Episode 272: Solar Eclipses And The Politics of Fear feat. Arthur Goldwag
Americans sure love being paranoid. And they’re not always paranoid for sensible reasons, like ever-expanding corporate and governmental surveillance systems. Sometimes they’re paranoid about natural and predictable astronomical events.
For this episode we discuss why the conspiracist world is fretting about the solar eclipse that will be seen across the United States on April 8th. We also chat with Arthur Goldwag, author of the recently published book The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696775/the-politics-of-fear-by-arthur-goldwag/
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Music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to the 272nd chapter of the QAA podcast, the Solar Eclipses and the Politics of Fear episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky and Travis View.
We're living in a paranoid age.
Sometimes that paranoia is justified.
Other times, people are paranoid about natural astronomical phenomena.
Today, to explore the many flavors of paranoia, we're going to start by talking about the upcoming solar eclipse and how the internet's paranoids are reacting to it.
After that, we're going to talk to author Arthur Goldwag.
He recently published a book called The Politics of Fear, The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia.
And he has a lot of interesting things to say about why this kind of conspiracist paranoia is just so popular in every age.
So, I'm gonna kick it off to Jake, because he's been diving into, well, how people are reacting to the very terrifying prospect of the sun being blacked out, possibly forever.
Yeah, speaking of paranoia, let's talk about total solar eclipses.
We're about to have one on April 8th of next month.
Now, the path of totality, or where you can stand to see the moon totally block out the sun, is a pretty narrow line stretching all the way from Mexico to Maine and into Canada, passing over Texas, Illinois, and other states along the path.
Naturally, when any sort of impressive yet easily explained by modern science event is set to occur, us people on the ground get a little antsy, a little spendy, rattled.
Now, this is nothing new.
Human beings have been baking eclipses for centuries, and before scientists and researchers were able to explain that due to the alignment of the Earth, our moon, and the sun, that a total solar eclipse occurs every 18 months or so, many early civilizations believed they were some kind of sign or warning from the gods.
In ancient China, people believed that the event was actually a large dragon attempting to swallow the sun.
A dragon boy?
He's gonna swallow the sun!
Um...
They would dance and shout and play drums loudly so as to defend the sun from this massive serpent.
And it makes sense.
If you're a person in a village and you're on your way to Riverwood to sell the golden claw you found, you know, looking up and seeing the entire sun encased by a black sphere would be absolutely horrifying.
There's even some real research that suggests that ancient factions who had been battling one another for years laid down their arms and made peace in the wake of witnessing an eclipse.
Other historians suggest that whole villages packed up and moved to different locations, not wanting to wait around and find out what kind of horrible omens the eclipse might bring.
In ancient Greece, a total eclipse believed to take place during 7th century BCE was said to have been observed by the poet Archilochus, who wrote, quote, Nothing in the world can surprise me now.
For Zeus, the father of the Olympian, has turned midday into black night by shielding light from the blossoming sun.
And now, dark terror hangs over mankind.
Anything may happen.
And the sentiment is, you know, fairly similar today, I gotta say.
I mean, yeah.
Have you, I mean, did you see that, uh, the last eclipse back in 2017?
Um, I did.
Yes, I, I did.
I had the eclipse glasses, I remember.
I looked at it.
It was, it was cool.
A guy who I was working with at the time actually traveled to watch the eclipse from, uh, the path of totality.
Um, and we'll, we'll talk, we'll talk about that a little bit later.
These, these eclipse chasers.
And I thought that that was really interesting, you know?
It's kind of a, it lasts for only a couple minutes, but I sort of think it's one of those moments where you get to see really good special, like movie special effects, but in real life.
Yeah.
You know, actually, yeah, back in the last solar eclipse, I packed my family into the car, drove all the way up to Oregon to a small town called Madras.
And, um, there are lots of enterprising farmland owners who like rented out these small patches of their land for, for like a couple of hundred bucks for a couple of days.
Amazing.
And they yeah so so because like it was like all these weird small towns that happened to be in the path of totality all of a sudden were swarmed by people like me who needed some place to camp out and it was yeah it was really cool I was able to see it was just as just as described all of a sudden the yeah the the whole world turns dim for just a few moments you see the corona these circles of flame going around the sun as the moment is totally blacked out I mean, it's pretty cool.
I gotta say.
And, and, you know, the incredible geography that, you know, I can't remember the exact statistic, but it's something like the moon is 400, you know, the, fuck, they actually get the science right in the Alex Jones clip that I'm going to play earlier.
Of course, their explanation for it is bad, but the actual circumference of these two, you know, massive sort of solar objects works out just perfectly so that you, you get this, this perfect, these two concentric circles.
Scientists have been studying these eclipses now for so long and have pretty much figured out the math so that we can now predict when these eclipses are going to happen hundreds of years into the future.
I mean, if you go onto the Wikipedia page for solar eclipses, you will see dates going into the future of when more will happen.
So, you know, it's not an unknown sort of phenomenon.
But despite all this, still today, many people believe that solar eclipses are a warning from God.
And as recently as three days ago, professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones posted a nearly eight minute long video to Twitter about it.
The video is titled, quote, NWO Hijacks Upcoming Biblical Eve.
The biblical implications are massive.
Monday, April 8th, 2024, a total solar eclipse will shadow North America, crossing Mexico, the United States, and Canada, passing over eight United States cities named Nineveh, Drawing a myriad of similarities to the Assyrian eclipse that occurred during the time when Jonah approached Nineveh and urged the Assyrian people to repent.
Mathematically speaking, the astronomy of an eclipse is a miracle.
The sun is 400 times further from the earth than the moon.
The sun is 400 times larger than the moon.
And because of that, we can have an eclipse that God created as signs.
Which is why we come to the letter TOV, which means a sign or a mark, and its numerical value is 400!
It was 400.
Do you get it?
[ Laughter ]
It starts good.
It starts okay.
That's real.
The sun is, you know, 400 times the distance and it's 400 times the size.
And then he's like, and it's a sign from God!
He is literally a wild-eyed preacher.
His peepers are just stretched wide open in front of his audience.
And he says, do you get it?
It's like, Jesus.
Yeah, it goes off the rails real quick.
Now, I was curious about this Nineveh thing.
I was like, what are they talking about?
So, this video opens with the claim that the Eclipse will pass over eight states who have towns named Nineveh in them.
Eight crazy Ninevehs.
Now, according to InfoWars, this is significant because it relates to a passage in the Bible where Jonah, as in Jonah and the whale, same guy, is instructed by God to travel to Nineveh and convince the Ninevites to accept God, otherwise they will be destroyed.
In the Bible, the people heeded Jonah's warning, they fasted, and they all put on potato sacks as a sign of repentance to the one true God.
But what does this have to do with an eclipse?
Well, according to researchers, the biblical city of Nineveh was in what is known as Mosul now, in northern Iraq, and based on writings contained in Assyrian eponym lists, An eclipse did occur there on June 15, 763 BC.
The note about the event is fairly vague but does mention an eclipse, and that passage reads,
"Year of Bir Segal of Guzana, revolt in the city of Asur, in the month Simanu,
an eclipse of the sun took place." Okay.
