August 20, 2020 • 56 mins
Today we talk with Aum Shinrikyo expert Sarah Hightower about the increasing danger of Qanon, how cults grow, and what we can possibly do to help people lost to them. We recorded this a day before some genius asked the president about it in public and he responded how cool they are. Awesome!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, A production of I Heart
Radio Together Everything. So don't goodness willakers this year is
(00:23):
not the best that I've experienced. I'm Robert g Heck,
Garoney and jam I couldn't agree more. I'm Cody Johnston
and Dolly Guys. I think it's going pretty well. I'm
Katie Stole. That is well. I guess we should spend
the next hour or so discussing whether or not this
(00:43):
year is very good or not, since clearly that question
hasn't been answered by the title of the show, we're
still we're grappling with it. Quick poll, quick pull in
the chat. Good year, no less than good? Yeah, like
if it's like, if it's good, retweet if it's not.
(01:04):
Let's get onto the actual subject of the episode that
we're doing today, so that today we'll have an episode.
We love having episodes, don't we focus? El Katie, Cody,
what do you? How do you? What's your opinion on
Q and on UH jury is still out? I think
(01:25):
you think so. I think it's dangerous and sad. Yeah,
that's those are those are the two words I would use.
I would if I had to pick two. Try to
make some joke but no dangerous and sad and um,
disturbing and depressing. Yeah, all of the above and hard
(01:47):
to completely understand. Yeah, yeah, it's it's very complicated and
very frustrating and very very dangerous. And uh, I think
what's What's something that I think I want to highlight
is that it took a long time for everybody in
like the mainstream media to start to get on the
same page about number one, Q and On being worth
(02:09):
talking about, and number two the fact that actually this
is a very important story. Uh. And today our guest
is somebody who for the last like I don't know,
since I've known her, which is close to four years now,
has been like repeatedly yelling at the entire world to
please pay attention to what the hell is happening with
Q and on because it's important and dangerous and terrifying.
(02:30):
And she was yelling about that years ago when the
only people who were close to the mainstream and talking
about Q and on would just make fun of it. Um.
And now that there's like twenty people who might wind
up in Congress who are tied to it one way
or the other. Um, she's she's still trying to warn people. Uh,
this is Sarah high Tower. Welcome to the show. Hi?
(02:52):
How are you? Sarah high Tower? I am of Boltron
of sadness and compassion, And I told you, yeah, you
did tell me? Um and what do you? What do you?
Let's let's let's go back in time a little bit. Sarah,
when did you realize? Because obviously Q and on you know,
starts happening in this weird look like it's a it's
a four chant thing where like people the drops start
(03:13):
going up and this like weird little community starts to form.
At what point where you like, ah, this is going
to be a problem because the Internet has all sorts
of weird little communities and most of them don't wind
up potentially putting twenty people in Congress. So at what
point where you like this? This is an issue the
mid to late shortly, I think after the Omshurikyo executions,
(03:39):
so that would have been a little bit after July. Uh.
Let's see, you had the visibility at the Trump rally,
you had the Hoover Dan standoff, and I had a
friend I know in real life who came to me
and asking me for help because her her parents weren't
talking to her anymore. They were just watching YouTube videos
about Q and on and it's I think you didn't
(04:00):
just mentioned ALM Shinrikyo for um uh for no reason.
There you've drawn a number of comparisons between and and
For folks who are listening, we have never recovered this
and behind the Bastards or anything, but I guess a
brief overview of O Shinrikyo is that they were kind
of a um an apocalyptic cult that gained an enormous
amount of power, including some political power in Japan, made
(04:23):
some very dangerous weapons, carried out a number of attacks,
including a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway that
would be kind of the barest cliffs notes. You have
mentioned repeatedly a lot of similarities you see between ALM
and and Q went on. You want to talk a
little bit about that, Yeah, But first of all, I
kind of um it's important to correct you. They they
(04:46):
had some people who had sort of infiltrated like police
departments and things like that. But when they ran candidates
for the House elections, so like the Japanese Congress elections
in that they lost all twenty five of the people
lost obviously, So um, I'm already doing better. Yeah, job
(05:10):
and m But let's see question. No, it's really not.
I'm very concerned, but you're asking about the similarities that
I see in between something like oh and C and on. Okay,
Well there's the cultic no you obviously, and the fact
that they're they're both a sort of apocalyptic theo political
(05:31):
high demand groups. They're very cultic, very absolutist in nature,
and at the core of the radical belief system, like
when you really started to peel it back and you
really start to dig through it, it's it's very anti semitic.
They have a lot on the same anti semitic cannarts.
It's cobble, the deep state, the swamp, the illuminati, them
(05:55):
just pretend up at the local triple brackets if you
get coming from. So, yeah, no, it's the There are
a lot of similarities. You don't have to have a
physical compound to be a cultic organization, and you don't
have to have really a cult leader like I think
there's a lot of folks who don't understand it well,
who places a lot of importance on figuring out who
(06:15):
Q is. And I guess maybe there was a point
at which that would have mattered, um, But I honestly
don't even know if that's true, and it certainly doesn't
matter now I think it does. You can get to
like in terms of like actually stopping it. What is
the what would be the value of like figuring out
who this guy is? The guy posting now the people
(06:36):
posts to you now, yeah, the individuals, because it seems
like it's more than one of them. Certainly. I mean
the theory, the working theory, and the one that I
personally ascribed to is that or it's changed hands over
the past few years. And if you look at who
run in eight con, it's I think that's a person
doing to you now. But we'll get into that later.
(06:56):
I'm working on something about that. But you're asking what
the value might be in actually knowing in terms of
you don't want to do what, want to profile the
cult leader, you don't want to be to get inside
their head. I think there might be a use in
doing that for um, for the sake of like a
good history. But do you think that's actually going to
help in taking in like in de radicalizing this this
(07:20):
situation and actually like like dealing with the cult itself.
Like at this point, nobody's going to believe you if
you say that the that that, like, nobody who's affected
by Q, I don't think would believe you if you,
like you point out this person did it or this
person did it, like from a perspective of making this
less dangerous, right, I know, and you're right about that,
But I still think that there's there's value in figuring
(07:43):
out whom all has posted as to you and just
how this they grew. Who's controlling it now? Because I mean,
we're on the outside, we got work to do. I
want to know. Yeah, I'd like I shouldn't have said
there's no point in figure it out, but I don't
think it. I don't think it would stop what's happening, right, Like,
(08:04):
I think there's an there's a belief that like if
you figure out who Q is, then you can tell people, hey,
look this person who's clearly a grifter. Yeah. Yeah, It's
like it's like asking Donald Trump to denounce Q and
he says sure, and that that's not gonna do anything.
Like you know, no, because at this point, one of
the things that they say, like the cultic jargon, like
(08:26):
one of the thought terminating cliches that they say a
lot is disinformation is necessary. Yeah, that's the movement I remember,
which is terrifying. Yeah. I think Travis, like Travis knew
it was going to be Travis view of the Q
and On anonymous podcast. Travis, So, how do you you
(08:50):
do want to walk us through in your mind? How
this kind of like one of the questions that I
have when I'm trying to like analyze this, this this cult,
this massive problem them that we're all dealing with, is like,
why what what aspects of like the culture I guess
of quan On, the cultic milieu that you've got going
(09:10):
on here, Like what aspects of it allowed it to
reach its state of prominence to kind of escape because
you've got this like Petrie Dish, this Internet, Petrie Dish,
of these all these different communities and subcultures, and most
of them don't rise to the level where we need
to be concerned about them, right, Um, and Q and
On grew in is growing into something. Um, but it's
(09:32):
it's certainly like it it got through that great filter
sort of situation. What is it about Q and On
that you think? Let it get out? So like so
to speak, let it escape, let it break its its bonds.
