His Dad Was Radicalized By a Prophet Online - with Zach Mack
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Brad interviews Zach Mack, host of NPR's Alternate Realities. Zach shares his personal journey with his father, who became radicalized by online conspiracy theories and New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) prophecies. Through a unique bet involving 10 conspiracy predictions, Zach and his father navigated their relationship, exploring the reasons behind his father's beliefs while growing closer despite differing worldviews. The conversation delves into the mechanics of online radicalization, the role of religious prophets like Julie Green, and the impact on family dynamics. Zach's story highlights the challenges and complexities of engaging with loved ones consumed by misinformation.
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy How many of you have had the experience?
You check in with a cousin, or your brother, or even your mom.
And over a few short months, they've been radicalized online.
Whether by Facebook posts from friends, conspiracy theories sent to them by people at church.
Or simply a prophet claiming to know what's ahead, to have been inspired by God to tell everybody about the ways that the world will change rapidly and everyone should get ready.
Whether it's vaccines, COVID, what happened in the 2020 election, or what will happen in 2025, most of us know what it means to see a loved one go down a rabbit hole, to understand what it means to lose someone close to you to misinformation.
Today, I speak with somebody who had that very experience.
His dad was radicalized online.
They'd never been particularly close.
But since every other family member was growing more and more distant from his father, Zach Mack thought it was time to try to do something different.
He approached his father about the ways he had gone all in on conspiracy theories and new apostolic reformation prophecies.
He'd become seduced by Julie Green, a NAR prophet.
who makes wild predictions about what will happen in the future.
In the past, she's predicted that the U.S. would undergo martial law, that Barack Obama would be put in jail, and so on.
Zach approached his father, and they ended up making a bet.
Ten things that would come true in the next year.
Ten things predicted by online conspiracy theories and nonprofits.
And if they did, Zach would have to say he was wrong.
But if they didn't, his father would.
What happened over the course of the year was something that surprised everybody.
Zach and his father grew closer.
Without having to argue about the wildly different perspectives of their worldviews, they found ways to talk, to interact.
Zach found a way to understand what these conspiracies did for his father, the mechanics behind them, and why he held onto them so dearly, even though it drew him further and further into isolation, away from his family members, and even cut off from his spouse.
Today I speak with Zach Mack, the host of Alternate Realities, a series from NPR's Embedded.
Zach is an award-winning podcaster and audio maker who has produced podcasts like The Rewatchables, The Big Picture, and Binge Mode.
Zach called me about a year ago to ask about what to do with somebody who's gone down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, a parent lost a radicalization online.
I talked about...
The thousands of folks in my audience, people who I've interacted with, you, who've told me similar stories.
Now that the podcast is out, I had a chance to catch up with Zach and see what he'd learned.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus on this fine Monday.
As I just said, I have a very accomplished guest and, you know, somebody who makes me kind of nervous as a podcaster because he's just sort of done so much.
And I'm usually interviewing, like, professors and authors whose microphones are from 1996 and who don't really know how to do this stuff.
And here I am talking to Zach Mack.
So first, Zach, thanks for coming by.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
It's good to see you again.
So, as I just said, you've done so much as a podcaster and really just produced some amazing stuff, but we're here to talk about alternate realities, which is out now from NPR's Embedded, and it's a show that, of course, touches on the very heart of this show, Straight White American Jesus, because it's all about your dad and a kind of long journey of you realizing how he's been radicalized online through various conspiracy theories, NAR prophets, and so on.
And you're kind of like attempt to get to know him a little better to understand why he has gone down that rabbit hole and what you can do about it.
There are thousands of people listening right now who have undergone that same experience.
So I'm sure there's going to be a lot of resonance.
Let's start here.
You talk about in the show not being always that close to your dad, even though like when you listen to the pod, he just comes off as like genial and kind of like.
That dad jokey guy who, like, if you went to dinner at the house when you were 16, you'd be like, oh, Mr. Mack's pretty, he's nice.
I don't know.
Like, we ate meatloaf.
He made a ton of corny jokes.
I don't know.
No problem with him.
What was that like for you guys growing up?
I mean, he was always like that.
He's always been very friendly, loves to talk to strangers, loves to make, you know, bad dad jokes kind of thing.