So, you know, it doesn't seem like they were gushing about it or anything,
but biblical scholar Donald Wiseman, that's his real name, has suggested that the eclipse
coincided with Jonah's arrival in Nineveh, and is the reason the entire city repented so quickly.
Mmmmm.
But keep in mind, none of this has been proven.
The reference that Wiseman is referring to comes from the Old Testament book 2 Kings line 1425, which mentions that Jonah prophesied in Jeroboam II's kingdom.
There is no physical evidence linking Jonah, the eclipse, or the location.
All right?
All right.
Bringing it back to present day, the April 8th, 2024 total eclipse does not pass over eight cities named Nineveh, but rather two.
Now, I guess you could claim that this is still a significant coincidence, but given America's supremely Christian roots, it is unsurprising that there are multiple towns named after places in the Bible.
The InfoWars video goes on to explain that, quote, God is speaking directly to us through the eclipse to warn us about the current administration's nefarious plans.
Confronted by a new world order and a US president that is carrying out their silent war,
we are living in a time of reckoning, and through signs, God is speaking directly to those with ears to listen.
In Genesis 1-14, God declared the sun and the moon were for signs.
Right.
The only signs they can give is eclipses.
All right?
And the nice thing about eclipses, no false prophet can manipulate it.
Solar eclipse means judgment is coming upon a nation.
Since we've become a nation in 1776, there has only been Eight total solar eclipses that have completely crossed the United States.
Two of them occurred during the Revolutionary War.
Three of them occurred during the Civil War.
Two of them occurred during the Vietnam War.
Of those eight, So, you know, watching this, I thought, perhaps if the United States is involved in some kind of war almost every single time a total solar eclipse crosses over the entire country, maybe that says more about the United States than it does about the eclipse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It would be really more extraordinary if the eclipses only happened when the United States wasn't involved in the war.
And, you know, of course, to make matters even more complicated, Newsweek published an article yesterday with the headline, quote, National Guard to be deployed for solar eclipse 2024.
Now, the article goes on to explain that Oklahoma is tapping the National Guard to assist with a massive influx of tourists, after NASA named the Oklahoma City of Ittebell one of the quote, 13 best places to watch the eclipse.
So, local and federal law enforcement are encouraging residents to stock up on groceries and gas, as the area is going to be absolutely swamped with folks like Travis and his family, known as Eclipse Chasers.
It's like Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, but instead of driving around looking for tornadoes, you travel across the world catching solar eclipses from all of the best angles.
Which is sort of funny to me, because this is an event that, you know, by the time it's visible in the United States, will last about four minutes.
Even though law enforcement and military agencies have repeatedly stated that the reinforcements are solely there to assist local resources being stretched, you know, due to the boom in visitors, many conspiracy influencers have taken to TikTok to bake the upcoming solar event and are almost certain it means either impending civil war or some type of biblical event akin to the Great Flood portrayed in the Bible.
Here's a video from John Savage, a religious TikTok influencer who has over 100,000 followers on the platform.
Did you know that the solar eclipse happening on April 8th is a lot more crucial than you think?
Jesus spoke about Matthew that this evil, adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except for the sign that happened in the days of the prophet Jonah.
In Luke it says, As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be as the coming of the Son of Man.
But you will not believe the path of the solar eclipse will take.
It'll cross over several towns named Nineveh and even Rapture, Indiana.
But that's not even the crazy part.
It also goes over the Ark.
And it'll happen under the constellation Cetus, which means whale, which is what swallowed up Jonah.
Subscribe right now if you want to learn more about Jesus and be ready when he comes back.
I don't feel that's actually useful information about Jesus at all.
So that video that we watched about Jonah and the flood, that got over 3 million plays on TikTok.
It was one of the most popular videos when you search for Eclipse.
Here's another video from a TikTok user called Holy Ghost Culture, and in the video, which received almost half a million plays at the time of this recording, the influencer claims it's not floods we'll have to worry about, but instead, massive earthquakes.
Stop and listen.
I'm about to tell you some things about the eclipse that you have not heard yet.
No, I'm not going to talk about how it forms the illa for the tav, or how it goes through all the cities of Nineveh.
More importantly, I'm going to talk about something in our past.
Did you know that in 1811, we had a solar eclipse that was preceded two weeks earlier by a partial lunar eclipse?
This is the second solar eclipse that we had in the early 1800s.
The reason this is important is because following these, in the year 1811, we had earthquakes.
Over 2,000 to be exact, followed by 6,000 to 10,000 in the Bootheel of Missouri, where the New Madrid Fault Line is.
You should pause and read this because you'll see that we had some as strong as 8.8 in the series following these solar eclipses.
Here's where it starts to get interesting.
It states that the Mississippi River ran backwards for three hours, as well as many other earthquake phenomena.
I bet you didn't hear about that in history class.
Stay with me because this is where it gets interesting.
There was sand boils, seismic tar balls, earthquake lights, earthquake smog, thunder, and animal warnings.
I suggest you pause and read those to see what was going on.
What's really interesting is the earthquake's smog.
It says the skies turned dark during the earthquakes, so dark that the lighted lamps didn't help, and the air smelled bad, and that it was hard to breathe.
I suggest you just pause and read some of the scriptures that I put here before continuing on because I'm trying to make this as short as possible.
Jesus, Grant, this thing is just littered with Bible quotes.
I love that it feels like these biblical prophecy TikToks have a background of like haunted house music.
Yes, this is the universal conspiracy background music.
You hear it in almost every single one.
I don't know where it comes from, I don't particularly care, but I know when I hear these tunes, somebody's gonna be like, did you know?
I mean, in a lot of this stuff, I couldn't help but think of the scene in, uh, the original Ghostbusters where they go to the mayor's office and they're like, uh, fire and brimstone falling out of the sky!
The sky's turned black!
You know?
I mean, it really does, like, it feels like this guy's doing that, but for real.
Now look, it is true that a series of earthquakes did occur around the New Madrid fault line shortly after the 1811 eclipse, but there is, and I repeat, absolutely no evidence that suggests the eclipse caused these earthquakes.
One of the most popular videos, however, is from a user who goes by Supreme Energy.
The video is just the influencer green-screened in over a news broadcast, and he sort of, you know, holds up his index finger when the broadcast mentions certain things to call specific attention to them.
It's a very popular format of people just kind of pointing and using their finger to underline text.
It's kind of lazy content but seems to be a very popular sort of format for these kinds of videos.
This one in particular has over 1 million plays.
This is the kind of thing that they train for and they are ready to go.
That said, this is something I think folks can plan for.
And planning is something that will be very important.
Oregon's Office of Emergency Management is leading the state's coordination efforts.
They estimate a million people could gather to watch the eclipse.
Think of it like a day with football games in both Corvallis and Eugene.
Or maybe the Civil War.
That's obviously going to be magnified on a much bigger scale.
But there's going to be people stuck in traffic.
There's going to be a lot of use of cell phone networks.
So we want to make sure that folks have paper maps if they're going into areas they're not familiar with.
Because you might not be able to rely on getting a cell signal and being able to navigate that way.
To help with the influx of people, Governor Kate Brown authorized the Oregon National Guard to deploy soldiers to help.
Of course, the relevant context here is that the Civil War being referred to by the news anchor is not any sort of domestic conflict or threat of domestic conflict, but rather the college football rivalry game played between the football teams of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University.
