.
	I think it is a very normal human impulse to go looking for those answers.
	Very often they're right.
	Things, people conspire a thousand times a day.
	The difference between looking into those theories and going off the edge, I have to keep invoking that, is that believing that there is good evidence that the Oklahoma City bombing was more involved than we heard in court is not An all-encompassing worldview for me.
	It doesn't really dictate my life.
	It's just it's something that I've read quite a bit about and said, yeah, that's probably a historically accurate argument.
	And I'm willing to hear more information about it.
	What happens instead with people who get very into conspiracy theories as we're addressing them in this podcast is that it becomes much more of a an identity for them.
	It becomes much more of a social pull for them.
	And they get into these affinity groups where I am with the people who believe Earth is flat.
	I am with the people who believe in great replacement theory or something like that.
	It becomes much more of a driving influence in their lives than being like, hey, you want to go get a beer and talk about McVeigh?
	Because I do.
	Yeah.
	And on that note, so I think there's something interesting happening with this, which is content creation, particularly in this economic moment.
	So, for instance, we do this podcast because we kind of try and do a little bit more of a deep political historical context of what's going on and keeping track of the far right.
	That's sort of our marketing niche, you know, to go ahead and pull back the curtain and be honest about how these things work.
	For you to go out, you could start like an Oklahoma City bombing podcast and there would definitely be people who would be into that.
	But this feels like such a larger sort of a marketing demographic, right?
	And now all of a sudden you have I don't know.
	I was really interested.
	I can't remember the name of it.
	The Netflix documentary about the Flat Earthers.
	Behind the Curve.
	Yes.
	And what I found infinitely fascinating about it were the personalities, the backstabbing, who was more influential than who, which happens in all of these online communities.
	And it feels a little bit Like, it is about this very, very small pond, and maybe it's not that small anymore, but it's a small pond where, like, you can be a big fish in it.
	Like, it feels like there's some sort of a marketing demographic niche thing happening here.
	Yeah, that's very much true, and you'll see that if you go to a Flat Earth Conference.
	You know, I go to these things, and I've watched some people's videos, so I have a vague sense of who they are.
	I've got the program lineup.
	I've got, you know, people's little thumbnail faces.
	I'm trying to identify them.
	Everybody else around you at a Flat Earth Conference knows these speakers like they're celebrities.
	And I thought that was really interesting because none of these people are huge voices on the Internet.
	You look them up, they've got, okay, you know, 30,000 followers.
	That's not bad.
	But that's not a celebrity outside this small world.
	I think Flat Earth and conspiracy theories at large Really, they really thrive online because they let people sort of seal themselves into this influencer ecosystem.
	And I think that's a very powerful drive for a lot of people who want some measure of fame or influence, or sometimes cynically, they just want money.
	And for the people who choose not to be an influencer, but to watch, They develop often very parasocial relationships with these figures.
	Maybe Justin Bieber won't notice you online, but the singer-songwriter Flat Earth Man very much might respond to one of your comments.
	So it becomes a community.
	It is driven by content creation and by sort of micro-celebrity status.
	I wonder, Jared, you're asking for yourself and your Sunday Bourbon Talks.
	But here's my question, a couple, but one quick one would be, the Flat Earthers, are they going to buy your book?
	I don't know.
	I don't especially care, to be honest.
	You know, listen, it's a weird, it's a weird relationship because you talk to people for years.
	And like, I was talking to one guy who I personally like, and he's like, Listen, I know your book is going to be a bash job on flat earth.
	And it's like, you know, I've never made any bones about it.
	I don't agree with flat earth, but I try to cover everybody empathetically, um, as people and listen to what they have to say.
	Not so much always their argument for the shape of the earth, but why they landed there.
	And if they, um, if they buy it, I hope they find an accurate likeness of themselves in it.
	Now, what does the Venn diagram look like between right-wing people and Flat Earthers?
	That's increasingly a circle.
	It didn't used to be that way.
	And just like I said, there's no reason that Flat Earth necessarily needs to be religious.
	There's no reason it really needs to be political.
	But something's happened in the conspiracy world over the past Five, ten years.
	It's what the journalist Anna Merlin calls the conspiracy singularity, where it used to be that maybe you were a flat earth guy or you were a chemtrails guy.