I mean, I don't why don't you compare it to
something like the quote unquote alt right, Yeah, Like it's
(09:53):
just there and it keeps growing and people find their
way into it, and then people start to red pill others.
That's why I'm comparing it to the right, because then
Q and On and I showed you one of the
first conversations we had. I was showing you these screen
caps on the eight cham boards and they were literally
teaching boomers how to red pill their families and stuff
(10:13):
like it's about uh yeah, it's the beginning of a hierarchy,
even with the mean squads and stuff. But look, Robert Man,
I don't really know how to answer that question because
I've just been watching it and like kind of plull
my hair out and freaking out because it looks like
it looks like the quote unquote al right. It looks
(10:33):
like any any predatory group that just keeps reaching out
and getting more people. And the thing about Q and On,
it's very fluid. It's like a little Katamari ball. You
can't do little new agers and your yoga people. It
doesn't always have to be your quote like your red
hats or whatever, Right, no, it doesn't even have to
(10:55):
be Americans. No, yea, now like everybody, I mean, all
the methods that they're using are obviously online. That's why
it's so effective, and the misinformation and connecting all these
people and now so many people are stuck inside. I
feel like that's really exacerbating. Yeah, there's actually grow quite
(11:17):
a bit of data on how the shutdown has helped
things to grow. Um that's been coming out for a while.
I mean yeah, and then it gets just conflated with
other things and other conspiracies, and it's just such an entryway.
I point to those doctor videos of as being entry
ways for a lot of people, um demons looking into
(11:40):
yes and then looking into conspiracy theories. And I've mentioned
it on the show before, people that not necessarily are
respect but like people that I've known in my life
being a lurned in by this. It's alarming. Yeah. The
Wall Street Journal reports that the average membership and ten
large public q and on Facebook groups grew by six
(12:00):
from March through July. Oh god, yeah, expected and upsetting. Yeah,
that's a problem now, But I don't think it's all organic.
I mean obviously, right, like, there's no way what so
because I agree with you, I don't think it's all organic,
(12:21):
But there is a question of like what aspects of
this are organic and just sort of how the internet
and social media works and what aspects aren't in in
than to what extent are they inorganic? Are they inorganic
in that you've got because like, one one thing that
I see as a definite inorganic factor in q and
ons growth is the fact that it was pretty clear
(12:42):
early on to Facebook into some other social media sites
that there was money to be made in this, and
so aspects of their recommendation algorithm and stuff, um really
rewarded q and on content because of the money, and
that helped this thing grow. But I also suspect that
there's like that's kind of like the soulist, cash oriented,
(13:02):
uh aspect of it, But there's there's more going on,
And I'm curious, like what what aspects in your head?
What what do you think is inorganic here? Like what
do you what are the things that kind of you're
looking towards. That's I'll put it to you like this,
if you wanted to start problems, if for any reason
(13:24):
it was in your best interests to I don't know,
kick up some dirt, you get some civil unrest going.
I mean, look at that, Look at a little fracture.
You just have to apply pressure to that, right, to
the fractures growing, right, And that could be domestic interests,
it could be a state interests, it could be any thing. Really,
(13:45):
you know, there are multiple groups with multiple interests and
maybe not the best interests for us. And that's really
what I'm going to say about that right now. Yeah,
like I think there's interests converge. Yeah, I mean when
I think this is kind of the important thing when
you think about sort of foreign meddling in the election
(14:06):
UM or just sort of like culture jamming within the
United States UM. And obviously, like now that's all turned
into there's aspects of it that have kind of evolved
into their own conspiracy theory. But like there is a
real problem there, and I like the way that you
you visualize it is sort of like it's hydraulic fracturing
of a culture, right, Like it's you you find this
(14:27):
crack in the skin of the culture and then you
just start pumping uh fluid into it um until it,
you know, releases the cultural gasoline. Okay, the metaphor breaks
down at a certain point, look about it. Yeah, said
(14:56):
everything the things I've brought you Sarah as you started. Um,
you were the first person who, like may convinced me
that Okay, this is a serious problem, and it's only
going to become a more serious problem. Um. You've been
yelling at people about Q went on for quite a while,
(15:19):
and I think very um perceptively, UM yelling about Q
and on, Um, what do you want people to know? Like,
He's like, what is it that you would like? An
audience of folks who probably haven't given too much thought
to this other than like every couple of weeks reading
another story and growing increasingly concerned. So like not people
(15:40):
who rejected to people who I think like most of
our readers have just kind of been like, what is
happening with this? This appears to be a problem. What
can be done about it? What do you want those people?
What do you what are kind of like the most
important things for them to know? I think just simply
mocking the followers, sure it does more damage than it
(16:02):
than it helps. I think really the only person of
that you know, benefits from just mocking the followers. People
mocking the followers because they get to feel you know,
superior to someone. Nobody is immune to propaganda, Nobody is
immune to persuasion or undo influence. So the thing is
like fe people like to say, like, well, I'd never
(16:23):
end up in a cult. I don't know. I mean
maybe you could, maybe not this one. But if you
find yourself the wrong place at the wrong time and
the right person saying the right things, you actually easily
could end up in a cult. Yeah, you can end
up in abusive relationship is the same sort of abusive dynamics. Yeah,
that's the lesson a hot yoga has to teach all
(16:44):
of us. Oh Shirigyo started out as a hot yoga
studio in Japan. Actually, yeah, I think that's a really
important point um that we keep relearning in different ways,
or I do over the past year. Is uh, mocking
people or coming at it from the wrong angle just
(17:07):
puts other people's defenses up. They get even more dug
in to something if you immediately just consider them, you know, unreliable,
like you were talking about like you and I'd like
we go back right, yes, and like no, sort of
like convincing you and some people about the kid. Do
you remember like Thanksgiving around the holidays Oh no, I
(17:32):
would have been drunk the whole like four month period there.
Oh yeah, I mean I was too. But see, there
was this there was this kind of trend, especially on
Thanksgiving on left Twitter circles and we are Twitter circles
and you know, oh yeah mocking. Yeah. Yeah, people would
talk about how like their their their family wasn't talking
to them anymore because they're into Q and on. And
(17:54):
there would be folks who were just like laughing about
that and taking great writer like now, yeah, I'm so
grateful I get to eat my delicious meal with all
of you Q people and it's like a piece of
bread and a cold hot dog and it's like, yeah,
you can look at it and go, that's I guess
that's funny, but like it's very sad. Uh. They're very vulnerable, isolated,
(18:16):
lonely people, and so of course they're finding that community there.
And if you just do that and you just make
fun of them, uh, they're gonna be pushed even closer together.
