The Far-Right Microtargeting Platform Radicalizing Churches + QAnon Yoga Moms
Brad speaks to filmmaker Kat Gellein Viken who is the co-creator of two recent documentaries on churches, conspiracy, and the war on democracy. In 2020's People You May Know, Gellein and her co-creator Charles Kriel connect the dots among the Council for National policy, American oligarchs, and nefarious data mining firms. The film follows a trail that eventually reveals how churches are collecting their parishioners' most sensitive data and how that data is being sent to political operatives in order to use it as a weapon to wage war on democracy. In 2022's Dis/informed the duo pull back the curtain on the 12 sources of disinformation that account for over 60% of the pandemics spread of disinformation. This time, the trail leads to online wellness spaces full of yoga moms into alternative medicine and natural remedies. The filmmakers reveal how yoga moms became allied with conspiracy theorists and far-right agitators as part of the anti-vax and QAnon movements.
People You May Know: https://www.amazon.com/People-You-Know-Charles-Kriel/dp/B08LHH7QJZ
Dis/informed (coming soon from PBS America): https://metrotonemedia.com/
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Produced by Brad Onishi
Edited by Shannon Sassone
Music by Matt Puckett - "846"
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Do people in churches know their personal information is being gathered to use in political campaigns?
No.
The meetings are secret.
The membership is secret.
Kellyanne Conway is a member.
Steve Bannon is a member.
They hope to use Trump as God's wrecking ball.
I had used and worked with predictive analytics and big data tools.
What would it look like to use it within the realm of ministry?
There's no better product than the gospel.
I've read an article that you said you'd worked with the original data guys, Cambridge Analytica.
Um, we worked with, um, uh, Eddington Station.
The ultimate position to be in is when your adversary has no idea that they're at war.
I bring greetings from President Donald Trump.
The American government is slated for destruction.
We own the relationship space.
Like, we own it.
That's the church.
What you just heard is a clip from the 2020 documentary, People You May Know, by Charles Creel and my guest today, Kat Ghislaine-Vickel.
In the documentary, Creel moves from the Parliament in the United Kingdom all the way back to his home in Alabama.
What the filmmakers show us is an incredibly scary story about data analytics, big tech, the Council for National Policy, and the churches where the people you may know attend every week.
When the film begins, it seems that we're going to be enmeshed in a story about Cambridge Analytica, the infamous data firm that collected and amassed data on hundreds of millions of people, including hundreds of millions of Americans.
Cambridge Analytica made headlines during the 2016 presidential election and it is now defunct.
However, the story takes a turn into the heart of what this show is about, the religious right and Christian nationalism in the United States.
What Creel and Ghislaine Vigil uncover is how churches became the locus and the entry point for data collection and data vulnerability.
They reveal how the Council for National Policy worked hand-in-hand with seemingly the Republican National Party and other data collection agencies in order to gain insight into people's deepest vulnerabilities, into their deepest sorrows, and into their relational breaks in order to capitalize
Not only by bringing them into churches, but sending that data to political operatives who could form their political opinions and values in important ways when it comes to electoral politics.
For me, the documentary is incredibly valuable because it connects certain dots.
It shows how churches are places where people form some of the deepest relationships and trust that their best interests are at heart in the most vulnerable ways.
When they give their data to a church, they often never suspect that it might be sent up to a cloud and at some point used against them, not only to sell them things, But to sway them to one political cause or another and use them to gain upper hands in American elections.
This year Creel and Ghislaine Vigil have released a second documentary called Disinformed, which follows the unraveling of the QAnon conspiracy into perhaps counterintuitive spaces.
Creel and Ghislaine follow the QAnon conspiracy not only as it reaches into religious communities and into the fringes of American and European and other societies, but into the wellness and health spaces online.
They focus on yoga moms who were convinced that their children's well-being was in danger, and thus demonstrate how the strange alliances we talk about all the time on this show among Christian nationalists, far-right political operatives, anti-vaxxers, and yes, yoga moms, have come to fruition during the COVID pandemic.
One documentary is about data vulnerability and data targeting.
It's about collecting as much information as one can through churches in order to leverage it for political and cultural gain.
The other is about disinformation and its spread.
Two sides in my view of the same coin and together they provide a startling and haunting understanding of some of the key events that have taken place across the globe and especially in the United States over the last five years.
One of the most starting realizations that I made watching the two films together is that one of the reasons that the Republican Party and Christian Nationalists have worked so hard to keep churches open during the pandemic is not only because of the culture wars and the ways they've leveraged it to claim a defense of religious liberty and basic American freedoms,
What dawned on me as I watched these films in succession is that the churches are the pipeline to the information and the way to spread disinformation.
They are the key nodes of this network on the ground.
And so if the churches are closed, the data pipeline is closed in both directions.
It makes sense, thus, that there would be so many cries to keep the churches open no matter what, despite the health risks, despite the pandemic, despite the contagious nature of COVID-19.
The people who are in the world are in the world of the world of the world.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I have an amazing guest today.
I'm not going to lie.
There's times when I do this show, I get to interview friends and colleagues, and there's times I interview people where I feel kind of like a fanboy who's just trying to hold it together.
And be professional.
And that's one of those days, because I have with me today Kat Ghislain-Vikan, who is a filmmaker, documentarian, and all kinds of other things.
So I'll just stop and say, Kat, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
It's great to be here.
We're both balancing, um, children and, and childcare and, uh, time issues and all kinds of stuff.
So I'm so appreciative of you being here.
Um, you have two recent films, documentaries that just touch on the core themes of this show.
And, uh, I'm really excited to talk to you about those.
So one of them is the people you may know, um, and, or people you may know.
And it's a documentary, really, that does a lot of things.
One of them is take us into the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked Britain and the United States and other places a couple of years ago.
But it really leads us into American churches.
And that's what I want to talk about in a minute.
The other one is just emerging, and that is disinformed.
And it's really about the pandemic and anti-vax and anti-vaccine movements across the United States, across Europe and across other places.
In my mind, watching the two, they feel very related.
They feel like thematically they just hold together.
And so let me just ask you about this.
Both of them seem to focus on information vulnerability, ways that information is used against us, whether that is in electoral politics, whether that's in religious communities, or whether that's when it comes to vaccines and other things.
How does that work?
If we go back to the people you may know, if we go to this film that you've made that really takes us from the House of Parliament in London to Alabama, where your co-creator Charles Creel is from, and these churches, right?
And I've been to these churches.
I know what my mother's from the South.
I used to live in the South.
I know what this looks like.
What does it look like to be information vulnerable?
If I'm in a church in rural Alabama and people are micro-targeting me for religious and political purposes, can you walk us through that?
How does that look like on the ground?
There's a couple of important things on that that I'd say.
Glue, the company that we talk about in People You May Know, simply put, they built a micro-targeting platform that's specifically for churches called Insights.
And they had a lot of investors, mainly a lot of far-right-wing think tanks.
We actually got their whole breakdown of investors.
We showed some of it in the film.
And a company that's now called Communio tested it in Florida first at some of their church sites.
And how it works is they can target you through data that you've already given up that's available, credit card data, social media, etc.
And then they cast a wide net around the church to find exactly who's vulnerable, who doesn't have a network.
If you're alone, if you're addicted, if you're grieving, if you're going through relationship trouble.
They find that out and then they target you accordingly and they're very openly excited about that.
And once you're in the church and you have this robust network of friends and they're around you, you're going to start thinking like they do because kind of imposing values is at the core of what churches do anyway.
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