	Now there's a lot more bleed over.
	It seems like now there's just if you believe in one, it's becoming part of an increasingly cohesive worldview where people believe in a ton of these things.
	So whereas I think 2018, I was Asking a lot of flat earthers at a conference like, hey, are you into QAnon?
	And they were like, nah, that's I'm not really I don't vote or whatever.
	It was a lot more explicit even the following year at a conference.
	So it's yeah, it's there are definitely left wing flat earthers and there's no reason it needs to be a conservative theory.
	But it is, I think, very useful to the right.
	And it's a conspiracism has become increasingly a right wing identity.
	So it makes sense.
	So on that, Kelly, I think you and I were similar in this.
	When I first got on the Internet, the first thing that I did was I started going to some really out there conspiracy theory websites, forums.
	When I got online, I wanted to see the farthest reaches that were there.
	And that was all that I was interested in.
	And I have to assume much like you, I have spent years prior to this moment trying to talk to anyone who would listen to me about conspiracy theories.
	Why people believe them, what they say, and what they could possibly lead to.
	That's weird shit, trying to talk to people about that.
	And some people are into it, which is one of the reasons why people like me and Nick have, you know, this podcast together, is because we are interested in those things.
	But a lot of people just don't want to discuss it.
	There's now a reason to discuss it as a society.
	And I have my own theory on this, but I would love to hear from you why you think people don't want to discuss these things, except for the fact that now it's like a national, societal, worldwide threat.
	You know, I think people want to believe that conspiracy theorists are crazy or they're just a really little fringe.
	As I cover in this book, conspiracy thinking is a pretty normal human process.
	I mean, one thing that's let us thrive as a species is we can make these connections, right?
	We will look at a scenario and say, why is this happening?
	And if we don't have all the information, we start to speculate.
	So theorizing is very natural to us.
	And I had to put in, you know, my own susceptibility to conspiracy theories, talking about like McVeigh stuff.
	Or just one anecdote, I remember being at a flat earth conference and you're trying to sort of, you know, buddy up with people and be like, Hey, you know, I'm sure I believe in some theories too.
	And they're like, Oh yeah, which ones?
	I'm like, do you want to talk about us intervention in Latin America?
	It's, it's a conspiracy.
	It's not all proven.
	So I guess some of it's a theory.
	All of that is to say that we don't really like to see ourselves as comparable with flat earthers because what they believe is so weird to most people.
	And it is a weird theory, it's an incorrect theory, but a lot of the thought processes are actually quite familiar to us.
	So if I had to guess why people shy away from reckoning with this, it's because it also involves some self-reflection.
	I couldn't agree more.
	I think it's such a feature of our species.
	And the reason why we've been able to do what we've been able to do is that sort of reckoning with ideas and all of it.
	And Nick, I think you and I have had enough conversations about it.
	Like, you know, when you start seeing patterns, at least you can sort of like pump the brakes for a second and wonder, is there an actual pattern or is your like homo sapien brain trying to put something together, right?
	Yeah, well, I mean part of the thing is it's like why do we like true crime podcasts?
	We want to solve it, right?
	There's a thing.
	But what's interesting about Flat Earth to me is there is no solving.
	This is not 9-11 you're trying to solve like who's behind that or JFK, right?
	This is, you know, a matter of like just faith, right, at this point.
	And that's why I think it becomes a specifically different kind of conspiracy.
	Is that fair to say, Kelly?
	I think that is, yeah, that's a very interesting way of thinking of it.
	And the way that they go about engaging with it is, yeah, it's less solving like a JFK mystery and more they will, they're trying to prove it.
	They go into it with the fairly preconceived notion that Earth is flat and so what a lot of believers will do is conduct experiments that they think will vindicate their thoughts.
	They'll go out in the desert with laser pointers.
	They'll try and take pictures of the horizon that they say affirms their beliefs.
	But that's not so much trying to solve a mystery.
	I think where the solving comes in, and this is actually where Flat Earth becomes at its most politically potent and its most worrying, I think, is when they try and figure out who's behind the cover-up.
	And that's where they'll start invoking some very loaded language about, you know, the New World Order.