And also if you're just mocking them, you're also mocking
the family members that are losing loved ones to an
internet death cult. Yep, yeah yeah, And I mean it
(18:40):
also does kind of strike me. There's a way you
can kind of draw this back because like I made
a comment about hot yoga earlier, and it's actually it
wasn't even because of Iloum. It was because of the
Bickram guy, who also was a bit of a cult leader. Um.
There's a documentary about that too. But like, one of
the reasons I think that worked, and I'm assuming it
had some of the same things to do with like
(19:01):
White worked with Alme, is that doing hot yoga is
kind of like a mind altering experience. UM. And when
you're in a state where your mind is altered, charismatic
individuals are capable of having more of an impact on you.
And if you're trapped in your house alone and increasingly
isolated from your family, you know that this is even
(19:23):
more the case now that we're in a pandemic, which
is why you've seen it grow so much. But like,
that's a mind altering state of affairs. To being abandoned
by your family is like like and that draws you
in and makes things that maybe you would never have
done before seem like reasonable things to do. Which there
was a really good analysis done of the Q and
on fellow who um took his family on that terrifying
(19:45):
drive trying to flee from the police, and um like
very nearly got some of them killed. And somebody like
walked through his radicalization um process. And it was like
a month or two, you know, between when he started
watching Q and on content and when he attempted to
like flee from a police, like police chasing him in
a car with his kids and like risked all of
(20:06):
their lives. Like, it was a very short period of
time that this person got radicalized. And it's like that's
not a thing that happens because people are in a
normal mind state, right, Like, that's a thing that happens
because people for whatever reason, like hyper suggestibility isn't like
it necessarily an individual characteristic, I don't think, as much
(20:27):
as it is something that happens um to you when
you're in certain points in your life, right Like that's
the point of you. You two could be taken in
by a cult. Yeah, anyway, that's I don't know what
that was. I guess something that occurred to me just then.
I mentioned that the in a real life friend you know,
(20:48):
back into team is trying to give me help with
their parents and stuff. They said it was like the
same thing. It was just like almost overnight they started browsing.
I think it was like the above to secret forums
and and these these people like they are boomers and
they weren't even like Trump supporters. They were new age types.
They liked Diane teeny and stuff like that. And then
(21:11):
she said it was a columnist. Over night they were
just watching. I was like, what are Q tubers. They're like, oh,
they baked the breads. I'm like what, yeah, And it's
it's that's part of what allows this to that's part
of what's so frightening about this right because we've hit
the point now where because of the prominence q has Um,
(21:35):
it's I think going to start growing even faster and faster.
And sorry have been growing at a pretty significant rate.
So we're we're looking at the case where like you
can make a strong argument that it's the fastest growing
religion in the country at the moment um. And I
am very concerned about the growth we're going to see
(21:55):
over the next you know, four or five months in
particular Um. And I don't know what to do about it,
Like that's my issues. Sarah's like, i I've I've most
of my reporting on this matter has just sort of
been trying to get the work that you and a
couple of other people like Travis who seem to have
a handle on this, like help help get that into
(22:16):
the in front of other people's faces. But the question
that I've been continually left was left with is like
what do we do now? But that's the question everybody's
asking me, Yes, solve this problem right now? On our podcast, Sarah, Yes,
I need you to deprogram my mom. I'm like, okay, Well,
(22:37):
first of all, deprogramming isn't what you think it is.
Deprogramming means like locking them in a room and like
playing Jacob's laddern starving them and basically abusing them back
to what you think they were before. Yeah, that is
something people. Yeah, people believe that that is more like
it started and I think that like modern kind of
(22:58):
concept of CULTI deprogramming start it in nineteen seventy seven
with that guy Benji Carroll Um who was a member
of the Unification Church, which is like a a South
Korean New Age Christian moment movement. They're called the Moonies
is the other thing people call them. Um. They actually
own the Washington Times if you're aware of that particular
propaganda mouthpiece. UM. So this guy like gets kind of
(23:21):
drawn up in this cult and a bunch of his friends,
UM fly down from Quebec and like meet him at
a hotel in San Francisco and hold him captive for
days and to quote unquote de program him. UM. And
like what they did to him is not what you'd
call like a like a like a nice thing. UM.
(23:42):
And like that's I guess part of the problem because
like deep programming became more popular after this, and people
would like high hired deep programmers who a lot of
whom were very sketchuling sketchy individuals themselves. And it's um
a lot of the same techniques involved in deep programming
that like colts use to kind of bring people like
it was all very shady set of affairs UM. And
(24:04):
I don't think people realize the extent to which that's
still kind of the entire um de radicalization d programming,
Like a lot of it is um is a mix
of grifters and people who are just kind of different.
I don't know, a lot of it's very unsettling, Like
when you start talking about trying to very quickly alter
(24:24):
someone's mind. And when people are talking about like just
deep programming in the popular sense, what they're really talking about.
They're talking about things like exit counseling, exit groups, and
they're talking about like a strategic intervention approaches and things
like that. You know, they're talking about your Peachey's, your
Stephen Hassans, things like that, Exit USA, exit UK, things
(24:47):
like that. They're not talking about like nineteen seventy nine
Ted Patrick, go kidnapped my son pack from Children of
God or whatever and lock them in a room. Stuff.
But they don't have the history of ant de cult movement.
As if they don't know the history, they don't really know.
It's it's like brainwatching and deep programming, that's all they know.
(25:09):
So what what do you think actually helps here? Like
That's the kind of question I'm left with, is like,
how do you you have so many people who believe
who who are locked in a set of beliefs that
are fundamentally incompatible with the survival of our society, right,
(25:31):
Like if you have millions of people who think that
there's a vast pedophilic conspiracy that reaches every level of
government and has been embedding um uh messages to society
in every sort of form of media imaginable. That can't
go on forever, can it? Like? So, but so what
do we what? I don't know. I keep asking you
(25:53):
what we do? But right, because there's so many it's
so many people now, and I feel like if if
things that we've been talking about today we're more known, way,
way way earlier on, it might have at least dampened
it just because you have these instead of pushing people away,
making fun of them, dismissing it, encouraging people to like
(26:15):
reach out and just be as compassionate as possible and
as patient as possible to help these people. But now
the individual level, what can you do when there are
so many people UM across the globe? Now? Sorry, I
was just like, I mean, what do you think I
was trying to do two years ago? Desperate and weird?
(26:38):
Like read Robert Jay Lifton read Margaret Singer talked to
Stephen Hassan at least could could you explain who those
people are in kind of brief and what you think
people would would get out of them? Because this is
this is I think one of the um one of
the things that it was difficult and sort of getting
what you were talking about this group two and a
(26:59):
half years ago or so um out to people, is that, uh,
the understanding you have of it and sort of the
research that people do into groups like this is so nuanced,
um that folks just don't have much of it. People
don't really understand cults, um. And so yeah, like when
when you're like, it's not enough to say you got
(27:21):
to read these people because most people aren't going to
read them, what is it? Like? What is the like? Okay,
So the thing that I always try to think about
when I'm trying to explain something like eight chan, right
like in two thousand nineteen, when there's all these shootings
going on and I'm trying to explain this very complicated
and strange thing that's happened on the Internet to a
group of people who are never going to look much
(27:44):
deeper into it than whatever thousand word article I've written,
is like, how can I how can I lay the
critical concepts out to people, um, without who are not
going to look much further into this? And I guess
what are the critical concepts from those individuals? Like? What
is it when you say you need to read Stephen Hassan,
What is it that you've gotten from his work that
(28:05):
has influenced your understanding of this movement? Instead of Hassan,
let's walk it back to lifting. Okay, So, yeah, which
I lifted. I mean, he's basically the godfather of what
we know. It's like cultic studies. I mean, like he's
he's this amazing psychologist. He was the one who accidentally
gave us the term brainwashing to begin with. With all
(28:27):
this sudden he was doing these research projects into prisoners
of war, you know, uh, communist ree education camps, things
like that, and he he authored this thing called the
Psychology of Totalism and brainwashing. You know, that term came
down from psychology totalism. You don't actually have to read
the entire book. You just have to look at at
(28:47):
the little principles, the Goudian principles he's laid out for
what he called totalist groups. And I think it's like
maybe eight or nine points. I think maybe it's like
three pages at the very most, depending on what it is.
