The new book The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging by Noelle Cook offers an unusually intimate look at why seemingly bizarre conspiracy worlds that involve starseeds, ascended masters, and shadowy cabals are powerfully compelling even when they damage the lives of believers. Rather than taking a detached academic approach, Cook traces how white, middle-aged women were pulled deeper into conspiratorial belief systems in the years leading up to and after January 6, through online communities, the pandemic, personal upheaval, and a New Age spiritual subculture fused with far-right politics.
The book follows Cook’s long, complicated relationship with two women in particular: Yvonne St. Cyr and Tammy Butry. Yvonne, from Idaho, sought structure in the Marines after a turbulent childhood, then found a home in the world of conspirituality, where politics becomes divine destiny and January 6 becomes a “spiritual war.” Tammy, from Pennsylvania, carries a history of trauma and instability, including seeing how the real-world betrayal of the “Kids for Cash” scandal harmed her children, making QAnon’s “save the children” framing feel emotionally plausible. Together, their stories show how conspiracism can function as belonging, meaning, and an explanation big enough to encompass their pain.
Travis and Jake talk to Noelle about how her book came together, her relationship with the two subjects, and why conspiracist movements like QAnon can appeal to women over fifty years old.
Noelle Cook
https://bsky.app/profile/noellecook.com
The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging
https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889832423/The-Conspiracists
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Welcome to the QA podcast, episode 355, Conspiracist, featuring Noelle Cook.
As always, we are your host, Jake Rocketansky, and Travis View.
One of the more frustrating things about conspiracism is how alien and strange the mind and world of conspiracists can be.
Despite the fact that an astonishing amount of American politics is guided by paranoid fears, it can still be challenging to understand the draw of the more wild conspiracy beliefs for people who are not deep into them.
Part of what drives my work is to like make the appeal of these odd beliefs like QAnon more comprehensible.
But if you really want to grasp why millions gravitate towards elaborate belief systems involving star seeds, cabals with seemingly supernatural power over the world, and ascended masters, even when those beliefs hurt their own personal lives, then I highly recommend picking up the new book, The Conspiracists, Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging by Noelle Cook.
It offers something beyond a detached academic view of the topic.
The perspective is much more intimate and personal.
In the book, Cook follows the past that drew white middle-aged women deeper and deeper into conspiratorial worldviews in the years leading up to and beyond January 6th, through online communities, personal upheaval, the height of the pandemic era, and the spiritual subculture that blends New Age ideas with conspiracy politics.
Cook tells a story up close through years of conversations in an unusual, complicated relationship with two women, Yvonne Sincere and Tammy Boutry.
Yvonne comes from Idaho and describes a childhood marked by emotional cruelty, abandonment, and bouncing between unstable homes.
She finds structure in the Marines, something like purpose, until she's hit with a life-imploding legal case that ends her military career and leaves lasting shame.
When she later moves into conspiratuality, politics stop being politics and become destiny.
For her, January 6th isn't a riot, it's a spiritual war.
In Cook's telling, Yvonne is living inside a cosmology where Trump is a signaler and she is being called to fulfill a mission.
Tammy is from Pennsylvania.
Her story starts with years of chaos and trauma, neglect, abuse, and violence, and then an adulthood that's still defined by instability and survival mode.
And crucially, she has this real-life institutional betrayal baked into her biography.
Two of her kids were caught up in the Kids for Cash scandal, pushed into for-profit juvenile facilities over minor offenses.
So when QAnon arrives with its save the children moral panic, it fit into a lived sense that systems do hurt children and nobody is held accountable.
By the start of the pandemic, conspiracy communities became her social world, her identity, and eventually the story she tells herself about why everything in her life happened.
And that is the heart of the book.
Two women drawn to the promise of belonging, meaning, and an explanation big enough to hold the pain.
It's so true.
I mean, I think about my own life, and I was at my most conspiratorial, most prone and soft, you know, moldable to conspiracy theories when I was broke, angry, lonely, looking for an explanation why I just couldn't seem to get a break through no fault of my own.
And I think that America in particular does that to a lot of people.
It makes us feel totally helpless through no fault of our own.
And of course, we're going to want to look for somebody to blame or some kind of bigger explanation as to why things haven't worked out the way we imagined them.
Yeah.
So today we're going to talk about her book and this development.
So Noelle, congratulations on publishing the book.
And thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
Thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, this is like this is really fascinating.
I'm really interested in like how this book developed because I've written, I've read I think just about every book on conspiracism that's been published, especially recently.
But this one is unusual for its level of real on-the-ground intimacy.
I mean, you say that early on, you were looking at like January 6th through a more like data set kind of lens.
So what did that approach miss, do you think, once you started to talk to these people directly?
I spent the first year doing this research on paper.
I looked at the January 6th women who had been arrested, the first 100 of them.
And I spent most of 2021 and into 2022 trying to find everything I could online about them through their social media accounts, their local court records, newspapers, et cetera.
Of course, the statement of facts that were in their January 6th cases.
And I started trying to compile a list of every data point I could think of to try to look for patterns of how they ended up at the Capitol that day because there were so many middle-aged women there alongside men in full body armor screaming, you know, hang my pens as they're taking selfies on the East Front steps, like it's just any other day.
And so I really went to study why they had been there, but I couldn't find any pattern other than age, which is why the middle-age thing became my focal point, which was also the first time in my life or in my middle-aged life that that worked out for me because as a middle-aged woman, I was able to understand the stage of life they were in, having gone through those same stages myself.
We were all the same age.
And so that's kind of how that population became my focal point.
And I went down that road for a year on paper.
I eventually hit a point with Yvonne where her spirituality was taking me into things I had no clue what I was seeing.
I didn't set out to study conspiracies.
Again, I was hoping to avoid QAnon completely.
Unfortunately, every woman I studied led me there in some way, shape, or form.
And so that's how I became interested in studying conspiracies because these two particular women led me into conspiratuality, which is, you know, I sort of had to learn about that.
I had never really heard about that either.
And so I went to the Conscious Life Expo two years in a row to feel it and experience it.
And the work I was doing originally was going to be academic.
But by the time I started having conversations with Yvonne and Tammy very quickly, that turned personal and it wasn't going to fly for an academic paper anymore.
And I think that was by the second year, I realized you can't hover above this and assign a label to everybody or a motivation to everybody because everybody's entering in different paths and it really is completely individual.
As a commonality, I found many of these women have a tipping point where there's an entry point, entry point where you can see where it starts to kind of slide, where we start asking questions.
And then with COVID and the pandemic, it was kind of the perfect storm for that.
So I think I probably answered like 15 questions there and may or may not have actually answered your original one.
No, it's no, it's great.
It actually inspired another question for me, which is, you know, was it unsettling as somebody who went in to talk to these folks and try to, you know, understand their motivation and also be consciously trying to avoid QAnon and to go, there's certainly, there's got to be some other, you know, there's got to be something else in the muck, right?
And then slowly over time, you're, you know, the way you said that almost gave me goosebumps that it always kind of led back to QAnon, even though it was from these sort of different entry points and paths.
Like, did that kind of feel like unsettling for you to understand how big this thing really is?
I think in the beginning, it was drinking from a fire hose.
didn't really even have a chance to process that piece of it until about year three.
And then when I saw it literally happening everywhere, and then you see the signaling everywhere.
And you start to, that's when I started to look at influencers in year three and realize the damage being done with people who, you know, have become almost, whether it's ministers, prophets, whatever these people are to the people online following them.
And sometimes it's just planal influencers, they have a lot of power.
And then I could watch people who had never been signaling for QAnon prior to like 2020 using all the slogans in their own marketing online campaigns for their selling their supplements or their workshops or their energy healings or whatever it was.
You could see everybody who was already positioned online for a business was right there to start signaling, whether it was the cult Love Has Won, who started using Where We Go When We Go All in 2020 as they were trying to sell collegial silver or to very anti-government people who also found that they could bring in more conspiracists into their movement.
And so at one point during all of this in 2023, I felt like I was at a trade show every day of extreme beliefs, right?
Where it wasn't just QAnon conspiracies.
It was anti-government conspiracies coupled with every other UFO conspiracies.
And you realize it's this giant trade show where all are welcome.
You can stay in your own lane.
You can pick and choose your own adventure from this trade show.