Civil War, in this context, is just a dramatic and memorable name for a football game.
And if you go into the comments, I mean, it is filled with just people sort of baking.
I mean, the one person writes, it's either going to be a Black Swan event where we could have Project Blue Beam or they are distracting people with military forces at the solar eclipse.
Another person named Stacy writes, so we have had solar eclipses before and everything was fine.
Hmm.
What do they know that they are not saying?
Uh-huh.
And then we've got another woman who says, who knows what's going to happen, but just trust in the Almighty God.
That's all we can do.
So very, very paranoid stuff.
But yeah, well, it's just going to be in the solar eclipse.
So if you're in the path or you're traveling the path, you know, have a good, safe time and enjoy.
And also, I just noticed that two days ago, somebody commented under this particular video, and they wrote, So, there you go.
Taking old videos, making them new, using them to inspire new fears about new eclipses.
Uh, you know?
I wish I could say, uh, this is, uh, something new.
Uh, but, uh, we, we tend to do this.
This is what we do.
We're, we're little people.
We, we see the sky black out.
We, you know, there's gotta be, it's gotta mean more than what it is.
And sometimes an eclipse is just an eclipse.
We are now joined by Arthur Goldweg.
He is the author of Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more.
He also wrote The New Hate, a history of fear and loathing on the populist right.
His new book is called The Politics of Fear, The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia, and I'm very excited to talk to him about it because it explores a question that we've been struggling for a long time on this podcast, is that why is American conspiracism so durable and enduring?
So, Arthur, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So, to get us started, I really like this early part of the book where you very succinctly list off the corrupt conspiracies and cover-ups and crimes that are very real and beyond question.
So yeah, Jake, could you read that passage of the book here?
Thanks to the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee Report in 1976, and many other sources from within and without the government, We now know that U.S.
intelligence and military officials, working on their own and under orders from their civilian leaders, committed all kinds of atrocities, both in secret and in full view, around the world and right here at home.
They arranged foreign leaders' assassinations, surveilled and harassed American intellectuals, activists, and celebrities, irradiated young soldiers, and fed psychoactive drugs to civilians without their knowledge.
Private actors have done terrible things too.
Tobacco companies conspired to quash the evidence that smoking causes cancer.
Pharmaceutical companies deliberately addicted hundreds of thousands of their customers to deadly opiates.
Fossil fuel conglomerates have worked to discredit the scientists who were sounding the alarm about anthropogenic climate change.
I like this section because it touches on something we sometimes wrestle on, a supposedly anti-conspiracy theory podcast, which is that, like, it may be delusional to believe that, like, for example, a poster on 4chan is sending secret messages that will help people predict future events.
It's just as delusional to deny how, like, covert action can drive history or the fact that powerful people attempt to cover up their harm and influence.
So my question to you is, like, you know, in a world with so much uncertainty and corruption, How are people supposed to responsibly distinguish between these real and imaginary conspiracies?
Well, the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theory wraps it up very neatly.
Puts all the bad guys in one category.
George Soros now is as busy as the Rothschilds were two centuries ago, and it gives them
like a singular motive.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I call it the Beethoven's ninth of conspiracy theory,
but it's not the first book.
I mean, Barrowell's book on the Illuminati is probably the first great book, but he drew
from all kinds of other books.
There has always been evildoers in the world, and there have always been people that are trying to get a handle on the evil around them, and that choose a narrative.
And anyone that writes about conspiracy theory in a skeptical way gets accused of not believing that anything bad ever happens in the world.
And you know that from personal experience.
I certainly do.
Because I, you know, I went into, I wrote cults, conspiracies, and secret societies.
I was complete naif.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
I thought I was just writing a book.
And I go out in the world, and I didn't go that far out into the world.
But one of the very first bookstore appearances I had, you know, there were people there, you know, they were telling me I was being paid by the Rockefellers.
I didn't understand even that people even believe this stuff.
You know, I thought it was kind of a game.
After I wrote the book, it was 2007 it came out, 2008 maybe, I started meeting 9-11 truthers.
You know, I watched 9-11 happen.
I was on the Brooklyn Bridge on my way to work.
I saw the plane fly into the building.
The idea that this hadn't happened Seemed so crazy to me.
And so I started reading 9-11 truth stuff and obviously I learned, you know, that the plane crashing into the building, the videos had been manipulated.
All the people that said that they saw, which was, I don't know, it was probably millions of people, You can see the World Trade Center from Connecticut.
You can see it from New Jersey.
While that, you know, New York City's full of Jews.
The Jews changed it.
And it was actually hurtful to me because it was a really scary thing to see.
And the funny thing about that was that one of the worst conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones, had gotten it right.
He had had a A broadcast, I think it was in August, maybe, where he said something terrible is going to happen very soon, and watch, they're going to blame it on Osama bin Laden.
And when I write about it, I say it's like the proverbial stop clock being right once a day, but there it was.
Had Osama bin Laden been secretly plotting to do terrible harm to us?
Yeah.
Did he have an organization?
That was all over the world that was looking to harm people?
Absolutely.
Was he responding to bad things that had been done to his people by our government and other governments?
Sure.
The world is full of evil.
The world is full of terrible things.
But it tends to be kind of complicated when you try to unpack it.
And conspiracy theory makes it morally so clear, and narratively so clear.
And the last thing I'll say, I'll let you get another question in.
When people ask me what the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a regular skeptical person is, is the conspiracy theorist has all the answers.
The skeptical person doesn't know.
You know, you can get at a lot of bad things, but you don't know the whole story.
Yeah, I mean, that's always the problem is that, you know, the real life is so messy and complicated and full of, you know, voids of information.
And that's so much less satisfying than the, you know, the overarching narrative, especially, you know, especially one that places the conspiracy theorist as a hero who's exposing things.
I think you bring up a really good point about Alex Jones and the sort of proverbial stopwatch.
Because, you know, one thing that you'll notice about people who believe in conspiracy theories or people who are influencers in the conspiracy theory sort of space, if they get one thing right, people are so willing to overlook all of the things that they got Wrong.
And there's this sort of, it's really interesting because, you know, they'll never want to, and we saw this a lot with QAnon, which was, they never wanted to point to, you know, all of the predictions that came false, only the ones that maybe there was a little bit of truth behind, or in some way they had kind of, could fudge it to say that they predicted this one thing, or, you know, looked like they had some kind of clairvoyance, and that's all that people ever want to focus on.
Yeah, often the thing that they got right, it turns out they didn't even get right.
Of course, yeah.
But it reminds me of Jean Dixon in the 1960s.
She was a seer, and I think maybe she had predicted the Kennedy assassination.
She had done something, but nothing else was right.
But she could ride on that one thing.
And, you know, look, we all know after 9-11, there was the Nostradamus prophecy about 9-11 that turned out to have been written by a college kid, but put it out there to see how many people believed it.
And the answer was a lot.
And still do.
I really like your analysis of Trump's popularity in the book.
You say that, quote, he is a symptom of problems that are hardwired into America's geography, economy, and culture that have bubbled up to the surface of our politics every few decades since the Constitution was ratified.
You know, sometimes people treat Trump as if he is totally alien to American politics, but he gained popularity despite that.