Key body. You can find it online for free, like
the Cult Studies Institute or the International Cultics Studies. I
just thinking, yeah, Wikipedia, Yeah, it's even on Wikipedia. Control,
(29:13):
mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language,
doctrine over person, dispensing of existence, and Q and I
has already had dispensing of existence. Q and ON has
already decided. Did you get you're worthy of salvation your
fake news media? You're a shill. Yeah, there's an element
(29:36):
of like that's a lot of where this started, right
because they've been taught trying to prepare each other from
the beginning for like the day it's their day of
the rope, right that the Nazis have this day of
the rope, where like they've been excited for forever that
like they're going to get to hang and execute all
the journalists and the race traders and the people in
internet interracial relationships and stuff, um and with Q and on,
(29:56):
it's kind of what you were saying earlier, like there's
all these there's a lot of anti semitism and stuff
buried in this, but it's just not they they don't
frame it exactly the same way. Uh. And you've got
like they're they're talking about when they talking about these tribunals,
they're talking about the day of the rope. It's just yeah,
within sort of a somewhat different context. So I don't
(30:18):
think people. I think people. I think people. One of
the things that, like lad, made it take so long
for people to take this seriously is that they folks
were sort of laughing at how silly the claims this
group was making were, and not that this group was
saying that like, at some point there will be a
moment where there are mass trials and executions and that's
(30:39):
our whole that's the thing we're all working towards from
the beginning. But it was also silly from the beginning. Um,
and it was hard to sort of yeah, look at
look at that whole PICTUREQ and on is basically like
an extremely online posse commentators. Yeah, and the Posse commatato
(31:00):
Us was a right wing like movement in the it
was the nineties early nineties, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And
and that tied in a lot to sort of the
a lot of what was happening and kind of the
militia culture in the United States around the time that
that a a friend of the podcast, Timothy McVeigh, was
(31:22):
getting up to the stuff. He got up to what
talk about Timmy times, good old m Yeah, Um, jimmythy
evil twin brother. Yeah, I mean, it's it's weird because
like a lot of what's happening with Q and ON,
(31:42):
it's just sort of um. It's like it's like somebody
took this old car and they've they've they've they've repainted it, um,
which I guess is kind of what what has been
continuously happening with these groups from the beginning, because like
you can find a lot of similarities between even sovereign
citizens and some of the US fascists in like the
nineteen twenties and whatnot. So like a lot of this,
(32:05):
I don't know, there's certain things that appeal to people.
What do you think is what what are the things
that strike you as like most important that are new
about what we're seeing with Q and ON. I think
it might be just the introduction of the new Age
stuff into that mil you that already resembles, you know,
the far right, anti tax protesters, sovereign citizen patriot militia,
(32:30):
Christian identity stuff from like the eighties and the nineties
until okay, see okay, but now you've got this this
new Age element to it and a lot more conspiracies.
I mean, they're they're they're incorporating everything. They're incorporating a sorry,
I guess Sarah and the Galactic Federation of Light, the
Ashtar sharing like the aliens that that look like Nordic
(32:51):
Couberman's or whatever, which is like this has been sort
of a common thing, Like this has been like a
common sort of thread in the the Conspirator real us
uh like subculture for a very long time, like like
the like these are the these are the folks who
would set up like um it takes like a lot
of them would take over a little small towns in
(33:11):
New Mexico and stuff right, and like have their their
UFO conventions and they you know, march outside of like
Roswell or whatever. Um, Like what is sort of the
significance of because these have always been such like a
fringe thing, like the people who believe in all these
different this like very detailed cosmology of aliens. Um, it's
(33:32):
never struck me as a huge movement. What do you
think it is about sort of pulling all that stuff
in with a lot of conspiracies that sound very similar
to like ship the Nazis believed right like stuff that's
basically the protocols of the elders of Zion, Like, what
is it about merging all this stuff that makes it
so much more viral? Because like I felt like I
(33:53):
could pretty safely ignore, you know, most of kind of
the UFO community um for quite a while. And I
guess I'm curious, like why, why do you think that's
sort of the merger of that stuff with kind of
a lot of more like traditionally far right kind of
conspiracies is so um makes it so virulent? Honestly, I
(34:15):
don't know, because it's not new to me seeing these
things together and blend together. It's not new to me.
I'm an olmswikio expert, and I also happen to know
quite a bit about other far right movements that have
been blending these sort of esoteric things together for a while,
up to and including the outer space stuff. So it's
(34:37):
like it's it's near to y'all, like from where I'm sitting, right.
So I started paying attention to like the kind of
different conspiratorial subcultures in the United States in the late
nineteen nineties. My introduction was a guy called Robert Anton
Wilson who was kind of, um lovingly making fun of
a lot of what was happening, um, right, Like, he
was a guy who was clearly interested in a lot
(34:58):
of this conspiratorial subculture without taking it too seriously. And
in the late nineties early two thousands, you watch a
lot of documentaries about these people, folks who went to
the conventions that they held, and you can see some
of the Nazi stuff. You can see some of the
scary stuff going on in these UFO UM colts and
sort of these other like the channeling and and and whatnot,
(35:18):
like the people who are are supposedly like acting as
mouthpieces for alien intelligences and stuff, all of which is
kind of yeah, gotten absorbed into this katamari of Q
and on. Now, and there weren't a tremendous number of them, um,
and a lot of them, Like there's some good Louis
throu documentaries from around the turn of the century, UM
(35:38):
where he's kind of meeting a bunch of these people,
and most of them are kind of living on the
edge of substance, um in some weird chunk of like
the Southwest. Um. And I'm I'm curious as to how
this all exploded to the point where now, um, these
(35:59):
are not really fringe movements anymore. Um, and I'm looking
for is like, is the is the explanation as simple
as the internet, like added fertilizer to this ship? Or
or is there something more about our times? Like what
what is it that's made this all? I don't know.
I guess no one has an exact answer here, but
(36:20):
I'm curious for your thoughts. I think it's both. I
think you've got high speed internet and we've got social media.
Even very very lonely people who didn't leave their house
before the epidemic, they might be very alone, but they're
they're not really alone because they're connected. We're all connected
(36:42):
now they we're connected, but we're still alone. That's part
of it. But also, I mean, we were around when
you had your your big w K panic and stuff
like that, had that little spike in uh you know
their political millinarianist you know buckery back in all these
(37:03):
weird little groups popping up. You know, the comment's gonna
come or it's gonna be the end of the world,
or God's gonna come back, or the Ailiens are gonna
come blah blah blah blah blah. Are you just everybody was?