And so I might come in thinking, I just looked at this starseed chart.
And yeah, I feel like my life has lost purpose and I feel like I don't have meaning.
And so I fit all these traits for a star seed, which is basically every middle-aged woman in America.
And then, you know, then you start to go to the next table and you pick up some sovereign citizen swag.
And now I'm sovereign.
And so when I get pulled over and I don't have my registration, I'm not going to pay for that.
You know, so you see these, all these different ideologies kind of pick these little pieces picked and chosen from each one.
And then that becomes part of the belief system.
And so, again, these belief systems don't work.
Like Yvonne's not a flat earther, but she's perfectly comfortable being adjacent to flat earthers, right?
And so that's what's been interesting to me is how all of these groups coalesce.
Yeah, I think, yeah, this is, I think, something gets really great that you portray the ways in which these women feel like, I guess, like conventional paths or conventional beliefs just aren't working for them for whatever reason.
And so they find this alternative that provides this buffet of options that they can sort of like explore and pick up or put down, but just it just feels like something different than the sort of the mainstream sort of way of operating that they think has not worked for them or betrayed them in some way.
Yeah, it's a whole new toolkit, right?
The trade show analogy is so wonderful because it really is.
You walk around, you look at, you see what wares they've got, you talk to the people in the booth, you know, talk to people in the booths.
And what I was going to say is all of this, even if you end up buying a couple tchotchkis, even if you buy an organite batarang that protects you from 5G, like Travis did once, that's a whole lot cheaper than one hour-long session with a therapist or a counselor.
And it's a lot easier to find yourself at those trade shows, quote unquote, than it is to begin to tackle the insurmountable challenge of healthcare and mental health care, especially in this country.
It's just, it makes perfect sense to me.
And I don't, I don't blame them one bit.
I mean, I think the other interesting thing is that it's not just sort of like an alternate framework of moving through the world or understanding the world, but it also provides like the sense of importance.
Like, because you talk about how this, the spiritual language can make this political conspiracy feel like a moral duty.
You know, it's beyond simply like something that's like a hobby or something that just is sort of like, you know, sort of mildly satisfying.
It provides this great deal of like motivation.
I mean, like, how do these, I guess, these spiritual frames sort of elevate sort of like these political conspiracy theory frameworks into something that like, you know, deep spiritual meaning.
Well, I think the one thing, whether it's evangelical charismatic Christians or spirituality, they're all about good versus evil.
And when you throw things like saving children, and again, there's the moral component to it.
So it operates much like spirituality does as far as moral lessons and teachings, right?
And religion.
To me, this almost feels like religion, some of this, the blind faith in these conspiracies, the way they kind of guide you through life on an everyday basis.
It feels almost like a religion that's kind of taken hold because it is, it's not unlike religion.
I think that's what kind of like again, year two or three.
And this is kind of the interesting part of doing this over time is I change so much and my own feelings about the people, the topics and how I understood them had changed quite a bit over that time.
And so you can really start to, when you know someone and you hear them talking, you can see how they're using some of this as a coping mechanism, whether it's to explain the unexplainable that has occurred in your own life, whether it's to bring on a sense of identity and purpose, like you just mentioned, the importance.
When everybody in the real world is telling you you're nuts, right, which is what happened to so many people, your online communities bolster you.
You're taking these surveys.
Am I a star seed?
Yes.
And I'm here to usher humanity into a better place.
And you do think you have what I've experienced in these groups is everyone's sharing their special knowledge with each other, which feels empowering in the moment, especially as people's real world lives are kind of falling apart.
A lot of these, the ideas that came out of the trade show for some of these women had long-term real-life consequences.
You know, when you start dabbling in sovereign citizen language, for example, and you decide that you no longer want to be a complacent slave to the system.
And so you decide you're going to quit your job and just stop paying your mortgage, your house gets repossessed.
And that's what happened to Yvonne.
I mean, she lost her house, lost her job.
And so there's real world consequences to this stuff.
And when you see people continuing down that path regardless, you start to realize this is, there's such deep faith in what they're doing.
In her case, in Tammy's case, it's a little bit different.
Tammy entered from a different point.
She's not out to be a leader.
She's not out to be a teacher even necessarily.
She entered because she was looking to meet people and to belong to something and to be a part of something.
And so, yeah, whether it's loneliness as the kind of the push-in, or whether it's anger because a system has failed you or a consequence has been administered that you think is unjust, I think that conspiracies offer a quick answer to something that's complicated.
Yeah.
And it's interesting because, you know, making the comparison to a religion, you know, I was thinking, and we've talked about that in the past is this desire to proselytize your conspiracy is a big part of, you know, what it is to be a sort of active conspiracy theorist.
But like, I was thinking, you said religion.
I was like, you know, in some ways, Q and stars, all of this stuff, like they are this belief in a higher power, right?
Because Q is this thing that's going to, oh, like Q has more power than the president, right?
It's like Q is this thing that's, yes, the president is part of it, but it's bigger than him.
It's lasted longer than him.
It's been here before he was.
In fact, they've been grooming him to be the, you know, the sort of figurehead that's going to lead the charge.
And so many, the belief in these conspiracies, it's like, yeah, it's like deciding to believe in a higher power that isn't the one that, I don't know, you maybe have bad associations with because you grew up in a super religious house or, you know, for whatever reason, if you're somewhat of an agnostic, you know, you have a hard time getting behind sort of like, you know, whatever standard religions.
Do you feel like all of these things, starseeds, the 20 in back program, all of this stuff, because it's so, it seems so out there, so part of science fiction, it is more powerful than reality.
When I started studying these women, the first time I talked to Yvonne in person was because she took me down a road in his spirituality that got a little too complicated because we're talking about Lyrians and all kinds of different alien hybrids that I wasn't familiar with at that point.
I didn't know we were going into that territory.
So I actually had messaged her in the Facebook group we were in and asked a question and she gave me her cell phone number and said, call me.
And then she spent an hour explaining my question.
And Lee spoke again the next day and the next day.
And so you could, at the time, it didn't seem this way, but in hindsight, I realized she was really interested in sharing that good news with me, right?
Yeah.
She wanted to share the good news.
She wanted to give this special knowledge.
She wanted to be my teacher.
And she was my teacher.
She taught me a ton.
You know, so in the beginning, it's very easy to say, oh, these are just these crazy fringe ideas.
And but she's living her life based on this structure.
She's doing the energy healing.
She's taking the supplement.
She's doing all of the things, you know, with the crystals and the meditating.
And so she's living this.
She's doing it.
And I started thinking, what is it?
And everything she does and believes in is based on these QAnon conspiracies that also now include a whole bunch of other conspiracies on top of those.
And I realized, what makes this any different from organized religion, right?
Everything is faith-based.
You're going in and you're being told how to live your life and how you're to conduct yourself based on this set of rules, but it's all faith-based.
And it's not that.
So I pretty easily, midway through, was able to accept the whole, I don't care if you think you're a star seed, you can be a star seed.
That's okay.
It's when you then start to talk about the nano chips and the vaccines and the reptilians.
And that's when it gets to be a problem.
It's not the new age spirituality by itself, because I personally don't feel that it's that much different than any other organized kind of religion.
It's faith-based stuff.
It's all the other stuff where you start, it's bringing up the conspiracies that go back forever with anti-Semitism and the racism and the targeting of marginalized groups because somehow your new age theory now can also target the LGBTQ, even though you are all about love and light and can't we all get along.
Somehow that's only reserved for a select few.
Yeah.
I really loved your fourth chapter in which you talk about the pandemic and how this is like a real catalytic moment for spirituality, not just for the subjects of your book, but like worldwide.
But like, how would you describe how this event turned the world upside down and just created the perfect kind of breeding ground for the kind of worldview and beliefs that you discuss?
And again, since I really am only looking at women, this is specifically towards middle-aged women.
But I think the pandemic really was the perfect storm for a lot of these beliefs to explode into the mainstream because the pandemic itself touched on every sphere of womanhood, right?
We have health, which is, you know, mothers and children or mothers are always typically responsible for that piece.
So we've got health, we've got education, you've got moral training still.
You have all the things that touch on what women's spheres are.
And I think that was why the Save the Children just pulled in so many middle-aged women who were already spending a lot of time online.