Yeah, so he's always been that.
And he still is that, for sure.
I just think he wasn't, we just weren't close and we didn't, we sometimes would butt heads on things.
You know, we have very different beliefs about life and how we see the world.
And, you know, my father was the lone Christian conservative in our household, but my mom is Jewish.
My sister and I are not particularly religious.
And so he was always a little bit of the odd man out and kind of doing his own thing.
And a little bit of, like, he was the disciplinarian in the family.
So, yeah, I think he and I were not very close.
And my mom was always just the one who was around.
She was the one going to, like, all the PTA meetings and picking us up from soccer practice and knew all our friends' names.
She was just much more present.
You mentioned watching Ohio State football.
There's also, you know, the Bay Area.
So would you help us understand where you grew up?
What's the connection to the Midwest?
What's the connection to the Bay?
Yeah, so my dad grew up in Ohio, and they moved to Indiana sometime after, and eventually he and my mom met in Chicago.
So both of my parents are from the Midwest.
My dad wanted to go to grad school, so he came over to California with my mom.
They were sort of in their mid to late 20s.
Eventually they got married.
Later they had my sister and I, and we grew up in the Bay Area.
We grew up right next to Berkeley and Oakland.
I was born in Oakland.
And it's a really liberal place.
And when my parents got together, neither of them were religious.
My mother's background is Judaism, and she's still not particularly religious, but she participates in more of the communal aspect of it.
And then my father, shortly after I was born, started returning to the church and just getting more and more into it.
And as the years went on, he got more and more into it, and his views became...
More and more conservative and a little more extreme.
And it just sort of kept going, going, going, ramping up.
But growing up, because he's from Ohio, he loved Ohio State football.
And so he got me into that.
Even though I was born and raised in California, I'm just a diehard Ohio State football fan.
It's pretty funny.
We were the only Ohio State football fans I knew growing up because we lived in California.
Everybody was like, why?
Why do you like this random team from Ohio?
But that's what it was.
And, you know, they're a fun team to root for because they're always competitive.
You know, as somebody who lives in the Bay Area, has a lot of friends in the East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley, who does a lot of work at Berkeley, I can tell you this is just not one of those regions where you're going to find large pockets of people who are participating in, like, New Apostolic Reformation prophecies.
Or, you know, I live here now.
I grew up in Orange County.
If you go down to Orange County, California, Yeah, it's kind of expected.
Hey, what megachurch do you go to?
Hey, where's the God bless you in the sign-off of your email?
So as I've talked to you about this project, as I've listened to the finished product, I've really gotten this picture of your dad as kind of a contrarian, as somebody who's sticking out in your family and in his own kind of larger community.
You noticed him getting more radicalized.
I think at one point in episode two or three, you talk about him getting more extreme, and it's kind of a word he doesn't like.
What effect did this have on your mom and your siblings?
I think it's been hard for a long time.
As he has gotten increasingly religious, he and my mother have had...
Less and less in common.
And, you know, I remember this time when I was, like, really young.
I mean, I must have been, like, eight years old.
And I could sort of hear them arguing.
They didn't really fight or argue a whole lot, so it was just one of those times where I could sort of hear them.
And I came out, you know, I remember I got out of bed and came out and they were arguing.
And I think I found out years later, he sort of went through this thing where he was...
Became extremely worried that she wasn't going to go to heaven with him.
And that was this really difficult thing.
And my mom was just like, I'm not interested in going on this journey with you.
I'm not interested in believing in any of this.
Please stop asking me.
And that has been a tension for decades, just that alone.
But at some point, that tension began to build because...
His views have gotten more extreme and have gotten increasingly less in touch with reality, unfortunately.
And then, you know, a couple years ago, my sister came out to him, and that didn't go particularly well.
And because of his religious beliefs, he really couldn't fully get on board with that.
And so I think that was like a really significant wound for the family.
And then, you know...
Just in the year or two leading up to that, he was saying more and more conspiratorial stuff, and then in the two years since she came out, it had just really also ramped up.
So we're just sort of watching him get further and further away from us and become more and more of the odd man out.
But yeah, I think you're right, though.
Well, this brings us to you and him and the whole...
The whole journey of this podcast, and I'm not going to spoil it.