But how would you say that he actually synthesizes with the American landscape?
Trump is a con man, and he's always been a con man.
And confidence men, they seek out vulnerable people, just like a con man on the street that has a long story about his wife is in the hospital and he needs $36 to take a taxi to this place and so on.
If you show any skepticism at all, they know to disconnect and go on to the next person.
If you show a little bit of weakness, it's like, oh, your wife, oh, that's terrible.
They know to go in and grab you.
So Trump looks for the soft spot in people, and the obvious soft spot in America right now is that lots and lots of people feel like they're being screwed.
Because lots and lots of people are being screwed.
So he gives them a story.
Now, they're being screwed by a system that has been really good to him, and that he's a part of, and he has no interest in really helping them, but he gets it at the hurt, and he gets at the vulnerability, and he gives them an enemy.
You know, it's not just women.
It's Hillary Clinton.
It's not just rich people.
It's, you know, it's George Soros.
It's not just foreigners.
It's murderous, rapist foreigners that Hillary Clinton has brought into the country or that Barack Obama or Who's president now?
Biden.
He gets this stuff confused.
When I saw him speak, he talked like Obama was still president.
And there's a reason for that, too.
I mean, he's gotten people to hate Biden, but instinctively people don't hate Biden as much as they hated Obama, because Biden's like a regular American.
Obama was this guy with a foreign name and black skin and he had a whole story.
And I don't know what Trump personally believes.
I don't know what his personal politics are.
It's about getting over on people.
I worry a lot about the people that are using Trump because there's a lot of people that benefit from having Trump in power.
I know what he wants.
He just wants power and acclaim.
Yeah, I do think that, like, you know, Trump has some unique talents.
I feel like what's really more dangerous are the people around Trump, like Steve Bannon, who are, you know, are able to see Trump for how he's able to achieve, like, a much more malicious political ends than mere odulation and wealth.
Mm-hmm.
I was, when Trump got elected, I was terrified of him.
And it turned out that, you know, Trump got tired of him and pushed him out of power.
But what I didn't realize for a long time, because you have to go out of your bubble and into his bubble, is that he still has a platform where he reaches millions of people, he still has Trump's ear, and he He's a very important guy in the next Trump administration, if there's a next Trump administration, whether he's explicitly a part of it or not.
And funny thing is that he's kind of a con man too.
But he's a con man that has read a lot more deeply than Trump has and who has big ideas about how government should work and who should be running the country.
Now, one of the reasons that baseless conspiracy theories persist, like you talk in the book, is that they do have utility for some people as political propaganda.
And to that end, it doesn't even matter if people actually believe them.
You quote the English philosopher Jonathan Rauch when he says that promoting conspiracy theories for this reason, quote, is not about persuasion, it is about disorientation.
So, I mean, what exactly is the benefit of spreading conspiracy theories that The, I guess, the promoter of them doesn't really expect people to believe, or that few, very few people will sincerely believe.
Well, it's about emotion.
It's about, you know, it's like in social media, you want to get clicks.
And the way to get clicks is to rouse emotions.
And in politics, or for that matter, in marketing, any kind of marketing, You know, you want to make people feel a certain way so that they'll do things.
And as far as the disorientation goes, we were just talking about Steve Bannon.
He has that very famous quote, you flood the zone with shit.
And then anything is true.
You disconnect people from reality.
You confuse everybody.
You tell so many lies that people don't know where to turn.
So they turn to you.
And hate has always been the demagogue's friend.
Find an enemy.
And remember this book I wrote was Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies.
And one of the things that I learned from that book, from writing that book, is that if you want to understand the dynamics of a dictatorship, you look at the dynamics of a cult.
It's much more personal on a cult.
The cults are small by definition.
The cult leader is probably actually abusing a lot of people, you know, rape, theft, Very personal and intimate kinds of abuse.
Dictators do it on a, on scale.
They tell people that the rest of the world is against them, that they're the only one that can protect them.
They disorient them, they scare them, they control them.
And I wonder for people, you know, the people who are listening, you know,
listening, listening to these, to these people, you know, with the invention
and sort of, you know, complete integration of the internet and social
media and news apps and all of this stuff into our, you know, everyday life,
every waking second, it seems like it feels like a smaller community because
you are in touch with so many different people all around you're in chat groups.
You're in discord servers.
You're in telegram chats, you know, cause we've always been, it's, it's
always been hard, at least when we initially started looking into QAnon,
we were kind of hesitant to call it a cult because there was no real central
power structure and so much of the content was being supplied by the people
who were reading the post, solving a puzzle that didn't have a solution.
And then their answers would be sort of folded into the narrative as if whoever
was writing the posts, you know, was, you know, kind of crowdsourcing, uh,
some, some of the content.
So yeah, I wonder if, you know, historically, you know, these, you know, you were saying that these cults are these kind of very small communities and there's these close personal relationships.
And I guess I'm wondering if the inclusion of the internet in our modern age makes this
sort of big constituency feel like a small community.
And for that reason, it's even stickier to get out of because these are your friends.
These are the people you spend time with chatting.
Maybe they understand you better than your family does or your friends do.
You hate arguing about politics with your friends, but here are people you can turn
to that are continuously providing positive feedback and reinforcing these belief structures.
I think you nailed it, basically.
People are desperate for community, and the internet is community.
And, you know, if I collected broken Bic pens from 1973, I could probably find a community of people online.
that know all about broken Bic pens from 1973. And it would be a real community. And one may be in
China, and one may be in Japan, and one may be, turn out, live down the street from me,
but it's a real community. And with QAnon, it was, I mean, I quote an academic in my book
that compares it to a massive multiplayer game, and I think that's kind of what it was.
It was both a very, very satisfying story.
You know, we're going to kill all these people.
We're just going to kill them all.
It's going to be wonderful.
But it was also that it was world building.
And, you know, people play fantasy games and they build worlds.
This was world building in the United States.
The weird thing about it was that the people that were driving it were probably driving it for money.
I mean, it looks a lot like One of the biggest proponents of it, you know, his father actually owned the site that most of the stuff was being posted on.
He was driving the traffic.
It was, I can't remember his name, Watson.
You're referring to, yeah, Jim and Ron Watkins, yeah.
Yeah, Watkins.
Again, QAnon is also so much like a religion, and most religions are born as cults, and cults are pretty weird.
and often their leaders, they may be real visionaries, but often they're really flawed.
And then if it manages to outlive the leader and outlive the strangeness of its origins and get
big, it becomes an institution. And I don't think QAnon is going to make that leap. I don't, you
know, I think it's too of its time, it's too tied to Trump, but it's a basis for, I mean, it probably
got killed in 2020 but something like it will come back.
If Trump loses, if Trump wins, there'll be a narrative and it'll be amplified.
I've always said, you know, I've always assumed that it would come back in some kind of form because it's too good of a marketing tool.
Here you have this, this thing that it's instantly recognizable.
You've got brand recognition.
It's going to drive politics, potentially even voting at this point.
Cause you know, when QAnon came around, Trump had already won the election.
You know, it wasn't invented to explain why he lost, which I always found very interesting.
And it sort of, I guess, brings up this idea that, and we've talked about this sometimes on the show,
the idea that Trump won, the very thing that nobody thought
was ever going to happen.