The pandemic saw people spending even more time online.
And again, the demographic I'm looking at, which was the pattern of the first 100 women arrested for Jan 6 who were firmly the majority middle-aged in Gen X, you start to realize they're also in a situation where many of them are still doing caregiving responsibilities, whether it be for children, grandchildren, or now parents also, because we're kind of sandwiched in between the two at this stage of life.
So spending more and more time online anyway, regardless of the pandemic, more and more of our social encounters happen online.
It's kind of been a replacement for real world social activity.
And I think that is why the pandemic became such the perfect storm for recruiting people into conspiratorial movements, especially women.
Again, algorithms and social media play a huge role here too.
You can be online in 2020 looking for tips on how to homeschool your child because in-person gatherings were closed and many, I would never have known how to make my three children sit down in front of a computer and how to be effective doing that.
So I think when you go online and you're searching for that, you're going to be fed homeschool material, which is going to have algorithms that feed you into other areas of extremism, unfortunately, right?
That was how I noticed in 2020.
The first mainstream thing I noticed was Target having the whole cottage core aesthetic going on in their store with little house on the prairie style dresses that they were selling to women during the pandemic.
Everybody was buying out the dry goods.
You know, everybody was doing sourdough starters during the pandemic.
And what I think what we forget is how much those algorithms come into play when you are searching that stuff.
And, you know, I know that just from my own research when I first started dabbling in Prad wives, trying to find out about them, I just kept getting fed more and more stuff.
And so the algorithms really work in favor of recruitment.
Yeah.
And if you're a person who's not used to educating yourself on the internet, so to speak, connecting to the internet for listeners of this podcast, you know, like if you're somebody who's mostly just watched CNN or MSNBC or even Fox to a certain degree, you know, that's kind of it.
But when you turn those channels off and turn to the keyboard and you're going, how do I do this?
How do I do this?
All of a sudden, you're presented with so many different ways of belief that are new and you can get lost.
I remember that during the pandemic and in, you know, talking about radicalization to QAnon specifically or conspiracy theories, I remember that the number was staggering.
It was something like within usually within like 72 hours was how long it took from the moment you started, you know, quote unquote doing your own research to joining some kind of, you know, QA, you know, pro-QAnon community online.
Yeah, and the DRON research has always been interesting to me too, because one of the things that most people think when they hear some of the conspiracies that I hear about is these people just must be completely dumb or uneducated or live in a hole or something, right?
To believe these things.
And that's what's really interesting with this: do your own research.
People are doing research for hours and hours and hours.
It's media literacy that we have a problem with because people don't exercise discernment.
And that's not just in QAnon conspiracies.
We have plenty of liberal conspiracists doing the same thing.
Yeah, 100% where there's this lack of discernment.
Yeah, QAnon in so many ways and MAGA, I think, gave liberals the blueprint and they have run and they have run with it.
One of my favorite episodes of the real Ghostbusters is there's this episode where the Ghostbusters realize that there's an alternate like unit of Ghostbusters in the spirit world called People Busters.
And they're like giant skeleton-like looking creatures and they trap people in the ghost world and send them back to Earth.
There could absolutely be like an alt QAA on the right wing that is, you know, breaking.
I mean, it'll never happen just because of the nature of this, this, this hill only rolls one way, unfortunately.
It basically gives you an idea of human nature, wants to explain things, right?
I mean, that if everyone's looking for answers, this is why discernment and media literacy is really important.
Yeah.
And of course, and, you know, this is not profound, but when was a more important time, you know, for people to be looking for answers about a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that information, you know, the 24-hour news cycle plus social media, so much information was coming out about this.
One thing was true one day and then wrong the second day, both from amateur and professional outlets.
I mean, people, I mean, we all know and we all experienced it because of the different things that we did.
Remember, like at first, it was like, oh, you know, you got to wipe down all of your, you know, your grocery bags with this, or you got to give a soap bath to your vegetables.
But then it was, oh, well, it can't live on the, you know, I mean, we were fed so many different things.
It was just, you know, the perfect storm.
I mean, it was funny because I was thinking about that during all this.
It was like, why have I followed them down these conspiratorial rabbit holes?
And I thought the only, the closest I ever came was during 9-11 when I had three little tiny kids and everybody was freaking out.
I remember the craziest thing I did was I opened our mail outside for a solid week because it kept saying anthrax was like pretty much everywhere in every post office.
And so I would take it outside with the martyr mother.
Like, I'm going to open the anthrax outside with my children.
And then after a few days, I realized this was crazy.
I stopped.
Right.
It's crazy, but like in my head, I'm also like, what's wrong with that actually?
On the off chance, you know, I'll tell you this.
I'll tell you this.
I was working on this project with this, with this woman from New Zealand, and it was early on.
It was like January of 2020.
Like it was, it was early when talks of COVID were just whispers in the dark, you know?
And she was like, yeah, I was talking to my friend and she works at NASA.
And she says, you know, she wouldn't get on a plane right now.
Like, she wouldn't even get on a plane.
She says, I didn't even get on a plane.
And I was like, huh.
And this was just something that was like told to me casually by somebody who I had no idea if she had any actual connection.
But because like I'm naturally prone to conspiracy theories, I go, huh, if somebody from NASA is saying, don't get on a plane, this thing must be real.
This thing must be worse.
And they're saying, and you know what?
I made me and my wife go to Target and I bought like a bunch of hand sanitizer and toilet paper.
And this was like months ahead of time.
And so then when the thing, you know, when it actually happened, we were the ones that had extra supplies that we were giving out to neighbors and all of this stuff.
I even got in a fight with my mom because she goes, well, if you thought it was going to be something in January, why didn't you tell?
You didn't say anything to your parents.
I'm, you know, immunocompromised.
Like, you know, got into a fight about it.
And it was one of those weird things where I was like, ah, my conspiracy brain gave me an advantage in this situation.
Were you a toilet paper hoarder?
Yeah, and hand sanitizer, but we gave it out.
I mean, we didn't, you know, we weren't.
We weren't stingy.
No, no, no.
And we let, you know, we let people know.
You know, we were, you know, we were a resource, if you will.
Yes, generous hoarders are the best.
Yeah, I think this is the other part of the equation was that like, especially in like the early parts of the pandemic, it feels like more authoritative systems of like, you know, information were kind of breaking down.
Like I said, like January, February, there was this sort of like uncertainty, but like, well, should we, how seriously should we take this?
And like, you know, there was like a little waffling and confusion on that question.
And then around March, when it became very clear that this was serious, there was still lots of uncertainty.
Like, how deadly is it?
How fast is it spreading?
How does it spread?
What should I do to help?
It says, should I sanitize surfaces?
Was the protocol.
And people didn't know what to do.
And like, you know, if you enter a situation where like it seems like even people who are in the authoritative positions aren't 100% clear because the data isn't in yet, then it becomes a situation where you have really no reason to believe them over, you know, someone online who acts very, very certain about how serious this is and what it means or claims to have some kind of access.
Yeah.
That does it.
We love access.
We love exclusive knowledge.
Yes, we do.
I want to talk about this, the specific like subjects of your book.
For example, I really like the story of Yvonne, especially.
I love this detail about how she watches this QAnon documentary called Out of Shadows in a chiropractor's waiting room.
And it just becomes a pretty, pretty significant moment in her, I guess, her journey down the rabbit hole.
And I like this because it's sort of, it portrays basically two kind of like overlapping distribution channels for these beliefs.
First, there's alternative health in terms of the chiropractor's practice and also the strange sort of like QAnon documentary.
But like, I'm like, how does this show like, you know, how like these spaces can like create layers of, I guess, like pulling a person deeper and deeper into like different realms through media and also just social spaces.
Yeah, that was interesting because I always wondered too, like, where are you finding some of these people?
But I've had this experience myself right here in California when I went to a dentist's office.
Okay.
Seems to be dentists and chiropractors.
We've got the most billed dentists.
So I went to a dentist and one of the first things he said to me as I'm sitting in the chair is he starts telling me about his wife's cousin's sister's friend who's paralyzed because of the jab.
And I'm like, oh, great.
And I'm not kidding about that.
I mean, this was just straight up.
As he's holding the Novocaine needle, you know, the wrong side first.
Yes.
And that was the man.