I'm not going to sort of let the cat out of the bag.
There's a lot of details and twists and turns, but this strikes me as one of those moments, and you can correct me here if I'm wrong here, and please do, where you get to a certain point in adulthood.
You get to be in your late 20s and early 30s, and you start to want to know your parents as people.
And what I mean by that is, by the time you get to that age, They're your parents, yes, but you don't need them anymore.
You have a job.
You moved out to New York City.
You've been making podcasts and other media for a long time.
You get to that age and you think, who are my parents really?
Not as my dad, but as a human, as a man, as somebody who's gone from the Midwest to the West Coast, whatever it may be.
What about his dad?
What about his journey?
This whole series feels to me like you trying to get to know him in that way.
Is that an accurate sort of summation of wanting to find a way to get close to him, even though he's gone down this kind of radicalized rabbit hole in the years prior?
So you're right in that is what happened.
We got closer and I found out so much more about him and our family history and all that stuff.
But that was not the intention of...
The podcast or the bet.
The whole thing started with my father challenging me to a bet after we got into an argument.
That's how it started.
It started with an ego-measuring contest.
It's a very guy thing to do when two guys are arguing and they can't come to a conclusion.
I feel like it usually ends in making a bet or setting up some sort of celebrity boxing match.
Those are the two ways we solve things.
So he challenged me to a bet, and I think we were each eager to prove each other wrong.
And once we made the bet and decided to do this podcast and sort of track our bet over the course of the year, then there was a bit of a truce established because we each had a year until it was proven who was right and who was wrong.
And so I think we sort of said, hey, you know, for the next year...
Neither of us is right or wrong.
We sort of have a year to coast and we can sort of check in as things go.
And as we were checking in, that's sort of when the closeness started to happen and I just began to find out a lot more about him.
And I was just, you know, I was really curious about how he came to these ideas and what were these ideas doing for him?
Why were these conspiracies so appealing?
Because for years we had just been trapped in these circular arguments.
I realized just lobbing facts at him wasn't going to work, and arguing with him in this way was not working.
So we tried something else, and I think we had more success that way.
There's something to me that's really insightful there, and really something that I think folks listening at home might latch onto, which is the...
The closeness and the ability for you to relate to your dad and your dad to you is just two human beings trying to get to know each other.
You as a son who's curious about him, about his worldviews, where he's getting his information, what his relationship with his own parents were like, what's going through his head as he's aging and getting older.
It happens when the trying to prove which worldview is right is paused.
And you just become two folks who are kind of checking in.
I mean, it's really you checking in on him, but trying to get closer.
I've always said that if you can get to a place where you are people who have an emotional connection and an emotional trust, then there might be some openings for intellectual inroads.
And I'm wondering if some of those things presented themselves in that year where...
You know, neither of you had to prove that you were right or wrong, and because there was a detente, there was an attention to just each other as human beings.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it's funny you phrased it that way.
You phrased it so similarly when I spoke to you a little over a year ago.
You were one of the first people I interviewed.
And you gave me advice.
It was good advice.
We ended up using a clip of that in the trailer.
You can hear yourself in the trailer saying, you know, if you guys can just talk as humans, then you have a chance and you're not coming at each other from these warring ideologies.
And yeah, I think for my father, the way we were able to finally have productive conversations is I put on a different hat.
I think I took off the upset son hat and I put on the...
You know, investigative journalist hat, and I just sort of approached this, like, with curiosity and as much empathy as I could, and just trying to understand, how'd you get here?
You know, why are these ideas so appealing?
And just asking him questions and being curious, and through that, and being genuinely curious, you know, not trying to trap him in some answer where he tells on himself, but just earnestly asking and being as patient as I could be.
And just talking to him for over months for long periods of time.
And, you know, by the end of that year, we were having the best conversations we've ever had.
And it's just because there was a level of trust there.
And I do think we were just able to get to a place that we had not been before.
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It's interesting to think about that kind of investigative reporter hat.
And I guess for me, as somebody who's dealing with his own parents getting older, and how many times am I going to see my own father play with my kids and so on?
My brothers and I have actually given my dad prompts for him to answer.
And sometimes we record them.
We do a podcast style, and it's one of these very sad things, apparently, about masculine relationships.