The concept wasn't as awkward or as strange then, because
you know it's the turn of the millennium. Who knows, right,
it's almost like that's coming back twenty years later. Yeah,
(37:27):
it does act like a wik I mean, that's why
they call it the Awakening, right, Like that's yeah, a
a rebirth of burst into like a new world. Um.
I think even like the Internet, the isolation and just
sort of the lack of meaning maybe I uh, you're
(37:49):
talking about like the alien stuff. I keep seeing these
TikTok's from like teenagers about being a star seeds. Are
you feeling with star Seeds? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And it's
like it's clearly cult stuff and and like people who
are running cults like taking advantage of these young people
to sort of like make them feel like special and
(38:11):
connected in a way that I think people are striving for.
And uh, the Internet just gives so many tools to
people to pray together everything down. One of the things
(38:33):
that I guess I think back to a lot y'all
remember a book series called Left Behind. I'm sure you do, Sarah, Um, yeah,
well he was in the movie version, right right, That's
who I do. I associate with it because and that
was kind of like prior to Q and On, the
most mainstream like, um, the most mainstream apoca liptic Christian
(39:01):
uh uh like indoctrination that I think that like that
like so blatantly we're like yeah, like my mom Christmas,
yeah right right, because it's not just yeah, it's not fantasy.
It's uh, not just what they believe will happen, but
what they want to happen. Yeah. It does seem that
(39:23):
one of the things we're seeing with Q and ON
is a lot of that same kind of apocalyptic urges
that desire to um believe that the end of things
is coming, which I think is tied to and I
think some of the growth in quan On is tied
to this kind of broad understanding that almost everyone has that, um,
this can't go on forever, right, Like things are not
(39:47):
healthy and that can't continue forever. And there's a number
of like if you if you if you kind of
feel that in your bones, there's a number of ways
you can interpret it. You can try to like analyze
it or study it historic lee or you know, understand
the material conditions and like how they like how that
might be a literal truth. Or you can kind of
(40:07):
let that feeling take you places, and it does feel
like that's an aspect of what's happening, Like it's it's
an aspect of kind of what was what's happening every
time you have these these sort of Christian apocalyptic movements coming,
because they've happened before in the past, and it's always
at times when the fundamental order that sort of had
(40:28):
had shaped culture was was in the process of crumbling
and giving way to something new. Um and it does
seem like that that has to be a part of
what's happening, right is you've got this gut understanding that
things must be, that things are on the edge of shifting,
and this is for whatever reason, the easiest thing for
(40:49):
a subset of the population to imagine about what is
coming next. Always just one of hundreds of these new
religious movements that that popping up in Japan and taking off,
and in the eighties and the nineties, right, I said,
the thing is Japanese society, in Japanese pop culture, if
(41:10):
you look, they were they were not just enamored with
seemingly the concept of the end of the world. It
just sort of accepted it that a lot of people
were thinking, you're like, hey, you know, maybe this No
Tadama stuff, maybe there's something to it, Maybe maybe the
world really will And kids were even like going to
(41:33):
school and then they were hearing about the prophecies of
no Damas for the first time and they'd come home scared.
And never that happened, where like it was a little
boom on its own, things like esp. Telekinesis, yoga, invitation,
all of these things sort of cussed at the time,
so all wasn't even really am didn't really stand out
(41:56):
that much, except like it was a little weirder because
they were obsessed with us. The thing is, they're obsessed
with what Sahara. Yeah, yeah, so I'm gonna need you
You're gonna need to be a little explain kind of
the basics a little bit more so. Choko A Sahara
was the like, I don't know, most people would say
he was the cult leader behind No Shinrico. Yeah, yeah,
you know, he was the absolute god figure. They were
(42:19):
best with him like that. But what I'm trying to
get at though, yeah, it's sort of the same things
happening here. Now we're open and like we're open to
a lot of weird stuff right now. And it does
not feel like the end isn't that far fetched? Yeah,
And when the end feels like it's happening, anything can happen.
(42:42):
When we've been told for so long, I mean like
they are real. They're real problems that we face. Um.
Obviously like the most prevalent one in terms of like
the world is gonna like it's like climate change has
been looming for a long long time. But I think
also like at least with the American culture, we've always
been sort of told that the world is probably gonna end.
(43:05):
Not sure how, I'm not sure when, but uh, we
absorb and consume so vraciously, like the like all these
post apocalyptic movies, dystopian movies, UM, whether it's Independence Day
or just or any sort of thing that sort of
creates this uh expresses an anxiety I think from decades
(43:29):
ago of like something's gonna happen, Something's gonna happen, and
then we absorb that and not only expect it, but
like some people want it to happen. Um, And now
we're in this state where ah, literally the guy who
has been uh for decades in these dystopian movies, the
example of like a bad dystopian president. He's the president now, um,
(43:55):
and we have all these looming disasters and current disasters
and sort of feeds into this expectation, I guess, um
as well as uh sort of a desire for for
some people to get there and to compare it to
Japan again during the eighties and nineties and the time
of the Own affair, UH, their society, their economic bubble
(44:18):
was busting because they have been doing really well economically,
but then all of a sudden, that economic bubble is
starting to bust. That they were worried about, like the
breakdown of the traditional family unit because everyone was out
in the work, more kids weren't going to school, kids
were starting to fight the teachers. Sometimes the teachers would
even kill students. It's kind of just sort of feel
(44:40):
like everything's little upside down on top of the other
things that I discussed. So it was the beginning of
the Lost Generation. And like, yeah, there's definitely parallels because
like it's kind of I don't think anyone would have
trouble believing that, like we're seeing kind of a lost
generation situation happen here. You've got like this this huge
(45:02):
group of young people who school just shut down. Um.
Any chance that it's starting a career for most of
them is put right now. UM. And there's been like
the story of their their lives previous to that, the
folks who are kind of a little bit older in
their twenties and early thirties has been collapse after collapse.
(45:24):
The idea that everyone's living like we've all been living
on the edge of collapse one way or the other
for a long time, so kind of bracing or expecting
that is the UM, I don't know like that that
that's the There's what people need right now is a
(45:44):
vision of what comes after everything falls off a cliff,
because everybody knows that the cliff is coming, right um
Q and on is a number of different people are
trying to all offer that, right Like Marxists are trying
to offer that with their own kind of you know,
beliefs about like what what what is going to be,
like what's going to happen with our culture and like
the way that that things happen historically, um, you know,
(46:06):
obviously like the like mainstream political parties try to offer
that too in their own way and for whatever reason,
the version of what's going to happen, what the collapse
is going to be and like what's going to happen
after it? That this that Qann's offering seems to be
a hell of a lot more compelling to larger groups
of people than any of the other stuff. It's also
(46:28):
very comforting. Yeah, and I guess that's part of them.
To them, it's less bleak because they're the winners, right,
they are in, they're in, they'll be fine and all
of the bad people will be dead and everyone will
know that they were right all along. Right, But every
like most of the other visions of like whatever is
whatever is going to happen and whatever it's going to
(46:50):
look like, uh there more realistic, um, And they're harder,
they're more complicated. It's not as easy as just saying like, oh, yeah,
you're not one of the know that the demon, satanic,
pedophile government employees, so you'll be fine and that's that
makes it really easy to accept. M hm. Yeah, I
(47:16):
don't feel great about where we're headed. Yeah, but they're
the really scary people want you to feel that way,
and they want you to sort of envision it as
like a cliff scenario. They want you, they need you
to be you know that black pilled. Are that fatalistic.