Yeah, I left and never went back for the crown.
And when you know the language and the vocabulary, I think that's it.
Again, every year I started seeing it more and more out in the real world part because one, it was actually entering the mainstream more and more, but also because I knew the vocabulary and I knew the language.
So when I heard someone say 11-11, it immediately got my attention.
Whereas, you know, years prior, I wouldn't have paid any attention to that.
Or someone was talking about angel numbers or a whole bunch of concepts.
I would have probably had no idea what those, what they were signaling.
So I have noticed that part in the real world.
So it's not so surprising to me that Devon saw this in a chiropractor's office.
I experienced it in 2022 with a dentist.
So.
Yeah, I do.
I do notice that conspiracy theorists or, you know, or just kind of your like MAGA, you know, your MAGA folks in general are way quicker within the first like two seconds of talking to them.
They want to bring up something political.
They want to bring up some kind of complaint or honor something that, you know, Trump did.
Whereas like liberals don't do that so much.
Not that I'm excusing one, but I just find it interesting.
If you sit down in a, in a, like, a lib, you know, dentist office, they're not going to be like, you know, oh, hey, have you, you know, have you looked at the, you looked at how many numbers that, oh, have you looked at how many Planned Parenthood sites have lost funding in the last, you know, two months alone?
Do you know how much was approved for the military?
Like, it's just not a thing.
Part of me wonders if like on some human level, like human level, they know they're wrong.
It's also built on grievance.
Yeah.
And so they like have to, you know, if they don't spread it or they're not talking about it, it's like, it's almost like they're convincing you also convinces themselves to a certain degree.
So I noticed that too.
Any Republican situation I'm ever in, they're always within like five seconds making it political and finding a way to sort of gauge what my politics are.
I don't know.
Maybe because I look like a lib.
I don't know.
Well, that's what's interesting.
So I spent, you know, a lot of people say, like, how did you do this for so long talking to these women so different from yourself?
And the interesting part was we didn't talk about politics almost at all.
After those first few questions I asked Yvonne about her spiritual journey, we very quickly realized we were a month apart in age.
We started talking about things from the 80s.
We started talking about our lives as middle-aged women now and what it was like raising kids and going through divorces.
And that's, we really talked about that sort of thing most of the time, which is why this book is pretty much traces their lives and in detail it does because that's what we talked about for three years.
Yeah.
I mean, I thought it was really interesting about Yvonne's journey is that you really, I think, portray well how this content opens her up to a new like method of interpretation for all of reality.
Like she talks about like getting into QAnon videos and influencer content that sort of like how she understands everything to be like ceremonial and like in plain sight and like creates this whole symbolic grammar that sort of alters how she views everything.
I mean, like, how did you sort of like understand this journey to like having a whole new conspiratuality-based framework for understanding not just political events or world events, but events in her own life?
Well, interestingly, she doesn't really, nobody I spoke to uses conspiracies to explain their pasts.
For example, you mentioned kids for cash with Tammy earlier.
Tammy doesn't think that's a conspiracy in the classic sense that we're talking about like the reptilians and the hamburger meat at McDonald's and stuff, the human meat they use.
It's not that kind of stuff.
She just thinks it's systems that are broken and powerful people protecting powerful people, which is their reality, right?
That's real.
And she knows this, but anything current and future is always explained through QAnon conspiracies.
And I find that interesting.
I don't understand that really, where that dis how you explain everything that happened in the past is your own bad choices or bad luck or whatever it was, but then everything now in the future is all these government conspiracies.
And you had mentioned earlier about Trump.
And yeah, he's the ultimate white hat here.
And then, you know, again, I've asked, there's some Christian people, some very evangelical Christian women I've spoken to.
And I'm like, how do you reconcile him with God works through flawed men is always the answer.
There's always an answer.
I mean, there's always an answer.
So that's the problem is that you, how do you get people out of a movement and a belief system where it's not just online and your groups of just your ordinary average people anymore?
And nor is it just the influencers trying to sell you their alt health products.
It's now in the health and human services department.
It's the president.
It's the entire administration is, you know, half of the QAnon conspiracy stars, the stars of those conspiracies are heading up the FBI.
And, you know, it's so bizarre and it's such a disconnect in 2025 and six to see the people that I was studying in 2022 and picking their faces out on Mike Flynn's, you know, reawakened tours, who are now sitting in the top seats of government.
How are you going to dissuade middle-aged women from believing these truths, you know, in quotes, when it's coming from the very people that we've been trained to believe are being honest with us?
Which again is pick and choose because we believe one set is complete liars and doing all these bad things.
And this other set somehow is truthful.
There's a real disconnect with reality here because what have they been screaming about for five years, six years now?
Save the children and here's the Epstein files.
And you know what?
The conspiracists were right.
There is a cabal.
There is an elite cabal of men or powerful people who abuse children.
That is true, right?
So why aren't we all applauding?
Let's all work together then to take that cabal down like we've been talking about.
Where is that?
It's like they're like, wait, wait a minute, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, take them all down.
I don't care who's in those files, right?
But how do you go from that for five years saying Trump's going to come back in office to expose this cabal?
Then he comes back and says, there is, there is no cabal.
This is a hoax.
And I don't even want your support if you're going to believe this bullshit anymore, right?
That's basically what he said in a post in September, I think.
And then that is, there are no files.
Now there's a million pages that we haven't released yet.
Then I keep watching everyone's social media pages to see what they're saying about it.
And they're just not.
They're ignoring it.
They're talking about other stuff, but not the Epstein files, which I find so fascinating since that was such a, such the main point for them.
Yeah.
I think that, yeah, it's really interesting.
It's like it's more than just, I guess, like the sort of like conspiratuality stuff is more than just, I guess, a set of beliefs because it also creates a sort of like interpretive framework and some sort of like which has some dogmas.
And one of the dogmas is, like you mentioned, like Trump is the ultimate white hat.
So this, this interpretive lens just naturally just guides them away from entertaining the idea that he might be, that Trump might be involved in this sort of child abusing cabal.
Well, yeah.
And the easiest way I've seen it explained, he's been playing a long game all this time as an asset for the FBI to gather information or something like that.
I, you know, it just, that's always kind of bob of my mind.
It's like, hey, guys, here it is.
Now's your chance to shine, right?
You called it.
Yeah.
So I think social media like keeps people too stuck in.
I think if there was no such thing as social media and Trump got elected on this sort of like populist platform and, you know, MAGA still happened as, you know, as it did, people that liked him in the same way that people, you know, were like really into George W or whatever.
But then all of a sudden, if like the Epstein scandal came out, like people would be like, oh shit.
Oh, fuck.
Well, this is a bad guy.
We got to get, we got to impeach him.
Get him out of here.
But I think we have social media to keep people so glued, you know, and so stuck in whatever lane it is and so many off-ramps to, you know, to keep you from having to like smash into the, you know, the plastic barrels filled with, you know, reality.
There's no reason.
There's no reason to, why, why should I have to go, oh man, for seven years, for eight years, you know, however long?
For eight years, I've had t-shirts, posters, mugs, USB drives of like the bigot, like one of the most prolific pedophiles of all time.
Oh, man, like that doesn't feel good.
And if somebody online, or maybe the moment you're going, oh man, I got to get out of here.
But then somebody online goes, wait a minute, he's a white hat.
And that's the lure of belonging part, right?
Because if you give up your conspiracy, you're not going to just give up that.
You're giving up your identity, your community, your sense of belonging to that community.
And so, you know, I always bring up the example of going back to that night in February when Russia invaded Ukraine.
And I was in one of my Facebook groups and just kind of observing the chat going through.
And I watched for about an hour and a half after the announcement was made where everyone was trying to figure out who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.
And they're literally like, well, they're doing this because of the bio-weapon, the bio labs, and they're doing this because of the underground child sex trafficking tunnels in Ukraine.
So Putin's a good guy.
And I asked Yvonne in real time, like, who I'm confused.
Who's the good guy?
Who's the bad guy?
She's like, I don't know.
I'm trying to figure it out.
And literally about 45 minutes later, or an hour later, Putin was a good guy across the board in my groups.
And I thought that was really fascinating.
Again, looking at the demographic and the age group we're looking at.
We were all raised to think Russia was our enemy.
So how did that flip so easily?