These men relating to men these days is...
You have to have a podcast in order for everyone to want to sit on the couch and talk, but what are you going to do?
One of the things he says, and I think this comes out in these conversations you're referencing, is what some of these ideas do, and I promise, friends, we're going to get to the ideas, the New Apostolic Reformation ideas, the conspiracies, but I want to talk about the mechanics first.
They help him see the world as it really is.
Did that come through to you as you got to know the ins and outs and details of the kinds of things he's believing in?
Yeah, you know, I realized when he first proposed the bet to me, this bet, and it had all these very politically apocalyptic ideas, I could not see how this had anything to do with God at all.
You know, I don't understand how throwing Barack Obama in jail for treason or our country coming under martial law just had anything to do with God.
It seemed completely separate.
But the more that we talked and the more research I did, I started to understand just like, The fusion that has taken place between right-wing politics and this sect of Christianity.
And, you know, he has really gotten into these online prophets who it's like a full-throated mixture of, you know, religion and politics.
And so I don't even think he...
I remember saying, Dad, I don't remember you ever being into politics.
Now all of a sudden you're so into politics.
And he's like, what do you mean?
This isn't politics.
And I'm like...
Every single one of these is politics.
This has nothing to do with religion.
But he was still seeing it as religion.
And I think that just speaks to that full merge between those two worlds.
And I don't even think he thinks of it as politics sometimes.
It's amazing to think about what you just said.
Because I think there are millions of people around this country right now who would tell you the same thing.
Their faith has only gotten more devout.
Because of the internet, they can listen to sermons and prophets online.
And religion, religion, religion.
And you're like, hey, I'm your son.
You were never like that political dad who was super into watching Meet the Press and the kind of local political machines.
And he's like, what are you talking about?
I'm not into politics.
And you're like, everything we're betting on, and again, I don't want to give it all away, the things you have that you bet your dad about.
One of them you mentioned is the U.S. will have martial law.
Another one is like Barack Obama will go to jail.
And you're like, what does that have to do with the New Testament or like the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule?
The Good Samaritan doesn't seem like a lot.
This brings me to Julie Green, who I have to mention, and I just, because of this show, we've talked about the New Apostolic Reformation.
At length, we made a series called Charismatic Revival Fury with Dr. Matthew Taylor all about this.
But Julie Green is an online prophet who's part of the New Apostolic Reformation.
What do you think led your dad to Julie Green?
What are some of the things that he learned from her?
Why was she such an attractive figure for him at this juncture?
Yeah, so he told me at some point during the pandemic, he came to believe in the idea of prophets, that God still speaks through intermediaries the way he did in the Old Testament.
And he said to me, you know, he...
He never understood why God would stop speaking to his people and that he, yeah, he came to believe in prophets.
And so, you know, my dad is not very tech savvy and he is really not an internet native.
He's very lost on the internet.
So I literally, he was describing it to me.
He was just Googling God's prophets and Julie Green is one of the 12 hits that came up.
You know, when you type that in, I guess, and he listened to her, and I think he liked what she had to say.
I also just think he liked that she wasn't really over the top.
You know, she's a...
Well, I find her to be incredibly over the top, but to him, she seemed a little more...
You know, she has kind of a Midwestern vibe to her.
You know, I think she's from Iowa, and she's a little more low-key in her presentation.
She's not...
She's not, like, super theatrical, but what she's saying is very theatrical, but her presentation is a little more tamped down than I think a lot of the, like, fire and brimstone type of preachers you're used to seeing.
So he liked her, and they started watching her, and I think partially because my dad is not a big news junkie, because he's not so invested in politics, I think that makes him a little more susceptible to hearing this kind of stuff, and now he's hearing it with the mixture of the stuff.
That he's so used to hearing, which is, you know, all the Christian, all the God stuff, and then here comes all the right-wing politics stuff that's in there.
You know, it's sort of like, it's getting slipped into his food, you know?
So, you know, and you listen to that for hours and hours every week, and eventually it really starts to take hold.
I think these ideas are really insidious.
So he became pretty into these ideas and thought they were...
For sure going to happen.
And he came to believe that, you know, God is really speaking through Julie Green.
I do have a funny story to tell you about him and Julie Green that didn't happen on the podcast.