	I've had many people just straight up tell me anti-Semitic stuff when I ask, you know, who's behind it.
	So that that if there's any element of solving, it's less of the it's less of watching the Zapruder film and more of inputting people's own political biases.
	Well, you know how we talk, you know, because, you know, pot is a marijuana is a gateway to like a life of crime.
	Right.
	So I wonder if our flatter is a flat earther conspiracy.
	Is that a gateway as well?
	Would you feel?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	You know, I will say Flat Earth is usually pretty far down the conspiracy pipeline.
	I don't meet too many people who are like, who go from zero to Flat Earth.
	It does happen.
	It does happen.
	But I will say that once you're in Flat Earth, people jump to all kinds of other stuff.
	People jump to apocalypticism.
	They jump to QAnon.
	So it's, yeah, one of the best predictors for believing in a conspiracy theory is believing in another conspiracy theory, Flat Earth being one of them.
	So what is the gateway then?
	Is there, you know, a dip in your toe that you found?
	9-11.
	For so many Flat Earthers, it's 9-11.
	And that's where I kind of say that Flat Earth doesn't need to be politically loaded, or at least it wasn't always so politically loaded, because 9-11 has a lot of lefty truthers as well.
	And so, so many Flat Earthers I've spoken to got into it because they were watching 9-11 YouTube videos and got recommended Flat Earth.
	Again, not one gateway, but if I had to pick one, that's the one.
	So back in 2018, I started paying attention to a little thing called QAnon and, you know, kind of trying to track where it was going, what it was doing.
	You know, now, of course, the Q quotation has sort of fallen off the flat earth.
	You know, we've reached a point in which the QAnon principles are existing in the body politic.
	Not even under the name QAnon.
	For some of the true believers, obviously, in the communities it is, but it's just sort of become an organizing principle for a lot of other conspiracy theories, a lot of authoritarianism, a lot of anti-democratic ideas.
	What do you see on the horizon for conspiracy theories?
	What are you watching right now in terms of where these things are going?
	What may be a new contender for the crown is?
	What are the trends that you're paying attention to at this point?
	I mean, most worrying for me is election denialism.
	And what's weird is that I think that's a bit more reality-like than Flat Earth.
	Certainly it's equally false, but it exists in the same universe.
	But why I think that is the way of the future is, one, it has a very immediate And it's also built up on these conspiracy networks that we've been watching push much more benign things over the years.
	We've been watching them push flat earth or, you know, naturopathic healing, whatever, crystals.
	And so many of those networks have gone to promoting really, really far-right content.
	And it's being very much normalized, like you say, into the body politic.
	I was writing just the other day about An elected official in Colorado who got up on the stage right after someone called for the hanging of her political opponent on that stage, you know, and that was for the supposed crime of election fraud, which never happened.
	So that's where I'm seeing a lot of conspiratorial energy going, um, is taking these preexisting networks, um, these networks that formed over maybe, maybe more, uh, Out there theories that we could laugh at and coalescing around genuine calls to political violence.
	I'm glad you brought the political side of it up because I'm wondering if you had encountered in your research major, major political figures completely and utterly validating a lot of these things like we've seen in the last couple of years even.
	Had that been a thing?
	I don't mean like, you know, your fringe congressmen or something like that.
	I'm talking about people who are leading the party.
	Yeah, I mean, listen, Trump's whole thing right now is election denialism, and he is very much the leader of the Republican Party, whether you like it or not.
	And it's yeah, it's he has a whole media apparatus around him, Fox News and worse, that are all in on that lie.
	That's that's very worrying.
	And you see that in other countries with far right leadership, Brazil, Hungary.
	And yeah, and I think something like that is much more believable and potent than if Trump got up on stage and said, Earth is flat.
	So, yeah, I think what even 10 years ago we would have regarded as just something disqualifyingly false from a politician is now being reconciled with pretty surprising ease in their fans.
	So I watched a lot of family members and a lot of friends and a lot of community people I grew up with just absolutely lost in not just Trumpism, QAnon, you know, election denial, a lot of really, really radicalizing things.
	I always noticed that that coincided with financial trouble.
	It coincided with relationship trouble and especially isolation and feeling lonely, feeling like they don't have networks.