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it is interesting.
Like, it's like whenever there's a significant event that's maybe unexpected and confusing, it's like they're immediately trying to figure out how it fits into their sort of this easy black and white framework.
And like, they're able to do it in under an hour, right?
And it's pretty astonishing.
Yeah, just give me 25 minutes.
Yeah, it was kind of astonishing actually to watch that happen because it really was nothing more than meme sharing and conspiracy sharing.
And there was no solid research of any kind to give anyone any indication of who the good guys should be or bad guys.
But there's just feelings because that's what all this is, is feelings, isn't it?
It's not about facts.
It's about how it makes you feel.
But, you know, I mean, it's like it's something they're like powerful feelings.
And sometimes they follow these feelings to disaster.
And I think This is, I think, illustrated when Yvonne's sort of like her legal troubles related to her involvement in January 6th.
And she has some very intense testimony talking about how it's like war and it's like a kind of like she's a divine sovereign being called by Trump to fulfill a destiny.
Not a good tack, you know, against against the advice of her lawyers.
You know, there's a moment where her lawyers tell her to stay off social media and then she immediately live streams.
I mean, do you understand?
It's like, no, this is like, this is not just your individual personal sort of belief system.
This is clashing with your real material reality in a very significant way.
I don't know.
I think that this also just illustrates just how potent these is, how important it is to the point that they, even when confronted with something very, very serious, like, you know, legal charges, they stick with these beliefs rather than like, you know, listen to their lawyers.
Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, if losing your house the year prior hadn't shown you that there would be consequences for some of these actions, right?
Because when she stopped paying her bills, that's what happened.
And then she went to court.
And I did go, I went to her trial and her sentencing.
And at her sentencing, she stood up and read a 45-minute letter to the judge.
And it started out, I am a divine sovereign being and I do not recognize your jurisdiction.
And I remember like having to be careful not to audibly go, because, you know, I mean, I'm trying to imagine on a planet I would be brave enough, essentially, to say something like that.
Because Yvonne didn't take a plea agreement, right?
She was offered a plea bargain.
She could have plugged down to, I think, two misdemeanors.
And instead, she took her to trial against her lawyer's advice, where she was charged with two felonies and four misdemeanors.
And the jury came to a guilty verdict on all counts.
And within about four hours that afternoon, that they arrested and, you know, and she and sentencing comes.
And instead of just, you know, standing there, she read a 45-minute email or a letter to the judge.
And I remember him asking multiple times, how much longer is this?
What page are you on?
She said, I'm on page two.
How many pages do you have?
Eight.
And he literally put his, he put his head in his hands.
And you could, he was so frustrated.
And he said, I guess I have no choice but to let you to continue.
And so he did.
The government was asking for 33 months.
And if you followed any of these women's cases, most of the women who had not committed physical violence, you know, the government might have been asking for 48 months.
They were getting 60 days or most of them, right?
Well, Yvonne was, they asked for 33 months and the judge gave her 30 months, which was kind of unheard.
Like she almost got to what the government was asking, which is the first time I had seen that with one of the women, but I'm sure it was because of just her absolute unrepentant nature.
And he was annoyed at the letter, I think, probably.
Oh, hugely.
Yes.
That's kind of unfair, I think.
Like, if somebody's about to, if somebody's about to get locked up in the slammer for, you know, any amount of time, like, you should be able to read a fucking 10-page thing if you want.
Well, she did.
She was allowed to read it.
She did read it.
I just don't think it helped her much when it came time to the actual sentencing.
That's not fair.
You can't like base people's sentences on like how nice they are to the judge, whether the judge.
That feels unfair to me.
It should be standardized.
Yeah.
I guess that's another, I guess that's a different discussion for another discussion for this one.
I think there is plenty of opportunity not to get 30 minutes.
But what do you do, though?
Again, she did her time.
She did do her time.
She was accepted to the RDAP program, which is kind of like the Cadillac of federal programs, I guess, when you're in prison that allows you to do a program that shaves off a year of your sentence.
So she had done, she had just been released to the halfway house when she was pardoned.
But when you're talking about a true believer like Yvonne, who believes that she went to trial and then went to jail for speaking her truth and for holding her truth and not, you know, giving that up for personal benefit.
What do you think happens when Trump gets in office and immediately pardons her?
And it's, it's, she was been right.
Everything's right, right?
There's no going back for her now because everything came true.
She believed that she was divinely placed there to tell her truth, both in court at the Capitol originally on January 6th.
And now she's been vindicated because she was actually on appeal.
So she's wiped plain as if it never happened to her.
So anybody who had their case on appeal when the pardons came down just get wiped like it never happened.
How many people can say they have a pardon from the president?
As much as we look at Trump and we're like, old fake president, you know, as Travis always says, we can try to diminish these people all we want.
It does not take away any iota of their actual real power, you know?
And so like, yeah, I mean, it all came true.
She stood, she stood.
Like you said, she told her truth and she has a presidential part and she could talk about that for the rest of her life.
Is she happy?
Is she happier than me?
My imagination is that people who believe in QAnon and people who give in to their conspiratorial nature and just kind of get to construct the reality that they want to and not have to contend with fact checkers and snobby, you know, journalists or whatever are happier.
But like you, I think of all people would bet would best be able to answer, I mean, other than Yvonne herself, like, you know, would answer that question as somebody who spent so much time with her.
I mean, Yvonne herself would be the person who would have to answer that.
But as far as my observation goes, she was, if you look at videos she was posting in 2020 and 2021, especially about COVID restrictions and mass making, there's a lot of anger that would come out in those videos.
As she got further down the conspiratuality road, she softened.
That anger was tempered and she did become somewhat happier in quotes, maybe.
At least the way she expressed herself wasn't always through internal rage.
And so whereas she would make videos lashing out at people, there's a lot of that going on on the right, where they make videos at each other all the time or like responding to people on TikTok, even after J6, because she got a lot of hate after that, obviously.
So everybody did who got identified and their social media would, you know, though there was a remedy to that.
You could put your social media on private, and yet that seemed to never occur to anyone because everything was public all the time, which is another, you know, another benefit of studying middle-aged women.
Our privacy controls suck.
And you can find out a lot just from looking around.
But anyway, I think that's one of the biggest problems was when authority gave all of this permission.
How do you draw someone back who is a true believer, who believed that they took the stand, they lost their house, they lost their job, they lost everything, but they were the one, they were the righteous one.
They were the one who stood for, as Yvonne says, I stand for truth and I will stand for truth to until the day I die.
Or until my very last breath, actually, is the quote.
It said that in trial, you know, so she, she's a true believer.
The thing that also is interesting with Yvonne, and I, this is not my realm of expertise, but I do know that in 2021, the summer of 2021, she went to Mount Shasta to the Lionsgate portal on August 8th.
And she met a group that was there.
And it was a shaman, a woman who was a shaman, a medicine woman, actually.
And she invited Yvonne to participate in one of their ceremonies.
And it was that toad, the toad poison ceremony where, you know, so Yvonne started dabbling in psychedelics along with her spiritual practice and then started doing workshops with this woman up in Reno that she met at Mount Shasta for about that next year.
You know, so here's people who, you know, again, are willing to spend a lot of money on these wellness retreats, on these new remedies and methods.
And meanwhile, dabbling with psychedelics, and you got to wonder sometimes based on the research that's going on with psychedelics, with depression, anxiety, and addiction, you know, when you're doing that with a shaman and you're a true believer and you believe this person has spiritual gifts and you think you yourself have spiritual gifts, what is that doing to your brain as far as the neural pathways that are being opened up when you're that receptive?
I would assume that it makes it even more of a stronghold internally in your belief system is my guess anyway.
But I would be interested in knowing if there's been studies on how, or if anyone is studying conspiratuality and the use of psychedelics and how that, how those two things bind together to create an even more intense experience in conspiracies.
I don't know.
But I did notice that that was happening quite a bit of the microdosing on a regular basis.
So very interesting.
I mean, I think, I think like her journey, I think illustrates, I guess, the kinds of problems that can spirituality or conspiracism solve, because like, even though it is adding to her material problems, it solves a certain epistemic or emotional problem, which is deeper and like maybe harder to solve than just like, you know, where to live in terms of like, you know, your own material problems.
