Premium Episode 232: Helen Keller Isn't Real (Sample)
Tik Tok get their hands on the deaf blind historical figure and the results are confounding. Liv once again takes us down a maddening path into the viral joke / rumor / conspiracy theory that Helen Keller either wasn't real or was faking her disability. Apologies in advance.
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Liv Agar: http://livagar.com / http://linktr.ee/livagar
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to the 232nd premium chapter of the QAA Podcast, the Helen Keller episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Aker, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we are debunking Helen Keller.
She is a liar, and people only like her because she pretended to be deaf and blind.
To defend this point, I will now throw to the head of our fact-checking division, Liv Agar.
She has a PhD in Hellenic Kellerism and a Master's in BDLE, or Blind Deaf Liars, exposed.
Liv?
For a second, I thought that acronym was DDLG, and I got really confused.
What is DDLG?
Oh, you guys?
Oh, never mind.
No, tell us.
You have to tell us now.
No, we can move on.
No, I don't think so.
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't think we're moving on.
You wanted to stop the episode and make the reference, so... I'm gonna look it up if you don't tell us.
I thought maybe Julian would get it and then he would laugh and we would move on and I wouldn't have to explain it.
No, no, no.
And poor Travis and Jake would just be left in the dust.
D-D-L-G.
Let me look this up.
D-D-L-G.
Dad's... Dad's doing good...
I'm surprised you didn't get that, honestly.
I see.
Good living.
Oh, Daddy Dom little girl.
Right, of course.
(laughing)
Okay, I actually--
I'm surprised you didn't get that, honestly.
Well, I'm not used to hearing the acronym, you know?
I see.
You've never seen discourse about it on Tumblr?
No, I really wasn't a Tumblr guy, but I have been a little girl,
and if there's any Daddy Doms out there, hit me up or whatever,
I'm willing to be your Princess Peach.
Julian in the designated little of the podcast.
Okay.
I'm the LG to any DDs.
Julian may have skimmed the script a little bit too briefly about the point of this episode.
Wait, so, okay, but we're taking down Helen Keller, right?
Mm-hmm, yeah.
I have a PhD in classics, aka Hellenic Kellerism.
Which, honestly, taking down Helen Keller would be pretty easy, because she has to keep up the, you know, the lie.
So if you go in judo, or if you trip her, or do that thing where you have someone on all four behind her, and then you push her over them, like, she has to just pretend to be like, oh, I'm surprised, and she would fall.
This is a great start to this episode of Babelism.
Oh, oh, okay.
Well, maybe I did misunderstand it.
Well, I mean, yeah, you know, take it away, prove me wrong.
Am I the asshole?
Reddit, am I the asshole?
At this point on the Q&A podcast, regular listeners should be aware of some of the conspiracy theories that have begun to spread on TikTok.
Things ranging from a test emergency update turning people into zombies, to CERN creating a shift in reality by turning on the Large Hadron Collider.
It's very clear that conspiracy theories, which are spread by the pill-to-the-gills QAnon-style individuals we've come to be so familiar with on the pod, have made their own on this newer social media site fairly comfortably.
Which shouldn't be a surprise.
TikTok excels at spreading misinformation, having a rather young and impressionable user base, and an almost entirely automated moderation system.
But despite the success that these sort of ideas have gotten on TikTok, they really aren't in the spirit of the type of conspiracy theories that are most likely to thrive there.
TikTok is far more commonly a catalyst for misinformation of a subtler, yet also remarkably far more reaching nature than the outwardly absurd conspiracy theories we feature so commonly on here.
The subject of today's episode concerns one of these conspiracy theories, related to Helen Keller, a deafblind author who wrote more than a dozen books, was at the forefront of socialist politics in the early 20th century, and was close friends with the likes of Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, and Alexander Graham Bell.
I initially encountered this theory, if you can call it that, through what appears to be a joke TikTok video from a user named Depressed Teriyaki Meat, which received 500,000 likes.
The video contains a woman sitting in her car in the middle of the night by herself.
She has raw eyes and a red face, and has clearly been crying before the video was recorded.