We were told it was impossible, and he did it, and yet the base and the people who participated in QAnon,
or at least, even if they didn't read the drops, they were friendly to the theories
that it was sort of shuffling around.
You know, they still needed it, even though their guy, you know,
they had won, essentially.
Well, populism wins when people feel like they're losing.
And so Trump has to lose.
He has to win because he has to be Trump, and he has to be a winner, and he has to be the richest man in the world, and the most powerful man in the world.
But he also has to lose because I represent you, I'm you, and you, my friend, are a loser.
They're shitting on you, they hate you, they have contempt for you, they're laughing at you.
So QAnon is both, you know, you're right.
I mean, this is a thing that just constantly baffles me when I'm dealing with Trump stuff, is Hey, you guys won.
You won.
Where is all this coming from?
You own the court.
You have, you know, they've impeached you twice and you're still there.
What is the problem?
But you ask, like, what is the utility of it?
You know, you want to mobilize a population of people who feel like they're losing.
And I might add, if you don't mobilize them around this hatred, and around these crazy theories, and around this hero worship of Trump, you know, they might start joining unions.
They might start, like the guys at Amazon in these places, they might start asking for, you know, all of the protections that unions bought people.
We have this long labor struggle in the United States, and there has been, I don't want to sound like a stereotypical leftist, But one of the things that's different now than used to be, besides the internet, is we have had a 50-year regime of neoliberalism that has rolled back a lot of things that made life easier for the working class.
There's been a lot of technological displacement, a lot of people that worked with their hands can't make a good living working with their hands anymore, but there's also been a rollback of a lot of protections.
In the book, you also discuss the financial benefits of promoting conspiracism for the promoters.
Jake, could you take this passage too?
Stories about Planned Parenthood selling babies' corpses and public school teachers indoctrinating their students with atheism and critical race theory may not be true, but they can be relied on to raise a lot of money.
Build a database of people whose likes and dislikes and fears and resentments are well known to you and you can sell them just what they think they need.
The miracle cures their doctors and big pharma don't want them to know about.
Gold futures because the Fed and its fiat money can't be trusted.
Survival gear and guns and ammo because liberals want to disarm them and leave them vulnerable to the urban gangs that are making inroads into the suburbs.
I mean, that's very true.
But does that essentially mean that the economic reality requires that conspiracism be popular?
I mean, that, you know, as long as there is a profitable demand for conspiracist thinking, there will always be people willing to supply it.
Well, you know, Paul Krugman says that the Republican Party, the far right of the Republican Party attracted all these grifters.
Now he wonders if that isn't the purpose of it.
Ike did an interview with a very liberal talk show guy on DriveTime in a big American city yesterday.
And, you know, his slogan is like, proud to be woke or something.
And while I was waiting to come on the air, I heard Steve Bannon selling some kind of crypto retirement futures package.
And I was like, oh my God, you really can't escape this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, they're also big on like, yeah, the survival gear, the survival buckets, you know, the buckets full of food.
Oh, yeah.
Once everything really, once the shit hits the fan, as they say in the Prepper community.
This isn't new either.
And, you know, and crypto and stuff isn't new.
In the 19th century, there was this whole rage for silver, because when they remonetized gold after the Civil War, there was a deflation that made your debt much harder to pay off.
And it was devastating for farmers.
And farmers have always been devastated because farmers are always in debt.
The way to make farming profitable is to make them really, really big.
And corporations can make really big farms, but families can't.
And farming is a hugely profitable sector of our economy now, and it employs about one or two percent of the population.
On the show, we sometimes struggle with the question of whether conspiracist influencers are insincere grifters or true believers.
This is very hard to kind of discern because they're inscrutable and mind reading is impossible.
But on that question, you write this.
Do mountebank like Trump and Alex Jones and zealots like Mike Flynn and Mike Lindell experience paranoia themselves?
Or simply package it for others so they can harness it for their own purposes?
It's one of those unanswerable chicken-egg questions, but for whatever it's worth, I still tend to believe the latter.
You can't have winners without losers, and America has more than its share of both.
The paranoid style has something for everyone who feels looked down upon, or marginalized,
or cheated out of what they believe should be theirs by right, or who has figured out a way
to make money from people who think and feel that way.
Now, I want to get your thoughts on like how I personally try to answer this question.
And I actually think that, especially for people like Trump, they have a kind of utilitarian perspective when it comes to belief claims in that it's almost useless to ask whether they sincerely believe in something because they don't believe in sincerity.
Rather, it's that they think that if promoting a claim can be useful, then they, for all intents and purposes, believe it.
They believe it with their body, if they think that performing as if they believe it is useful for them.
So in that sense, I mean, they kind of do believe what they're saying, only because they know that the belief can be packaged for others in useful ways.
So that's my attempt at splitting the difference in regards to that question.
But like, I think that, you know, it's like, I was, you know, really interested in like, questions of like, epistemology, and like, how do you, how do you access your real true claims out there in the world, independent of our experiences and stuff?
These people have never thought about those kinds of questions, I don't think.
So it's like, yeah, so what, so what do you think about that?
I mean, just because I don't, I mean, I don't think, I don't think it's like, really an either or question when asking about whether or not they're grifters or true believers.
Well, again, Trump, I said, I think he's a con man.
And one of the things I did when I was writing this book, I found online, I think it was evidence in one of the lawsuits, the book that they give to salespeople for Trump University, they weren't called salespeople, they were called instructors.
And there's a line in it, it's like, look, you're selling feelings here.
You're selling emotion.
And like Scientology and all these other kind of scammy things. The deal isn't to sell you one
course, the deal is to get you in a course, and when you're in it you say, "And if you want to know
more, sign up for this course."
And you raise the price higher and higher, and you get people paying more and more money.
And who are the best closers in the sales world?
You know, you talk to people that sell used cars or something, they're people that they believe it themselves for as long as it takes to close the deal.
I got ripped off when I bought a car once, and it was very painful and humiliating, and at the end of the book I say, you know, for anyone who's ever been lied to, you really feel this.
And at one point, while I was being ripped off, I said to the guy, you know, these numbers aren't adding up.
And he looked at me and he said, Arthur, are you calling me a liar?
Are you saying that I'm lying to you?
And I was like, well, you know, no, I wouldn't want to hurt your feelings like that.
And then I walked out of the sales room and I was, oh my God, he, you know, he robbed me.
But he had used his vulnerability.
It was like he had gotten inside of me.
It was so intimate.
It was so awful.
And it wasn't rape.
It was not rape.
It was just money.
But it felt like he had done something like that.
And so a lot of these people, like you said, it's not if they're sincere or not.
They don't believe anything.
They don't believe in sincerity.
They believe in closing.
But there are some people that really are crazy that thrive in this world, too.
I spent a lot of time reading about and thinking about the Birchers when I wrote The New Hay, and I read an authorized biography of Robert Welch.
And I don't know.
He was really nuts, but I think he believed a lot of this stuff.
And it was funny because in this authorized biography that he had approved every word of, there's stories about in his days as a candy maker, You know, he was so dedicated and so driven he would, like, drive hundreds of miles overnight so he could make a sales pitch somewhere in another city.
And twice he fell asleep at the wheel and wrecked his car and suffered, like, terrible head injuries.