And like most religious stories have, you know, teach of a figure who does just this, who faces all sorts of material challenges and setbacks, but becomes spiritually enlightened and aligned.
And I was thinking, it's like, my God, like Yavad is like as dedicated to this belief system as like, you know, a third century Christian martyr.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's probably true.
In some ways, you know, this is the heart.
This is the part I came to feel again at the end of this.
Having done it again for so long has been a real advantage in my ability to then kind of let my own beliefs catch up to, or my sense of thinking catch up to where I'm at and trying to make sense of some of this stuff.
But I have kind of come to think of this as something, again, is not that different than organized religion.
It's all faith-based and you're expected to behave a certain way, adhere to a certain set of rules based on someone's teaching, but you just have to take it on faith that it exists, you know?
And I think that's what happened with Yvonne, which was interesting during the pandemic.
Her big shift into conspiratuality was in 2020, and that was her great awakening, as she calls it.
And she says, in part, part of that was the COVID restrictions.
And when her church, because after she left the Marine, she became very involved in a Church of the Nazarene congregation up in Poise, Idaho.
And Yvonne doesn't do things as just a, you know, a background participant.
Yvonne is going to become a leader in whatever she does.
So she's going to go to the Capitol.
She's going to make sure she's right up against those bike racks.
And, you know, so she does the same thing with her evangelical Christianity.
And so it was during the pandemic, she was on a youth group trip because she had taken on the youth group leader role that she wasn't wearing a mask and had posted a picture online.
And she got a call from one of the pastors saying, you have to be masked right now.
And she was shocked by this.
She was shocked that she would be scolded for not wearing a mask.
And then when they stopped in-person gatherings at the church, that's when her aha moment happened.
And she rejected Christianity and organized religion in general because she decided they're right.
It is a man-made institution.
They're following these unjust orders of closing down because God would never close his doors to his followers is her rationale.
And so that was when she, and because she was getting, it was all kind of the snowball, her belief systems were starting to have people calling her, you know, crazy or shunning her.
And she's getting scolded for not wearing a mask.
And now they shut down in-person gatherings.
It is another system to make us complacent slaves and to keep us programmed.
I mean, and she's not wrong in some ways, right?
That's, that's this, you know, but she then took that same need and just flipped it over into conspiracies.
That need never left her.
That need of being told how to live and what to think and how to behave stayed there.
She just switched to a different leadership.
I mean, it's, it's tragic because like in any other context, these kinds of qualities, such as like, you know, a willingness to go all in and dedication and the willingness to step up into sort of leadership positions would be a debt positive for herself and her community.
But in this context, it just drags herself down and like, yeah, poisons the information sphere.
Yes.
But then also, again, thinking about the demographic we're talking about, as much as we think it's dragging them down, or us down, I'm one of them.
What is interesting is as a woman who's over 50, you're pretty much invisible and there's really no place or role for you almost anywhere.
It always cracks me up when you fill out surveys.
It has like age 20 to 30, you know, check the box, 30 to 40.
So it's 50 up.
So it's like they put 50 year olds with 80 year olds.
Yeah, they're like dead.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I think that's the other thing.
A lot of these people have found this place in this space where they're getting attention and people care about what they're saying and they're seeing.
And this does become an identity in many ways.
And so there's a whole mass of a ball that you have to unravel.
It's not just trying to debunk conspiracies.
It's now, how are you going to give someone a way to occupy their time 16 hours a day when they've been living online for the last six years?
And how do you get people reconnected with real, real world relationships when everyone in their real world life thinks they're crazy or hates them because I wanted to ban this book or all the things that have happened in the last six years that have completely made us even more divided and polarized in many ways.
You know, you have to make those decisions.
It's not just about the conspiracies anymore.
It's about your entire lifestyle at this point.
I had my book lunch at Romance last week on Tuesday night and a young man and probably younger than my son, he was in his early 20s, came up to get his book signed and he says, my aunt is a QAnon conspiracist.
And he goes, you might have heard of her.
She was arrested for January 6th.
And I said, oh, who is that?
And he told me it's Mickey Larson Olson.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
I've met her.
And I was like, wow, okay.
So he was very excited about this book.
And I, you know, I think with my own personal experience with that dentist I mentioned to you, I met a therapist that I talked to who was very bright and started talking about soul contracts at some point in our conversation.
And I'm like, you're what?
What was that?
Soul contract?
You know, because I know this language now and it catches my attention.
And, you know, so I was like, are you talking like Ascended Masters?
She's like, yeah.
So this is everywhere.
This is just all over.
Yeah, people, people are pilled.
You know, it's totally natural that, you know, the older you get, you, you start to get curious about religion, you know, you know, and as you have to scroll the wheel, like when you select your age on like the spectrum, like, you know, whatever, you know, whatever, any, any fucking app that you have, hey, you scroll the wheel further and further down to get to the year, you know, to get to the year that you were born.
It's just like, no, it's like, it's not just the church now.
There's like something else that people can like find meaning in, like something that's totally free, actually.
And they don't have to go anywhere either.
Like you don't have to go anywhere and actually like put the put the effort in.
So I, I, yeah, this is just another, this is just another thing.
As long as we have social media, we will have this.
But then Tammy's journey is different though.
Again, Tammy's not doing this to be a leader or teacher necessarily.
She's doing it to meet people and to be a part of something.
She would go to Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.
She would never tell me what Trump said.
She would tell me who she met from her Telegram fam.
Oh.
So you can see for her, it's always been about social connection.
She went to January 6th because she'd seen a Facebook posting about a bus from her area taking people to January 6th.
And that's how she said, oh, I'm always looking to meet up, meet people somewhere.
Because again, this is a woman who's taking care of grandchildren, who still has adult children who are in mess in many ways, who are there's a lot of addiction and incarceration and abuse still happening within that family system.
So she's still dealing with all of that at age 54 or five now.
So it's, you start to see what we talked about a little while ago with the age thing.
This is a way for women to have visibility, have a purpose, have some power with their knowledge or secret knowledge, whatever they call it.
And Tammy uses that, but for her, it's mostly social.
She's very, very lonely.
And because of all of the internal family system problems, there's not a lot of room or space or time for a social connection with most people, which is how she and I kind of got off of my academic path into a personal one was very early on when I started talking to her in July of 2022 when her co-defendant committed suicide.
His name was Mark Angst, and they had been on the same bus together and gone into the Capitol together.
They were the only two from the bus that did that.
They were about a month out of a couple of months from sentencing and he committed suicide because he lost, you know, he lost his job and all that stuff.
Neither of them, by the way, none of these people I'm talking about did political, did physical violence.
If you don't count the physical body presence as part of the violence, because everybody was outnumbered.
So I tend to think that the number of bodies were part of that.
But so, you know, she told me when I first started talking to her, one of the first personal things she told me was, I'm really kind of scared.
I've got my sentenceee coming up and my public defender is asking me for 15 character letters.
And I don't think I have 15 friends anymore.
And something about the way she said it in that moment, I started thinking, do I?
You know, because when you're middle, when you're our age, I mean, late 50s, you don't have that same social network you used to have when your kids were younger or when you had time to socialize before, you know.
And so I started to have some empathy for that situation because again, this is how we, as middle-aged women, found so much to talk about that had nothing to do with Trump at all.
And why I know so much about their lives personally, because that's what we talked about and how trauma impacted them and that sort of thing.
But it's, it's a lot.
Yeah, but it makes perfect, it makes perfect sense.
You have a diminished, like a huge part of our population who, like you said, 50 plus, you're 90 to us.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's why that's why I was joking with my husband when Travis invited me to do the show.
I was like, oh my God, I'm probably their worst nightmare.
I already know this.
I already know if Jet X is your worst nightmare.
I know all the influencers.
I know all of it.
I've listened to all those episodes cross-country twice, so I know.
But that's why your book and your voice are so important, right?
Like we need.
Like I said, it's a first time being middle-aged.
Help me out here.
But how did you, you know, you were saying you have so much in common.
You found so much in common with women.
Well, no, no, not so much.
Not so much.
Some of our lived experiences as middle-aged American women are, there are some similarities.
Okay, okay, okay.
That's that's a much better way to phrase it.
But I guess, I guess the question that I'm trying to ask is, what do you attribute, if you can attribute anything, to not being pulled in the same direction?