	Obviously, these are people who, you know, these communities get formed.
	They're there for one another.
	They're bound together.
	It's an in group versus an out group.
	The times where I've seen people emerge from that.
	has been when they found other networks.
	They found other groups of people to be around, particularly people who were actually around them physically, whether it was family or relationships or churches or whatever.
	I was wondering if you could speak to what not necessarily cures this, but what have you seen or what have you found that does something here?
	Yeah, I think having a real community is just a profoundly grounding effect.
	And I think we can't underplay that.
	And I also think it's no coincidence that we've seen a surge in conspiracy theories coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, right?
	When people lost a lot of real world connections and spent quite a lot more time online in these sort of tenuous relationships, both with people and with truth.
	When I speak to ex-Flat Earthers, and I do with a couple in this book, Something that they told me that helped them the most was having a community that was waiting to receive them when they left Flat Earth.
	It was having friends and family who didn't mock them when they said, you know what, I think this theory was wrong.
	People who accepted them and said, okay, cool, welcome back, you know, we still love you.
	I think it can be harder to embrace that return when it's something more More violent or more hateful.
	It can, I think, be hard to embrace someone who months earlier was calling for racist action or for political executions.
	And yet, I think one of the best things we can do is give them a soft landing.
	People stay in these communities because they are fearful of what will happen when they leave.
	To be able to welcome people back to reality, I think, is one of the most helpful things we can do.
	I'm curious, your thoughts, if you thought about this, is there an inflection point between the percentage of the population that believes in, let's just choose flat-eartherism, it could be a bunch of other conspiracies, and the destruction of democracy?
	I'm wondering if there's a direct line connection, if you feel like there's anything related to that.
	I mean, I do think it's interesting, and I do think a lot of these conspiracy movements, either deliberately or not, have very anti-democratic bents.
	Again, I think so much of it goes to not just that, for some reason, Flat Earth would be an anti-democratic theory, but the way that it's been used throughout its entire history.
	You know, it's been often used for right-wing reaction.
	So I think, listen, anybody can make a conspiracy theory.
	But they are so popular on the right because I think they allow us to erode at the shared idea of truth, which I think is a very foundational necessity for a democracy.
	So when you start bringing in these outright lies, yeah, it's no surprise to me that the erosion of that shared sense of reality does lead to a loss of democratic values.
	So we've been speaking with Kelly Weil, who is with The Daily Beast, and the author of the upcoming book, Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything.
	I have to tell you, everyone listening, I don't think you expected you needed to buy a book about flat eartherism, but you absolutely do.
	It cannot be more important, timely, relevant, and this is a fantastic book.
	Kelly, thank you so much for coming on.
	Where can the good people find you?
	I am extremely online.
	I'm on Twitter too much.
	It's just my name.
	Kelly Weil, and yeah, my book is out there now.
	All right.
	Thank you so much, Kelly.
	Thank you.
	All right, everybody, that was Kelly Weil, who, again, is a journalist with The Daily Beast and the author of the new book, Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy, Culture and Why People Will Believe Anything.
	Really, really good book.
	I can't recommend it enough.
	I got to tell you, Nick, I try and wrap my head around the flat earth idea.
	Like what they actually believe, which is just not only that it's flat, but, you know, that maybe there's a dome.
	What exactly is happening there?
	It is such a far out there type thing.
	But, you know, I think like Kelly gets into it really doesn't matter how far off the map this stuff is.
	Like it's got really important intrinsic value for some people.
	And I mean, it makes total sense why people get caught up in this stuff.
	Well, first I just want to thank you for letting me be part of the interview, considering my background and where that could have gone, so I appreciate that.
	Can we just have a quick moment just you and me?
	You were trying so diplomatically not to tell Kelly that you think that possibly the moon landing.
	That was so kind, but also self-serving.
	That was like, I think that's an all-time moment for the podcast.
	That was something.
	Well, you know, anyway, I needed to, you know, set the stage a little bit better for the night when I was doing, but, you know, but yeah, it's just fascinating to me to think, you know, This is the conspiracy too.
	Where do these groups of people go and what is that effect going to be overall on everything?
	And, you know, my big question we can explore in the next show too would be something like, you know, was Trump's reaction His political reaction to COVID, for instance, the death of democracy.