And I was like, oh, that's interesting.
I wonder if because, you know, a lesion in the brain could probably lead you to think some pretty crazy things.
But he seemed like he was a believer.
And if you worked at the John Birch Society, you were at the headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, they set the table with a white tablecloth and brought out a luncheon every day and you had to sit there and listen to him hold forth for hours.
And If he wasn't well off, if he hadn't built that candy empire before he went into politics, he might have been in a madhouse.
I don't know.
But I think he really was a believer.
So some people, there's probably some Q person out there that actually believes this stuff, but I doubt that they're on television.
I doubt that, you know, you're reading them in the newspaper.
Those guys are grifters.
I feel like the best example of a guy who is perhaps a real true believer but also an influencer is Mike Lindell, just because he has paid such a heavy price for his ludicrous beliefs.
He's lost much of his fortune.
And I feel like if he hadn't made it big as, you know, an infomercial pitchman for pillows, he'd be one of those guys who is just, you know, working class and then sending half of his paycheck to these drive time people.
And look who he was before he made it big.
I mean, he was a drug addict.
Yeah.
He was a very trouble-driven guy, given to compulsions, given to impulsive, compulsive behavior.
And here he is, just, I mean, the people that, if anybody cares about him, they must be just beyond seeing him throw all his money and his reputation and their money.
I'm sure there were a lot of people depending on him, and they're losing everything.
You know, it's something that we kind of see in the past, I don't know, 10 years or so, this idea that a good feeling is worth more than a hard truth.
And we've seen instances where there are influencers, whether they're on Instagram or Facebook or social media, or they make YouTube videos, and they'll have You know, very normal content.
They'll be talking about their family, they'll be talking about their kids, what they cooked for dinner that night, here's the recipe.
And then they will post something that is conspiratorial.
And all of a sudden, their engagement skyrockets.
And you can watch in real time, going back through their videos of their content, you know, doing this Hard, hard pivot.
And, you know, I've always sort of wondered if, you know, when you get a ton of positive reaction and, oh my gosh, maybe you're even making money.
Maybe, maybe you're getting lots of ad revenue because people are watching your YouTube videos more or, you know, whatever, whatever it is.
They're subscribing to your Twitch channel, whatever it is, that even though there might be something like deep down that knows how you were before this and what you believed Before this, you become a believer because you've seen how well it works for you.
I wonder if there is some sort of coordination between the grift and the belief that the positive reinforcement that we get, you know, when we say various things, if If people then tend to go, "Oh, well, maybe I'm on the
right track.
This must be right because this is the thing that's bringing positivity into my life,"
whether it's like you mentioned community or actual financial stability or gain.
Well, I just read Naomi Klein's book.
No, it's great.
Yeah, we've talked to her.
And that's a big, I don't want to sell somebody else's book, but it's a great book.
No, it's great. Yeah, we've talked to her. She's fantastic.
And she spent a lot of time on that. If you believe in the idea that everything is a meritocracy,
everything is the individual, you've given up on community.
You've given up on societal well-being.
You've given up on social struggle and solidarity.
Then you start to believe in the idea that whatever gets you likes is real.
And it does get you likes.
It does get you money.
Not all influencers.
I'm sure the... Why no?
Because I've actually done work on this.
I've talked to influencers that make an incredible amount of money.
And it's... They're, you know, they're a thousandth of a percent of the people in that space.
But they're doing really well.
And they have to... You also have to amp up your message to keep your status up there.
Because the internet turns against you at the drop of a And so, if you start to get traction being extreme, then you have to get more extreme.
Otherwise, somebody else comes in and disrupts you and copies you.
So, yeah, it's a... I think that these things are related.
And I think the instant gratification of the likes and the dislikes is we're in this disintermediated society.
It makes people crazier.
Robert Welch, John Birch Society, he had to self-publish a lot of his stuff.
He had to have meetings with people.
He couldn't build up an internet audience of millions of people.
If he tried to go on the Johnny Carson Show, they would kick him off, because he's nuts.
He couldn't get a mass audience.
Same thing with the hate groups that I studied.
they would live in these compounds in the backwoods somewhere and they have 17 members
and somebody would self-publish a book.
This kind of describes the guy that wrote the Turner Diaries.
He was brilliant, probably insane person, but you know, it was not big time.
It was not big time.
And if he had lived a little bit longer into the internet era, he might have had an Alex
Jones sized audience.
But their work does live on and is folded into these various conspiracy theories, which
is, I think probably the most clear observation about QAnon is its ability to bring in all
of these different conspiracy theories, the one ring to rule them all.
I mean, Travis, you know, Travis has called it, you know, the Big Tent Conspiracy.
And so, yes, it is fascinating because all of these guys who lived, you know, before
the time where they did have access to this wide audience, people now who are getting
into conspiracies for the first time, and it's still happening.
People are still, you know, you look at them in 2020, even after January 6th, and their,
you know, their online presence is relatively unpolitical.
And then, you know, they get roped into the stolen election, and the ballot mules, and all of these theories, and they get in that way.
And here is all of this old content, you know, that they've never really heard about that's there to strengthen these new beliefs that they're sort of turning into their personality in a lot of ways.
I mean, you know, when you run into a conspiracy theorist out in the world, all they want to do is talk about conspiracy theories.
I mean, this happened to me.
I was in Solvayne a couple years ago.
I was in the Christmas store in Solvayne.
It's a Christmas ornament shop.
And, you know, I was standing by the tree and, you know, the big sort of display tree and looking at some stuff and there was another couple.
And I think I mentioned something.
I looked at one of the ornaments and I went, oh man, I was like 15 bucks for an ornament.
I don't know.
And this guy who was standing, you know, two feet away was like, oh yeah, well, you know, Biden's America, inflation and man, what they're really doing and the stuff that he's, and he just kept going.
I had mentioned this one thing and we were trapped.
You know, in a 15-minute conversation about this stuff.
And so, yeah, it's... I can't remember the point I was trying to make, but it's wild to see it.
Yeah, just all of this stuff just still so effective, whether it was written 50 years ago or whether it was an internet post last Thursday, you know?
Well, I really believe that we're wired this way.
And part of it is you... I mean, it's sad, but when people's brains fail...
When they get plaque in their brain, and it doesn't function right, Alzheimer's.
Paranoia becomes, you know, it's not in every case, but it's awfully common.
The caregivers are stealing from me, the people are listening in on the phone line, the vulnerability, you know, God help you if some con man calls you up on the phone, you write them a check right away, and it's like a lot of the attributes.
And it is sad.
And that's the part of conspiracy theory that, I mean, it doesn't endear me to the conspiracy theorists, because I'm feeling sorry for them.
I'm laughing at them, they would say.
But you don't get this way if you feel well-loved, secure.
You know, societies don't get that way if they're prospering and everybody has hope.
So, I mean, that's another kind of demonic thing about Trump.
is that he's feeding on people's fear, he's feeding on people's despair, and he's feeding it.
And every time he gets up there and tells people how miserable they are, he's making it worse.
And you can't reason with that.
You know, you just kind of have to... I don't know what you do, because I think it's a very bad thing for society.
But here we are.
In your book, you devote an entire chapter to the topic of cognitive dissonance and cognitive dissonance reduction.