Like, you know, I can relate.
Yeah, I was also kind of like, and when I say kind of, I mean very pilled on 9-11.
I was in college.
I was in my freshman year of college at the time.
And it was like the first political beliefs that I ever really had were kind of conspiratorial.
Huh.
So what, you know, were Yvonne, I guess, or Tammy curious about why you weren't as pilled as they were?
No, because we never talked about it.
And again, I think because I wasn't a combatant, I was, you know, I was genuine with them.
And so they just assumed, I think, that I, you know, I think Tammy over time knew I, she's like, I know you're skeptical, but whereas Yvonne never doesn't, she just assumes I'm going to believe the same she does.
And it wasn't until the road trip we did with her after her sentencing where she was with me in person for several days.
And but I was concerned about going to the speed limit.
And she's like, why?
There are no accidents.
And now if you're going to manifest one by saying I have to go to the speed limit because there's potholes, then you're going to be, you're going to manifest that for yourself.
And I'm like, well, because I just, you know, whatever, buckle up and wait.
Well, shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's, yeah.
That then she started to, she said I was much more 3D than she realized.
And that maybe I wasn't going to ascend.
And maybe that I was just going to be their sister here on earth to help humanity in 3D.
So, and she said, either way, there's no judgments.
So, you know, I'm going to go ahead and stick with the 3D and I'm going to retain my free will because that's the thing.
You have to be willing to give up free will to ascend.
Oh, interesting.
I didn't know that part of it.
You know, which is also, if that's the belief system, if you're supposed to give up free will and you're supposed to have no attachments is the other piece of it, which is also, you know, interesting.
That's another thing that they spew a lot of in these spirituality circles is there are no attachments.
So as people are saying, hey, guess what?
You don't get to see your grandkids right now because it goes against my Mormon beliefs and you're talking about aliens and et cetera.
The, you know, someone who's a true believer can then say, well, this is what they're talking about.
There are no, there are no connections.
We're not supposed to have attachments.
And so this is a natural occurrence here that I'm not allowed to see my grand.
It's a way of rationalizing painful experiences also.
You know, again, I think so much of conspiracies for me and my observations have been coping mechanisms.
And you asked me how I didn't get involved in them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't have that kind of, I've never been a conspiracist.
I think, I think I use self-loathing as my method of explanation.
You know, familiar.
I don't need to look on the outside for a reason why things went wrong, I think.
I don't know.
I just, there wasn't, there's never been a moment where I was drawn in to any beliefs that were conspiratorial.
I recognized during the pandemic telling myself stories as a coping mechanism, but I recognized it fully in the moment as a coping mechanism.
Like I had been in India when the pandemic started.
I had left on March 9th before they were giving out refunds.
And, you know, 12 days later, India shut down.
And this is part of my, this is for my original academic project, and which turned into this book ultimately.
And so, you know, I came back after 12 days and everything was obliterated.
And we all know we all live through it.
But I, every day, for about three months at the same time in the afternoon, I would go make chai, masala chai from scratch with grinding up the ginger and all the stuff they taught me when I was in India just to keep that feeling alive and to keep that hope alive, you know, of like normalcy, of something soothing and comforting, you know, a memory of a better time.
And I would tell myself stories about what these things meant and even co-opted some Hindu religion along the way.
But I always knew in my head these were just, you know, fairy tales or, you know, little fantasies or to make myself feel better in a time that had no explanation, that had no guarantee of when it was going to end or if it was going to get worse, right?
And so I understand how that happens and I understand how easy that is, but I also am too skeptical.
I just don't have the kind of mind that can let me go there.
I also wasn't raised in a household that was based around religion.
So I don't have that in my, I don't have that faith background.
That's not part of my experience of just believing something without some tangible evidence to it.
You know, I do have believe in intuition sometimes and that sort of thing, but that's different.
I don't base, you know, whether I pay my house payment or not on that.
So I just don't have that in me.
I also don't have some of those same needs.
I have a so I have a family that doesn't have a lot of that everyday trauma stuff going on.
We don't have incarceration and addiction and abuse.
I'm very fortunate, it turns out.
I think I don't think I've ever felt more fortunate than after these last five years of talking to so many women because I feel like I'm the anomaly.
It's such an important, such, it's so important to like talk about this kind of stuff because you do.
It's a great reminder that so much of this stuff is like all kinds of mental health issues.
If you want to lump conspiracy theories into that, which I don't necessarily think that I would, but it's something you grow up with.
It's something that's cultivated from, yeah, I think a very early age.
And I think that that's always why I and Travis and Julian and everybody, I think that most everybody that we talk to on this show has such compassion for people who, even if it's kind of funny and silly and they believe in stupid shit and it's funny to laugh at.
And it's like, posted their art sucks online or their music sucks.
It's like, you know, I'm lucky too.
Like, we don't, I didn't grow up in a super religious house.
I, we didn't have like a ton of, we don't have addiction runs in our family.
Like, and it's so, and I still am like, I'm, I'm like, oh, 9-11.
Like, you know, you know, you also have the, you know, being an American citizen and seeing what our government is capable of and reading, you know, good journalism about, you know, the three-letter agencies 30 years after, you know, they've already gotten away with whatever they're doing.
And so there's good, there's good cause, I think, as Travis has said in the past, to be suspicious, but so much of it is out of their control.
And I think that everything that, you know, we've been talking about and the examples that you give in the book are such great reminders of that to some degree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's, you know, again, I'm, I have to also say, you know, it was easy for me.
I did this for such a long period of time, which was a huge benefit than hovering above because you can see the nuance and the different entry points.
But I'm also part of a privileged population, right?
I'm not one of the marginalized communities that's targeted with conspiracies.
So I would, you know, talking about sitting and talking to people different than ourselves and having empathy for them is great in practice and theory, or in theory.
But in practice, it's harder if you're a group that's maligned and targeted and threatened.
So that I just want to make that really clear.
I recognize the privilege that I was, that I have in that.
So it's not something everyone can do, you know?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So because I'm not touched by it personally.
There's nobody in my family.
There's nobody in my close circle of friends.
So I got fortunate.
I got very fortunate.
Yeah, me neither.
I've got sent a couple like blue and on art.
That's like my personal, that's like my personal shame in my family.
Yes.
Somebody will send me an article and I'll be like, oh, no, But it is.
And there's so many families.
I mean, that's one of the coolest parts about when we did the live show was like, you know, getting to meet other listeners.
And there were so many people who were like, you know, just like the young person who came up to you was like, oh, my aunt, my aunt is this very kind of famous, you know, QAnon influencer.
You know, like, that's so many people are.
I mean, obviously, we wouldn't have this show.
You know, you wouldn't have this book.
Like, you know, so many people.
It is so in the mainstream.
And it is just another, like, yeah, it's, it's another pamphlet that you find at your aunts, you know, on their like table.
And you're like, oh, no, they're into this.
So some days I feel like it's like, I remember going in the grocery store when I was a kid, like in the 70s and that new world news or whatever it was that really that it's like the Inquirer nation, but it was like real world news or something that had like, you know, Hillary Clinton gave birth to Martin Beats or something.
I feel like that whole rag came to life and that's what we've been living in for five years because it's just insane.
Yeah.
In some ways it shielded me though from the reality of what's actually happening because I still feel like I'm in a big LARP.
Like this isn't actually like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn't actually the human health, but he is and vaccines are actually going away and what?
Yeah, now we're the ones feeling like totally disconnected from reality because all of these yeah, that's that's a good way of saying it.
I think I've been kind of walking around a little bit of a weird fog like that for the last year because like, how is this reality?
Yeah.
You look at the you look at the National Inquirer now on, you know, when I'm checking out at the grocery store and it's very normal, very tame.
You know, it looks like it's today's time.
It looks like just another magazine.
Right.
Because the real world has caught up to the crazy.
Yeah, except it's like $11.95 now.
Magazines are so fucking expensive.
I had no idea.
It's actually insane.
Yeah.
Have you bought a pack of gum lately?
No, no, I can't.
I've got like real weird jaw issues.
So I can't, I can't chew gum.
But no, what's it at?
What are we talking?
Like four or five bucks now?
Pretty much.
I think I spent $4 on something like that the other day.
Oh my God.
The dollar store.
The dollar stores.