But, you know, at some point, he made another bet.
He made a second bet with my mother.
And the bet was, this was right in the summer.
Remember?
Joe Biden had decided to step down and Kamala was going to run for president in his place.
So it was kind of a crazy month in the middle of the summer.
And we're leading up to the DNC. And I remember the week before the DNC, my dad was like, the Democrats are going to toss Kamala at the DNC, I promise you.
And I was like, Dad, what?
They just got rid of their candidate.
They're not going to do it a second time.
That would be...
That would be like political suicide.
You know, there's no coming back from that.
It's going to be hard enough for Kamala to win.
And he was like, no, no, no.
They're going to toss her, I promise you.
And he was like, I have it on good authority.
And I was like, okay.
And my mom was just like, what are you talking about?
And he was like, well, do you want to bet on it?
And he proposed to bet with her because he was sure Kamala was going to get tossed at the DNC. And the terms were, if he won, She would have to give up all mainstream media, as he put it, for the rest of the year.
And she was like, okay, well, if I win, you can't watch Julie Green anymore.
And he agreed to it.
And then sure enough, a week later, Kamala accepts the nomination officially, and he can't watch Julie Green anymore for the rest of the year.
But the unfortunate part is that that didn't matter.
He immediately just moved on to the next prophet.
It didn't really seem to be about Julie Green.
He just...
There were 10 others to quickly take her place, and now he's like, I don't even need her anymore.
I check out all these other people, and now there's this other woman that he likes more.
So that's just where it is.
But there's something really important that you talked about there, which is your dad's not a news junkie.
So your dad is not the person...
Who has been consuming Fox News for 30 years.
I remember when I was growing up, my stepdad at one point discovered Rush Limbaugh.
And all of a sudden, he was super into the Rush Limbaugh talking points.
But to me, what's really, I think, compelling about your dad's story and is one that many people will identify with and already are, of course, through the podcast is...
He's not the guy watching four hours of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or the political pod.
He googled God's prophets because he was convinced God still speaks directly to people.
He finds Julie Green.
And Julie Green, friends, many of you know, many of you don't, is a New Apostolic Reformation prophet who believes God speaks directly to her.
She makes prophecies all the time.
She predicts things in the future, many of which don't, I mean, almost all of which never come close to coming true.
She's off the run.
Yeah, I mean, but nonetheless claims not that she's inspired by God.
That's one claim.
She claims that God tells her what is going to happen, like an Old Testament prophet, like the prophet Jeremiah, like the prophet Isaiah.
And I bring that up because this is what radicalizes your dad.
It's not.
Rupert Murdoch.
It's not Tucker Carlson.
It is these folks who are mixing prophecy with bonkers conspiracy theories that, of course, link into a whole network of conspiracy theories about the New World Order and about martial law and Barack Obama and the Illuminati and QAnon and everything else.
And that leads him to that thing we talked about earlier, which is that he can see the reality as it really is, and everyone else is blind.
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Well, the podcast is out.
Alternate Realities.
Tell us where we can keep up with the pod, keep up with you and future work, and best ways folks can just follow along with everything you're doing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not hard to find.
I'm online a number of places.
Zach Mack, Z-A-C-H-M-A-C-K. You'll see me.
I'm the podcast Zach Mack.
There's another guy who sells beer in New York who's a good guy.
I do like him a lot, but that's not me.
And the podcast itself is on the Embedded feed in NPR. So anywhere you get your podcast, if you just NPR Embedded, you will see Alternate Realities.
It's right there.
If you go to Apple Podcasts right now, it's at the top of the page.
So it's there.
And I don't know when this is running, but yeah, it's not hard to find.
But yeah, Alternate Realities, NPR Embedded is the show.
Episode 2, you'll hear a familiar voice.
I get a little cameo there, and so that's always fun.
As always, friends, thanks for listening.
Thanks for tuning in today.
I'm sure many of you are identifying closely with Zach's story and what's going on with his dad.
We'll be back Wednesday with It's in the Code, Friday with the Weekly Roundup, and if you haven't already, go subscribe to Andrew Seidel's One Nation Indivisible.
All the bonus content on that show is available on Swatch Premium.
So, all the info for both of those things is in the show notes.