It really only benefits the scary people. You need to
(47:37):
have hope. And I'm not just trying to like pander
or pedal like a false hope and say that things
aren't going to be scary or whatever, because yeah, I mean,
obviously it will. But one of the things that you
can do to help counter some of this stuff is
like you've got to give people some sort of vision
of of like a realistic hope. So like maybe instead
(47:57):
of saying it's a cliff, they give it more like
the wave or a roller coaster. Yeah, even a waterfall.
You're still falling, but it's not. Yeah, but maybe it'll
be one of those waterfalls in like the Jumanji movie. Well, right,
you it's a waterfall. But we're all we're all all
of us, even the people who are getting involved in Q.
(48:20):
We're all in the river headed towards it, and we
can help each other make barrels for each other to
make that fall down the waterfall a little better. Yeah,
let's all make some barrels. I think that is you're
hitting on something really important there, because I think that's
the problem that a lot of like serious political thinkers have,
and it's a problem that journalists have, right, Like folks
talk about how as a journalist you shouldn't be like
(48:45):
all you should do is kind of describe the things
that are happening, um and as as much sort of
raw accuracy as you can. And sometimes that actually leads
if the goal is to speak truth to power um
and speak truth in jim role, sometimes doing that leads
people away from the truth because if all you're doing
(49:05):
is reporting what's happening and kind of the rawest and
most um factually accurate sense UM, that can lead people
into the arms of something like Q and on because
there's you're not providing them with anything else but cold
hard reality, which um may lead them in a state
(49:26):
of sort of anxiety and fear and hopelessness to embrace
something that's that's that's very wrong, um, Which is why
I think there does need to be kind of more
social responsibility in the people who are reporting, in the
way that people are reporting, Like, I don't think raw
facts are always the most helpful thing. I think you
(49:48):
need to be providing people um with with more than
that if you're going to be a responsible sort of
um uh person of fluence within kind of the broader culture. UM.
I think that's that's necessary. People need something that people
(50:09):
need a sense of possibility, um. In order to make
them resilient to stuff like this. They need a sense
that that things. Um. That they need a sense of
hope and a sense of I can be a part
of something hopeful. Otherwise they're going to get caught up
in one of these things that provides that to them.
Sorry you were talking about just like raw facts and
(50:30):
stuff and and that sort of fatalistic thing. But some
of the journalists, and especially some of the journalists on
you know, this particular beat or whatever covering really scary things. Yeah,
they some of them maybe sensationalize it. And I'm not
saying sensationalize it in a sense of they overstate the
dangers or whatever, because obviously the dange was very real.
(50:53):
Yes I'm not trying to say that, but that the
sensationalism just whips up maybe more of a friends. So like,
if you could take maybe a bit of a work
i don't know, empathetic approach sometimes m and think maybe
people on our rand and things might be a little
less scared. Yeah, how do you if you were approached,
(51:15):
say by like UM. I don't know editor in chief
at the New York Times who said, Sarah, we were
trying to we want to cover Q and on UM,
and we're concerned with the way we've been covering it,
Like what do you think we should look into and
write about in order to UM kind of present the
thing that you think is missing in sort of mainstream
(51:37):
coverage of this movement right now? Where would you send them?
I'd I'd send them to some of the key researchers
like Travis and some of the moderators of the support
subredit for the for the Families. Yeah, and that's a
subgredit where people who have lost family members to this,
you know, uh talk about what that's like. Yeah, yes,
(51:58):
that would send them to them. I've sent some major
media people to those contacts, people like at Poker Politics
on Twitter, Poker and Politics, their Pew researcher and a
moderator of that subreddit they've helped people get out of
and they just talked to people who are dealing, you know,
struggling with losing their families and stuff. Maybe you could
(52:21):
like tell some of those stories so as the people
who got out, stories of people who are like just
coming to terms with what's happening. Things like that. You
could start there. You can talk to other cultic abuse
survivors and uh their former neo Nazis and things like that,
and not just the famous ones. Talk to some of
the ones who aren't out there on the lecture circuit
(52:42):
and the ones who aren't out there with book deals
or TV shows or whatever. I talked to the normal people,
the average yeah right right, people who got out and
they're living their normal lives again. Yeah. Well, I guess
that's as good a note to kind of close things
up on. This has been us trying to talk through
(53:02):
whatever the hell is happening, um, because it's uh confusing
and worrying, but not hopeless. Maybe maybe not hopeless. We
might survive the year. Yeah. Um. I was very quiet
for a lot of this because I had had internet
(53:24):
issues and kept getting logged in and out. So I'm
excited to really listen to most of it, but very
grateful for you taking time out of your day to
chat with us. Um. The parts that I heard were
very interesting. It's kind of cool, like I talked to
Bobart and Cody sometimes, but this is actually my first
(53:44):
time meeting you. And Sophie. So I'm actually really happy
about that. It's me too. It's so nice to meet you.
I'm sorry that my internet is choosing today to kick
me in and out of this room. Yeah. Well, if
there's one thing we've learned about, we can shoot cars
and satellites and stuff into space, but having four people
communicate for an hour or so um via the internet,
(54:09):
UM is bound to not going to happen issues. But
you guys can check us out online. Yes, that's consistent.
What worst your pod on Instagram and Twitter? Um, and
follow all of us and stuff like that if you want,
if you want. And I think I got kicked out again, yeah, asshole.
(54:37):
And Sarah, is there anything I want to plug at
the end here? Is there anything that you want to plug? Sarah?
Is there anything out personally want to plug? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Actually, UM,
I want y'all to go subscribe to The Informant. Nick
Martin snows, Yeah, yeah, y'all should go stay in the
Informant if you want like good coverage, that a coverage.
(54:57):
Do you want to feel good about the year? You'll?
Nick Martin rules, Yeah, he's the best every day, one
of the very best within the field. Of looking at um,
looking at look at Nazi type folks and being like,
what's going on? What's going on over here? Yeah, I'm
(55:18):
gonna cyber bully him and get a shrimp dinner. So
y'all go, y'all go, subscribe to the informant. All right,
subscribe to the informance that Sarah can eat shrimp. Um,
I am going to eat some shrimp myself. Metaphorical shrimp.
I don't know what that means. What what I think
you're trying to say? Because it kicked Katie out of
the zoom meeting again. I love technology is that you
(55:43):
can follow us Where's your pot on Twitter, Instagram. You
can follow Katie at Katie Stole. You can follow up
Cody at dr Mr Cody. You can follow Robert on
Twitter and I right, okay, we have a t public store.
Uh man, so dumb, everything so dumb, and it's not again.
(56:07):
I tried. Daniel. Worst Year Ever is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, A production of I Heart
Radio Together Everything. So don't goodness willakers this year is
(00:23):
not the best that I've experienced. I'm Robert g Heck,
Garoney and jam I couldn't agree more. I'm Cody Johnston
and Dolly Guys. I think it's going pretty well. I'm
Katie Stole. That is well. I guess we should spend
the next hour or so discussing whether or not this
(00:43):
year is very good or not, since clearly that question
hasn't been answered by the title of the show, we're
still we're grappling with it. Quick poll, quick pull in
the chat. Good year, no less than good? Yeah, like
if it's like, if it's good, retweet if it's not.