So this is the theory promoted by sociologist Leon Festinger, which we've discussed a couple times on the show before.
And you make an interesting point that cognitive dissonance reduction has a lot of explanatory power.
Not just regards to the popularity of conspiracism generally, but also in light of how popular conspiracism is in a rapidly changing society in terms of like, you know, just social changes and technology.
So, after discussing your own childhood, you say this.
The pace of change was extraordinary then, and it is moving even faster today.
But for many Americans, it is going in the wrong direction.
Some of those suburbs that were so new back then have more poverty, crime, and minorities in them today than the big urban centers they were supposed to be refugees from.
And a lot of those big cities are nowhere near as big as they were before their factories were relocated to greenfield locations in right-to-work states or offshore to Asia.
Drug addiction is no longer just a problem of the inner cities or of the youth culture.
Many of the opiates that Heartland Americans routinely abuse were prescribed for them by their doctors.
It wasn't so long ago that brick-sized transistor radios seemed like miracles of miniaturization.
Nowadays, even children carry powerful computers in their pockets that can link them to all the knowledge in the world, but that are programmed to steer them to ad-supported social media sites that feed them a steady diet of rumors, Yeah, isn't that dystopian?
It sounds like... Who could make that up?
to arouse their most primitive emotions.
Really well said, dude.
Yeah, isn't that dystopian?
It sounds like, who could make that up?
That's horrible.
And you touch on something that I'm so nervous to bring up because I think we as leftists and especially, you know,
more centrist liberals or neoliberals are afraid to criticize their own.
But this idea of the opinions and analysis and predictions as news I think has put the left in some ways—not what I would consider the left left, but your more blue team, red team kind of neoliberals—puts them at risk for cultivating a conspiratorial mindset.
Because there are so many internet shows, podcasts, sub-stack letters, there are so many independent pundits nowadays whose real work is analysis or opinions or saying, well, you know, This could happen, or this trial could work out this way, or it could do this, and people, like you said, are so mad.
They look at somebody like Donald Trump, and they know he's a bad guy.
They know he's the last kind of person that should be, you know, in charge of the country, and they want to see him punished.
They want to see him punished for real reasons, in the same way that QAnon people want to see Hillary Clinton punished for imagined reasons.
And as you know after the 2020 election I have to say that you know I have watched that space become gradually more conspiratorial because opinions are presented as news and the fact that we're constantly being fed this and it confirms a lot of what we already believe so we're not necessarily willing to go well and it's very possible that somebody like this somebody like Donald Trump might not get in trouble for any of this because historically in America people in his Class, do not get punished in the same way that somebody like you or I does.
And I wonder if that's something that you've seen or that you're concerned about or, you know, because I, you know, we watched QAnon.
We watched QAnon from its very infant stages take shape.
And some of the rhetoric, you know, that I saw in those spaces, I'm seeing similar, similar language.
Even down to the point of talking about, you know, getting Trump and Flynn and all of these people should be, you know, sent to Guantanamo Bay.
I mean, even the language is somewhat similar.
And I fear that this point that you make about the powerful computers in our pocket that are guided by this algorithm and feeding us this analysis and these opinions is actually hurting the left in some ways as well when it comes to conspiratorial thinking.
I totally agree with you.
Oh, thank you.
I mean, I don't think the left is as bad as the right.
Agreed, yeah.
I mean, I watch MSNBC and I listen to them sometimes and I say, stop sounding like Fox.
Just stop personalizing everything.
And if you talk to the people that are doing it, and I know this because I read interviews with them, they say, we would love to cover other stuff.
There's terrible things happening in the world that we need to cover.
But our viewership drops when we do that.
Right!
Because they're counting it.
You know, they have the Nielsen ratings or whatever they use on TV now.
And when they stop talking about Trump, people get less angry.
A lot of them, like, wander off into the kitchen and make a drink or something and forget to come back.
And again, you know, it's driven by commerce, but it's making us angry and stupid.
And we should be angry and smart.
I don't want people to stop being angry, but I want them to be smart.
Yeah.
And one of the benefits of getting people mad at the wrong people is that it allows you to continue doing all of your wrongdoing.
And I want us to be mad at the right people.
There was this beautiful period right after the 2020 election where there was this whole thing, this whole sort of celebration online, we never have to talk about Trump again.
We never.
He's nothing.
He's dead to us.
And he was.
He was kicked off social media.
If he wanted to put out any kind of statement, it had to be on this really kind of sad letterhead, you know, that was like a photograph of a piece of paper that then got shared on the sites that he was banned from.
There was this beautiful period where nobody was talking about it and it lasted about two weeks and then afterwards it was as if you know you had mentioned before you know sometimes how you know Trump would talk and it would be as if Hillary Clinton was actually president or Obama was still president and I really felt that from the from the sort of liberal sphere as well you know for the last couple years it has felt almost like Trump is president because it's all we hear about and it's all we talk about and I don't know, maybe it's just because we do this podcast and stuff and I'm just sort of sick of hearing it.
But I agree that there is this kind of vested interest in keeping people mad.
And I also agree that the left will never be as bad as the right.
I think the right is inherently more violent.
There is more violence baked into that belief structure.
There's also heavy, heavy religious beliefs that I think that the centrists and even further left Liberals don't have.
But I'm always wary, you know, when you see this kind of conspiratorial, you know, this baking.
How can I analyze this so I can sell my audience a narrative where our enemies are going to be punished?
And I think that that was, in some ways, the root of what drove QAnon to become as big as it did and lead us to something like January 6th is promising justice that never comes.
And I think that we gotta be really careful about that.
I read a very interesting piece yesterday by Josh Marshall from the Talking Points Memo website.
He was looking at a survey of New Yorkers' perceptions of their quality of life.
And not good.
You know, not good compared to 2019.
And he said, you know, part of what's going on in the world, extrapolating it to the country at large, and I don't know how much you can extrapolate from New York to the country at large, but for argument's sake, let's say you can.
He said the pandemic was really bad.
A million people died.
The economy ground to a halt.
Supply chains were kinked afterwards.
It created rampant inflation.
There was this really polarizing election.
There was all this bad stuff happened.
It didn't go away immediately.
And a lot of it was still going on.
I mean, the pandemic started when Trump was president.
It was basically ending as Biden got into office, but the repercussions are still being felt.
Part of why conspiracy theory thrives is because things are sort of crappy and people need a narrative to explain it.
You know, probably part of the reason that Biden had so much trouble calming the country down was because he didn't go in for retribution.
He said, I'm not going to talk about Trump.
If he had taken a page out of Trump's book, And try to rouse his side, which isn't the left.
I mean, Biden is really, I think he's, he's for normal people.
And like, I'm, I'm the left, but I really want to be read.
I don't think I'm going to get through to a single QAnon person, but I think there's a lot of people that have voted Republican that might want to hear what I'm saying.
I'm, I'm, I'm not that untemperate, you know, I'm, I don't think my book is particularly partisan.
What I want is for people to just, like, be more sane, be a little kinder, be a little more thoughtful, a little more self-critical.
And maybe that's too big an ask.
I don't know.
Last thing I gotta say, Travis, sorry, before you get on to your next question, because I think, Arthur, you actually made me think of something that I hadn't really thought of before.