	Is that the moment where it would, you know, because think about the cascade and the conspiracy, like, you know, that could be a conspiracy.
	But like, I just do feel like that that could be the moment that like unleashed so many different things.
	And at the time we couldn't tell.
	We were outraged.
	We were upset because we understood like science.
	But I don't know if we all realize that this was a signal and this opened up the stuff that is now leading us to a path we don't want to be on.
	Well, I think it just, I think it took a lot of, and we've covered this and we've talked about this, it took a lot of the distrust that has been brewing for decades.
	And, you know, everybody points at Watergate.
	Watergate's part of it, but starting, you know, in the very beginning of the Cold War, and I'm glad Kelly brought this up, like our operations in, like, Latin America and our operations around the world, like, there's a reason to distrust Official reality, because a lot of it is weaponized by the people who are in power and who have the money and the means to do this stuff.
	I mean, you know, we've been covering this convoy situation in Canada.
	There's a reason to distrust the conventional story, which, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post are like, man, these are a bunch of anti-vax truckers.
	And it's like, well, that's part of it, right?
	There's so much more underneath the surface.
	I don't know.
	What Trump did was just use that energy, that bubble.
	It's like Ghostbusters 2.
	You know, all of that.
	I know that's a rough little movie.
	I hear you.
	I didn't see it.
	You didn't see Ghostbusters 2?
	I don't think I saw it.
	I can't even know if I can admit it, but I don't think I saw it.
	I didn't see it.
	You didn't see Ghostbusters 2?
	I think it came out when I was in high school, and it was like, I'm not going to go see that.
	That's incredible.
	I'll say this, and this is a little bit of nostalgia.
	I think there are parts of Ghostbusters 2 that are interesting.
	Not a great movie, interesting movie.
	So in Ghostbusters 2, which I'll bring Nick along on this one, and for anybody who hasn't seen it, there's like this There's like this slime underneath the city that's just like churning through everything and it's reacting to things, right?
	And eventually it comes up and it affects everything in the city.
	I think that's that distrust, like, and Watergate, of course, is the, you know, the cherry on top of the shit, like, and, you know, the Kennedy assassination, of course, all the Cold War operations, all of these anti-democratic, anti-leftist operations around the world, that stuff existed.
	And Trump, I think, by, you know, by hook, by crook, by a bunch of people advising him and telling him what to do, was able to use it and just really set it loose.
	And I think Kelly nailed it, which is that this the big lie election bullshit is going to be a hell of a gateway for a lot of people.
	And it's really going to destroy democracy in a lot of ways that I don't even know that we can wrap our heads around yet.
	Yeah, I would like to think, okay, take a step back.
	The Trump presidency was a great experiment.
	And you would hope that you'd see like, this was an experiment was a failure.
	But instead, you got people who like want to find the next, you know, the insane Dr. Evil to like perform another experiment on them and find out what happens that that's I don't think anyone would have called that on their bingo card.
	I'm just going to take that quote out of context.
	Nick Halseman, the Trump presidency was a great experiment.
	Just let that linger out there.
	He got elected.
	Maybe we're like, OK, look, maybe, you know, the adults in the room, he'll change whatever the weight of the presidency itself, whatever.
	So I think people were like, OK, look, whatever.
	But at the very least, yeah, if we wanted to put a put a fucking cherry on a piece of shit, let's call that that was the experiment.
	And we realize now how important it is to not do that anymore.
	But man, not enough people are realizing that.
	No, it's real bad.
	And, you know, the problem is that this conspiracy theory problem isn't going to go away.
	It's been with us for millennia.
	I mean, like I said, I tracked it back to Rome.
	I have to assume if I dug deeper, it would go back to, you name it, right?
	I mean, it's part of the human experience.
	It's just when people use it for terrible, terrible means.
	All right, everybody.
	Reminder, we're going to have a live show this Thursday, February 17th at 7 p.m.
	Eastern.
	If you want to tune in for that, and if you want additional content from us, and if you want to support the podcast, we rely on you and we appreciate it.
	All you got to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
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	Eastern, and that will be off of our Patreon page.
	Thank you so much for your support.
	If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.

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