(01:04):
Let's get onto the actual subject of the episode that
we're doing today, so that today we'll have an episode.
We love having episodes, don't we focus? El Katie, Cody,
what do you? How do you? What's your opinion on
Q and on UH jury is still out? I think
(01:25):
you think so. I think it's dangerous and sad. Yeah,
that's those are those are the two words I would use.
I would if I had to pick two. Try to
make some joke but no dangerous and sad and um,
disturbing and depressing. Yeah, all of the above and hard
(01:47):
to completely understand. Yeah, yeah, it's it's very complicated and
very frustrating and very very dangerous. And uh, I think
what's What's something that I think I want to highlight
is that it took a long time for everybody in
like the mainstream media to start to get on the
same page about number one, Q and On being worth
(02:09):
talking about, and number two the fact that actually this
is a very important story. Uh. And today our guest
is somebody who for the last like I don't know,
since I've known her, which is close to four years now,
has been like repeatedly yelling at the entire world to
please pay attention to what the hell is happening with
Q and on because it's important and dangerous and terrifying.
(02:30):
And she was yelling about that years ago when the
only people who were close to the mainstream and talking
about Q and on would just make fun of it. Um.
And now that there's like twenty people who might wind
up in Congress who are tied to it one way
or the other. Um, she's she's still trying to warn people. Uh,
this is Sarah high Tower. Welcome to the show. Hi?
(02:52):
How are you? Sarah high Tower? I am of Boltron
of sadness and compassion, And I told you, yeah, you
did tell me? Um and what do you? What do you?
Let's let's let's go back in time a little bit. Sarah,
when did you realize? Because obviously Q and on you know,
starts happening in this weird look like it's a it's
a four chant thing where like people the drops start
(03:13):
going up and this like weird little community starts to form.
At what point where you like, ah, this is going
to be a problem because the Internet has all sorts
of weird little communities and most of them don't wind
up potentially putting twenty people in Congress. So at what
point where you like this? This is an issue the
mid to late shortly, I think after the Omshurikyo executions,
(03:39):
so that would have been a little bit after July. Uh.
Let's see, you had the visibility at the Trump rally,
you had the Hoover Dan standoff, and I had a
friend I know in real life who came to me
and asking me for help because her her parents weren't
talking to her anymore. They were just watching YouTube videos
about Q and on and it's I think you didn't
(04:00):
just mentioned ALM Shinrikyo for um uh for no reason.
There you've drawn a number of comparisons between and and
For folks who are listening, we have never recovered this
and behind the Bastards or anything, but I guess a
brief overview of O Shinrikyo is that they were kind
of a um an apocalyptic cult that gained an enormous
amount of power, including some political power in Japan, made
(04:23):
some very dangerous weapons, carried out a number of attacks,
including a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway that
would be kind of the barest cliffs notes. You have
mentioned repeatedly a lot of similarities you see between ALM
and and Q went on. You want to talk a
little bit about that, Yeah, But first of all, I
kind of um it's important to correct you. They they
(04:46):
had some people who had sort of infiltrated like police
departments and things like that. But when they ran candidates
for the House elections, so like the Japanese Congress elections
in that they lost all twenty five of the people
lost obviously, So um, I'm already doing better. Yeah, job
(05:10):
and m But let's see question. No, it's really not.
I'm very concerned, but you're asking about the similarities that
I see in between something like oh and C and on. Okay,
Well there's the cultic no you obviously, and the fact
that they're they're both a sort of apocalyptic theo political
(05:31):
high demand groups. They're very cultic, very absolutist in nature,
and at the core of the radical belief system, like
when you really started to peel it back and you
really start to dig through it, it's it's very anti semitic.
They have a lot on the same anti semitic cannarts.
It's cobble, the deep state, the swamp, the illuminati, them
(05:55):
just pretend up at the local triple brackets if you
get coming from. So, yeah, no, it's the There are
a lot of similarities. You don't have to have a
physical compound to be a cultic organization, and you don't
have to have really a cult leader like I think
there's a lot of folks who don't understand it well,
who places a lot of importance on figuring out who
(06:15):
Q is. And I guess maybe there was a point
at which that would have mattered, um, But I honestly
don't even know if that's true, and it certainly doesn't
matter now I think it does. You can get to
like in terms of like actually stopping it. What is
the what would be the value of like figuring out
who this guy is? The guy posting now the people
(06:36):
posts to you now, yeah, the individuals, because it seems
like it's more than one of them. Certainly. I mean
the theory, the working theory, and the one that I
personally ascribed to is that or it's changed hands over
the past few years. And if you look at who
run in eight con, it's I think that's a person
doing to you now. But we'll get into that later.
(06:56):
I'm working on something about that. But you're asking what
the value might be in actually knowing in terms of
you don't want to do what, want to profile the
cult leader, you don't want to be to get inside
their head. I think there might be a use in
doing that for um, for the sake of like a
good history. But do you think that's actually going to
help in taking in like in de radicalizing this this
(07:20):
situation and actually like like dealing with the cult itself.
Like at this point, nobody's going to believe you if
you say that the that that, like, nobody who's affected
by Q, I don't think would believe you if you,
like you point out this person did it or this
person did it, like from a perspective of making this
less dangerous, right, I know, and you're right about that,
But I still think that there's there's value in figuring
(07:43):
out whom all has posted as to you and just
how this they grew. Who's controlling it now? Because I mean,
we're on the outside, we got work to do. I
want to know. Yeah, I'd like I shouldn't have said
there's no point in figure it out, but I don't
think it. I don't think it would stop what's happening, right, Like,
(08:04):
I think there's an there's a belief that like if
you figure out who Q is, then you can tell people, hey,
look this person who's clearly a grifter. Yeah. Yeah, It's
like it's like asking Donald Trump to denounce Q and
he says sure, and that that's not gonna do anything.
Like you know, no, because at this point, one of
the things that they say, like the cultic jargon, like
(08:26):
one of the thought terminating cliches that they say a
lot is disinformation is necessary. Yeah, that's the movement I remember,
which is terrifying. Yeah. I think Travis, like Travis knew
it was going to be Travis view of the Q
and On anonymous podcast. Travis, So, how do you you
(08:50):
do want to walk us through in your mind? How
this kind of like one of the questions that I
have when I'm trying to like analyze this, this this cult,
this massive problem them that we're all dealing with, is like,
why what what aspects of like the culture I guess
of quan On, the cultic milieu that you've got going
(09:10):
on here, Like what aspects of it allowed it to
reach its state of prominence to kind of escape because
you've got this like Petrie Dish, this Internet, Petrie Dish,
of these all these different communities and subcultures, and most
of them don't rise to the level where we need
to be concerned about them, right, Um, and Q and
On grew in is growing into something. Um, but it's
(09:32):
it's certainly like it it got through that great filter
sort of situation. What is it about Q and On
that you think? Let it get out? So like so
to speak, let it escape, let it break its its bonds.