I just wanted to say Helen Keller's not fucking real, and I don't care who you are, but she's not fucking real.
Who the fuck?
Like, she wrote books?
No, she fucking didn't.
She's blind and deaf.
Also, TikTok, you need to make a front flash.
Comedic.
Yeah, and I have to admit, encountering this without knowing it was a trend, and understanding the ramifications of this trend, made me laugh.
The idea of someone so distressed about Helen Keller, quote, not being real, which is surely, obviously, ridiculous, to the point that she's crying in her car alone, It's kind of funny.
It's very classic Gen Z humor.
Someone making up a fake conspiracy theory of an oddly specific historical figure and quote unquote ironically believing it.
It's a fairly common Gen Z joke that has become a lot more popular since the rise of online conspiracy theories beginning at the start of the pandemic.
I also like the flawless transition to complaining about the TikTok app.
So that's, that's, uh, that was, that was very funny.
It doesn't have a front facing screen flash.
It's annoying.
You have to turn your phone around if you want the flashlight.
I mean, this is, you know, all things considered better than like the people who were dressing up as, let's say, Holocaust survivors and like making up stories or, you know, there are way worse things happening on TikTok than a girl making, you know, relatively tasteless joke.
You know, this is kind of, this is the new innocent.
Yeah, this is the, yeah.
So surely, I thought, this was one of those prodigal situations, and surely no one would actually believe that Helen Keller was faking it, right?
As it turns out, Over the span of the last three or so years on TikTok, starting at some point in April of 2020, the notion that either Helen Keller wasn't genuinely deafblind or that a deafblind person is physically incapable of authoring books has been repeated again and again and again ad infinitum in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of ableism.
In one word, it's almost entirely impossible to really tell how sincere those spreading the theory truly are being.
I mean, if you listed her friends earlier, we've got Mark Twain, wrote books.
We've got Charlie Chaplin, acted in movies.
Who was the third one?
Alexander Graham Bell, called people on the phone.
Invented the PlayStation.
Invented the PlayStation and called people on the phone a lot.
So all those things she can't do.
So how does this work?
Why wouldn't she just be friends with someone else?
Doesn't make any sense.
I'm going to amend the end of this episode to specifically talk about Julian's conspiracism.
We're going to add an extra 20 minutes.
I need to get on TikTok.
I feel like I'd get far.
Oh yeah, you'd get so much better.
At being a piece of shit?
I'm on TikTok, Julian.
You could follow me.
You could promote my channel.
Yeah, that's all I'm gonna do is re-talk or re-TikTok or whatever.
People talking about NBA.
Yeah, just do duets with me.
Yeah, duet.
Oh, this guy, he says the graphics are really good in this game.
You should repost my AI yearbook video trend where it photoshops you in like a high school yearbook thing.
Yeah.
That would really help.
I'm trying to boost my numbers there.
I really never go on TikTok.
It's incredible.
I never go on Instagram either, basically, except for research and once in a while when I really hate myself.
And I try never to go on Twitter, and I definitely don't go on Facebook.
So, I'm on my way to a place where I'm gonna, let's say I'm gonna Helen Keller myself.
The jokes surrounding Helen Keller on TikTok can essentially be placed on a spectrum.
On one side, you have people who think the idea that Helen Keller was faking it is so absurd and surely not actually held by anyone that parodying it is funny.
These types of jokes are essentially akin to the fairly viral birds aren't real fake conspiracy theory, which ironically posits that birds are spying machines made by the government.
On the other hand, you have the people who sincerely believe that those with deafblindness could not possibly become literate and that Helen Keller's achievements or deafblindness are made up.
One, it seems, is built around ignorance surrounding basic facts about what it's like to have deafblindness.
The other has only really spread, to the extent that it really has, as a result of ignorance surrounding how pervasive ableism is.
Because, I mean, surely even in her condition she could learn to read braille and then she could do sign language.
So, solved!
Debunked!
There's a couple ways.
She could also, um, like, touch people's throat and understand what they're saying
and mouth and understand what they're saying through like vibration slash because it's just
pattern recognition. That's advanced and that's what Homer Simpson was trying to do with Bart
Simpson before he killed him.
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