You said, you know, Trump traumatized people, and that's undoubtedly true.
And what I would want to add to that Is I think that MAGA traumatized people as well.
The bullying online, the pointing and laughing, the going, haha, you thought she would never lose, and the sore winner kind of mentality, and how that sort of group interacted with people online, I think was traumatizing for people as well.
It makes total sense to me that you would want to get them back.
Which is, you know, I think is the whole Dark Brandon thing, you know?
Well, our guy can shoot lasers out of his eyes, too, you know?
We can do it, too.
There is this element of, you know, you've been bullied for four years online, and all of a sudden, now the bullies have lost, and oh boy, are you gonna stick it to them.
I think that's a really, at least in sort of online communities, I can't say how much that happens out in the real world, because I think in the real world, in the third dimension, you have a lot more aggression coming from your MAGA person towards your liberal than vice versa.
In any situation I've ever been in where I've clearly been, you know, been in the vicinity of somebody who is, you know, a hardcore Trump guy.
I'm not trying to poke the bear.
I'm not trying to get into an argument with him.
I'm trying to keep things civil and move on, you know?
No, the left eats its own.
We don't go after them.
We go after the people on our side that are saying the wrong things.
I agree.
And that's a terrible thing.
I agree.
So I'm going to have just one more question for you.
So in the book, you make a really interesting point about Trump's embrace of QAnon, because this is a really interesting thing.
I always wondered like how he'd react to it.
And unsurprisingly, he was willing to support the QAnon community.
Like even today, Trump, he regularly amplifies posts from QAnon followers on Truth Social, his social media platform.
I thought it was a natural choice for him.
It's like, of course Trump is going to, you know, cater to and sort of like coddle people who are that devoted to him.
But you, you make an interesting argument.
You argue that it may come with downsides that are not immediately obvious.
You write this.
Like so many modern dictators, Trump has a messiah complex that his followers are only too happy to indulge.
Though he had maintained a cautious distance from QAnon during the 2020 election, now he was openly aligning himself with the movement.
That seemed like a dangerous gambit, since QAnon and the white Christian Nationalists see him as at least a divine instrument, and possibly even a divinity.
He may be raising the bar higher than he can reach.
Once you declare yourself to be God, your disciples expect you to heal the sick, and multiply loaves and fishes, or at the very least, put Hillary Clinton in jail.
They may even want you to be martyred, so they can have the satisfaction of seeing you rise from the dead.
Yeah, I mean, I had really considered that because like Trump's followers, especially his QAnon followers, are so thoroughly devoted to him.
And it just seemed like I didn't really see any downside to Trump, you know, just sort of like, you know, winking and nodding to them at the very least.
But do you really see a scenario in which this extreme devotion like backfires on him?
Well, those thoughts came into my head literally when I was sitting at the Trump rally.
And part of it is I was just so bored beyond imagining.
It was a Trump speech.
So boring.
I mean, everybody should go to a Trump rally and then they wouldn't vote for him.
It's like... Because it's just me, me, me, me, me.
It's like listening to... I washed dishes when I was a teenager in this restaurant and one of the other dishwashers was a pathological liar.
And the man was so Boring.
I mean, he was very mentally ill.
I think that was why he was washing dishes there.
But he couldn't stop talking about himself and putting himself in the most ridiculous situations.
I mean, you know, the radio would be on and Elvis Presley died.
And that was in the news.
And he's like, Oh, I knew Elvis Presley.
And it's like, No, you didn't.
You didn't.
And but you know, you knew this was going to come.
And that was sort of the feeling I had listening to Trump.
And then I was thinking, you know, what if people start taking him seriously?
And isn't that kind of the logical end of that?
And I was just being funny, I thought.
But you look at, you know, movie stars, they do something wrong and all of a sudden everybody turns against them.
The punishing, we were talking about with the circular firing squads to the left, just this internet world of, you know, it's built on excluding people and Not excluding people.
It's built on keeping the bubble pure.
Having the bubble exactly the way you want it.
And if somebody messes it up, you have to purge them.
You have to expel them.
And when people love you that much, be aware.
Be scared.
I mean, if you ever go to the opera and you go up in the standing room area where the real, real opera fans are, those are the loudest booers.
You know, everybody will be applauding politely and they'll be booing because they love them that much.
And with that love comes, you know, the line between love and hate is very, very narrow.
You stir people up and you don't know how you're going to stir them.
And I read that yesterday a boat was bobbing on the sea outside of Mar-a-Lago, flying a big Q flag, and Trump had them dock so that he could give them a meal or whatever.
One of these days, one of those people is going to shoot him.
I mean, it's just...
If I were him, I, I'm obviously not him, but if I were him, I would be terrified of these people because he should know that he's not God.
I mean, he should really know that.
Yeah.
Well, and, and, you know, we've, we've, we've seen this happen.
I mean, even, even recently, you know, Trump put himself in a really hard place because he wants to take credit for getting the vaccine rushed out and approved, you know, when the pandemic first hit.
But now, you know, but now when he brags about it, he loses a piece of his, you You know, a piece of his audience who are totally anti-vaccine.
And so we're already seeing these situations where he's between a rock and a hard place because he wants to brag about his achievements, but his following has gotten so out of control that, you know, it doesn't matter if he did it, it hits against a wall of their belief system that they are not willing to cave.
In that particular case, you know, anti-vaccine, that sort of thing.
Right.
And on a much less extreme case, the Right to Life people.
When I went to that Trump rally, I'm not even sure if Dobbs had happened yet.
No, it had just happened.
It had happened two months before.
And he so wanted to take credit for it, and at the same time, he wanted to reassure everybody that you could still get abortions.
And I could see he was really between a rock and a hard place.
You know, love me because I'm pro-life, And don't hold it against me, I'm as pro-choice as you are.
Yeah.
So the book is The Politics of Fear, The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia.
It's available now.
We're going to put a link to it in the show notes.
Pick it up because there's a lot in it we were not able to get into today.
There's a lot of history, psychology, analysis.
I really liked your sort of discussion of the historical antecedents of QAnon, like Christian Gnosticism.
You talk about anti-Freemasonry and stuff.
It is a really, really great read, so pick it up.
So, Arthur, thank you so much for talking to us today.
And thank you so much for having me.
I really enjoyed this.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can subscribe on patreon.com slash QAA for five bucks a month and you'll get access to, you know, Well over 200 premium episodes, as well as multiple seasons of miniseries like Travis's Trickle Down, Julian's Perverts, and Man Clan, and Brad and my series The Spectral Voyager.
So it's a ton of content.
If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it.
For everything else, we've got a website.
It's QAnonAnonymous.com.
So yeah, check it out.
And listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
What I'm about to tell you about the upcoming solar eclipse on April 8th is going to blow your mind.
In Matthew chapter 12, Jesus said that an evil and adulterous generation will seek for a sign, but they will receive none except for the sign of Jonah.
And in Luke 17, Jesus said that as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.
So get this, the path that the solar eclipse is taking will literally cross over the city of Jonah, Texas, several cities and towns named Nineveh, and it will cross over Rapture, Indiana, and not only that, it will cross over where the Ark is in Williamston, Kentucky.
But that's not all.
All of this will be taking place under the constellation of Cetus, the whale.