I remember in college, if I was hungry, I was able to fish maybe a couple dimes out of my car seats to get some Taco Bell.
I'd be full up for the day.
But yeah, no longer.
No more.
Wow.
No, now two combo meals is like $54.11.
Right.
And going to McDonald's to get a human hamburger is now, what, as much as it used to be to go to a nice restaurant?
Yeah.
Like, it's like $15 for a combo meal.
Yeah, exactly.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
And everybody's squished.
Everybody's squished.
And the internet is, it's the thinnest, it's the thinnest like crack to slip under.
So like as everybody gets squished down, it's so easy just to get funneled into, yeah, like Travis used to say, the marketplace of reality and our new, our new analogy, Noelle, that you have birthed a trade show.
Well, that happened when I went to Conscious Life Expo in 2023.
That's what it really felt like to me as a trade show because you'll be one, somebody over here selling crystals, love and light and energy activation, but also ask me about crypto and coffee.
What?
Or Mickey, Mickey Willis with his pandemic table.
They were also over there hawking crypto and other weird opportunities.
And so you start to see you had the old school astrologers, the numerology guy, and the lady who wanted to read my aura for 40 bucks.
But then you have there's all kinds of anti-government conspiracy booths next to the Palladians and the guy who's like, it just, it's crazy.
And you start to realize that it was truly like a trade show because you have so many, this is no longer just new age.
This is now anti-government stuff.
And Mickey Willis is trying to talk to everybody.
The first thing he said is, what would you be willing to die for?
You know, the kids, the kids, the kids.
Well, you know, that's how they were sucking all those women in too with the kids.
And he's building a school in Texas, but we can't call it a school.
You know, when you look back, I went back and looked at all the covers for Conscious Life going back to their inception.
And it really didn't get this way until about 2020.
They were having just the basic, they had Russell Brand, I think, 19, which might have been the first one I saw.
Marianne Williamson back in the early, you know, mid-2000s, but that was still normal.
But they've gone all in to the point where the last time I went, Lee Dundas was there with Del Bigtree.
Oh, my God.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So now you got her, which is interesting when you start to break it down.
All these same people are players and, you know, there's Lee Dundas at Conscious Life Expo.
There's Lee Dundas organizing the People's Convoy truck rally.
Yeah, I think we saw her.
I think Travis, I think we saw her speak at the trucker rally.
We did.
We did.
We attended that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She was in California.
And then she quickly distanced herself from that almost as soon as they took off headed east.
She could have got out of that.
But, you know, there she was all of 2020 was with RFK Jr. in the anti-vax stuff all over California.
And then traveling around with Sasha Stone, who's a British conspiracist, believes that there's 5G is what's 5G and what nano chips and the jab.
It's kind of like Hollywood.
It's like the industry is actually much smaller than you think it is.
And like they're all kind of friends and they all probably, yeah, yeah.
It's the Reawaken Tour poster.
Yeah, yeah.
It's everyone's face on there.
Why did it have to go this way?
Well, it kept a lot of people in jobs.
I mean, I always always think about that too.
You know, what do a lot of these influencers online do if this went away?
You know?
What would I do?
I was delivering sandwiches.
I was delivering sandwiches up to North Hollywood when the show started making enough money that it matched my, you know, my like low-level assistant, you know, salary.
So yeah, I'm also guilty and also need this to continue.
And I have no, I have no doubt that it, that it won't.
But you're educating people, actually, though.
I don't see you guys as trying to be influencers at all.
I learned, this is what's so funny talking to you now is you were like who I learned from, right?
When I first started this stuff.
And I 2022, I listened to you from Maryland to California, you know, driving, trying to all these concepts were so new to me.
I'd never, like I said, I just wanted to avoid it.
Yeah.
And we were good.
We were like, you didn't think that it sucked?
No.
Of course.
Like I said, I was like, okay, what is this?
What is she talking about?
Disclosure.
I'm sure there's a QAA episode for that.
Let me go look.
Because we're so unqualified.
I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I'm like so unqualified.
As somebody who is like, well, I guess I don't know.
I'm kind of like a former sort of conspiracy theorist, which I think is a good perspective to have.
Because I think once you get past the embarrassment of being like, yeah, I believe this like really dumb thing that ended up being like actually really kind of bad and hurtful.
It's actually fine.
It's okay.
It doesn't feel so bad.
I'm still alive.
I'm still able to be happy.
I don't feel like a total loser or anything.
And so I guess that's like a helpful perspective to have on a show about conspiracy theories that are, you know, that it's more anti-anti-conspiracy theory.
I have learned a lot of what I've learned as them formers as well.
I think people who actually have an idea of how that works that also have critical thinking skills and have other pieces of their lives they want to keep intact can can help teach a lot too.
So yeah, it's tough.
It's tough and it's out there.
And so thank you so much for coming on and sharing your time with us and talking about this.
I always, I love talking with people who have been like, you know, down in it and understand the human, you know, the human price, the toll, and some of the kind of the amazing fortitude of folks who are sort of deeply, you know, trapped in this belief system.
I'm really happy to be here.
Thank you for having me.
The book is The Conspiracist: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging by Noelle Cook.
And put the link in the show notes so you can pick it up.
Yeah, thanks so much for speaking with us.
It's a fascinating book.
Like I said, it is unlike any other book on conspiracism that I have read before.
It's really depth and intimacy into real people who got wrapped up in this and believe it very deeply.
So congratulations on that.
And yeah, thanks so much for speaking with us today.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
You can go to patreon.com and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a second premium episode for every regular episode, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes, of which there are now, I don't know, more than 300?
Hundreds of us count.
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Yes, exactly.
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For everything else, we have a website, QAAPodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless and keep you.
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Hi, I'm Yvonne.
Can't fix it.
Yes, very proud of what I did, and that pissed the judge off because I show no remorse.
Why would I show remorse for standing for freedom and fighting for what is right?
That is not to be remorseful for.
So I will not apologize for me going there.
I will, and it pisses them off.
But my story has never changed.
In 2020, I woke up.
I woke up to a lot of things.
But we'll stick to the election.
If you want to hear my story, we can share that in another place.
But I started observing.
I realized that we have been under mind control and we haven't been thinking for ourselves for a long time.
We've been indoctrinated and we believe things that are not true.
And so I started watching and observing.
And believe it or not, I wasn't a Trump supporter.
I voted for Trump because the evil, there was no way Hillary Clinton would ever get my vote.
But I do look at the person.
Yes, I have always been Republican, but I do look at the person.
And I didn't love Trump.
And it wasn't actually until 2020 that I started to see things and listen to him and started to realize he was trying to help us see.
And I told my husband in August of 2020, I said, Trump's not going to save us.
We're here to save ourselves.
That's right.
That's right.
That's absolutely the message that is.
And God showed that to me.
And he said, Yvonne, you've always struggled with the system because the system wasn't created for we, the people.
And I, am like many of you, I have suffered trauma in my childhood.
My parents didn't have it easy.
We've all been there.
There's only a few that have not suffered.
And every human suffered trauma, whether they know it or not.
Giving birth is traumatic for a human.
So I watched and I got arrested in December of 2020 because I went to a mask mandate and I started to realize, I knew the mask was for control, but God started to show me a lot of things.
And I was arrested for that.
And I got a misdemeanor trespassing charge.
I'm guilty on my birthday.
But when Trump said, come to DC, I was like, Troy, this is going to be history.
Little did I know.
And I wanted to be a part of history.
I wanted to someday to be able to tell my grandkids, I was there.
I went for you.
That's right.
And so I said, I'm going whether you go with me or not.
I wasn't working at the time.
I quit working in 2020.
When I woke up, I said, I'm not doing this anymore.
And so we drove.
We left on January 1st and we were in our car and we drove from Idaho to here and it was, we had our Trump flag, we had DC or bus, our car was decked out.
We were ready and we came here and it was the most amazing.
To be over there with all those people and feel that energy and love and to see people standing for truth was amazing.
And then I walked down Constitution Avenue and I was so excited.
Yes, I started off following Q.
And I still believe there's a lot of truth there, but I also realize there's a lot of disinformation and misinformation in this world.
So I take everything to God.
I'm not going to believe any man and I'm not going to judge any person because I don't know their Story, and I don't know their shoes.