I mean, I don't why don't you compare it to
something like the quote unquote alt right, Yeah, Like it's
(09:53):
just there and it keeps growing and people find their
way into it, and then people start to red pill others.
That's why I'm comparing it to the right, because then
Q and On and I showed you one of the
first conversations we had. I was showing you these screen
caps on the eight cham boards and they were literally
teaching boomers how to red pill their families and stuff
(10:13):
like it's about uh yeah, it's the beginning of a hierarchy,
even with the mean squads and stuff. But look, Robert Man,
I don't really know how to answer that question because
I've just been watching it and like kind of plull
my hair out and freaking out because it looks like
it looks like the quote unquote al right. It looks
(10:33):
like any any predatory group that just keeps reaching out
and getting more people. And the thing about Q and On,
it's very fluid. It's like a little Katamari ball. You
can't do little new agers and your yoga people. It
doesn't always have to be your quote like your red
hats or whatever, Right, no, it doesn't even have to
(10:55):
be Americans. No, yea, now like everybody, I mean, all
the methods that they're using are obviously online. That's why
it's so effective, and the misinformation and connecting all these
people and now so many people are stuck inside. I
feel like that's really exacerbating. Yeah, there's actually grow quite
(11:17):
a bit of data on how the shutdown has helped
things to grow. Um that's been coming out for a while.
I mean yeah, and then it gets just conflated with
other things and other conspiracies, and it's just such an entryway.
I point to those doctor videos of as being entry
ways for a lot of people, um demons looking into
(11:40):
yes and then looking into conspiracy theories. And I've mentioned
it on the show before, people that not necessarily are
respect but like people that I've known in my life
being a lurned in by this. It's alarming. Yeah. The
Wall Street Journal reports that the average membership and ten
large public q and on Facebook groups grew by six
(12:00):
from March through July. Oh god, yeah, expected and upsetting. Yeah,
that's a problem now, But I don't think it's all organic.
I mean obviously, right, like, there's no way what so
because I agree with you, I don't think it's all organic,
(12:21):
But there is a question of like what aspects of
this are organic and just sort of how the internet
and social media works and what aspects aren't in in
than to what extent are they inorganic? Are they inorganic
in that you've got because like, one one thing that
I see as a definite inorganic factor in q and
ons growth is the fact that it was pretty clear
(12:42):
early on to Facebook into some other social media sites
that there was money to be made in this, and
so aspects of their recommendation algorithm and stuff, um really
rewarded q and on content because of the money, and
that helped this thing grow. But I also suspect that
there's like that's kind of like the soulist, cash oriented,
(13:02):
uh aspect of it, But there's there's more going on,
And I'm curious, like what what aspects in your head?
What what do you think is inorganic here? Like what
do you what are the things that kind of you're
looking towards. That's I'll put it to you like this,
if you wanted to start problems, if for any reason
(13:24):
it was in your best interests to I don't know,
kick up some dirt, you get some civil unrest going.
I mean, look at that, Look at a little fracture.
You just have to apply pressure to that, right, to
the fractures growing, right, And that could be domestic interests,
it could be a state interests, it could be any thing. Really,
(13:45):
you know, there are multiple groups with multiple interests and
maybe not the best interests for us. And that's really
what I'm going to say about that right now. Yeah,
like I think there's interests converge. Yeah, I mean when
I think this is kind of the important thing when
you think about sort of foreign meddling in the election
(14:06):
UM or just sort of like culture jamming within the
United States UM. And obviously, like now that's all turned
into there's aspects of it that have kind of evolved
into their own conspiracy theory. But like there is a
real problem there, and I like the way that you
you visualize it is sort of like it's hydraulic fracturing
of a culture, right, Like it's you you find this
(14:27):
crack in the skin of the culture and then you
just start pumping uh fluid into it um until it,
you know, releases the cultural gasoline. Okay, the metaphor breaks
down at a certain point, look about it. Yeah, said
(14:56):
everything the things I've brought you Sarah as you started. Um,
you were the first person who, like may convinced me
that Okay, this is a serious problem, and it's only
going to become a more serious problem. Um. You've been
yelling at people about Q went on for quite a while,
(15:19):
and I think very um perceptively, UM yelling about Q
and on, Um, what do you want people to know? Like,
He's like, what is it that you would like? An
audience of folks who probably haven't given too much thought
to this other than like every couple of weeks reading
another story and growing increasingly concerned. So like not people
(15:40):
who rejected to people who I think like most of
our readers have just kind of been like, what is
happening with this? This appears to be a problem. What
can be done about it? What do you want those people?
What do you what are kind of like the most
important things for them to know? I think just simply
mocking the followers, sure it does more damage than it
(16:02):
than it helps. I think really the only person of
that you know, benefits from just mocking the followers. People
mocking the followers because they get to feel you know,
superior to someone. Nobody is immune to propaganda, Nobody is
immune to persuasion or undo influence. So the thing is
like fe people like to say, like, well, I'd never
(16:23):
end up in a cult. I don't know. I mean
maybe you could, maybe not this one. But if you
find yourself the wrong place at the wrong time and
the right person saying the right things, you actually easily
could end up in a cult. Yeah, you can end
up in abusive relationship is the same sort of abusive dynamics. Yeah,
that's the lesson a hot yoga has to teach all
(16:44):
of us. Oh Shirigyo started out as a hot yoga
studio in Japan. Actually, yeah, I think that's a really
important point um that we keep relearning in different ways,
or I do over the past year. Is uh, mocking
people or coming at it from the wrong angle just
(17:07):
puts other people's defenses up. They get even more dug
in to something if you immediately just consider them, you know, unreliable,
like you were talking about like you and I'd like
we go back right, yes, and like no, sort of
like convincing you and some people about the kid. Do
you remember like Thanksgiving around the holidays Oh no, I
(17:32):
would have been drunk the whole like four month period there.
Oh yeah, I mean I was too. But see, there
was this there was this kind of trend, especially on
Thanksgiving on left Twitter circles and we are Twitter circles
and you know, oh yeah mocking. Yeah. Yeah, people would
talk about how like their their their family wasn't talking
to them anymore because they're into Q and on. And
(17:54):
there would be folks who were just like laughing about
that and taking great writer like now, yeah, I'm so
grateful I get to eat my delicious meal with all
of you Q people and it's like a piece of
bread and a cold hot dog and it's like, yeah,
you can look at it and go, that's I guess
that's funny, but like it's very sad. Uh. They're very vulnerable, isolated,
(18:16):
lonely people, and so of course they're finding that community there.
And if you just do that and you just make
fun of them, uh, they're gonna be pushed even closer together.
And also if you're just mocking them, you're also mocking
the family members that are losing loved ones to an
internet death cult. Yep, yeah yeah, And I mean it
(18:40):
also does kind of strike me. There's a way you
can kind of draw this back because like I made
a comment about hot yoga earlier, and it's actually it
wasn't even because of Iloum. It was because of the
Bickram guy, who also was a bit of a cult leader. Um.
There's a documentary about that too. But like, one of
the reasons I think that worked, and I'm assuming it
had some of the same things to do with like
(19:01):
White worked with Alme, is that doing hot yoga is
kind of like a mind altering experience. UM. And when
you're in a state where your mind is altered, charismatic
individuals are capable of having more of an impact on you.
And if you're trapped in your house alone and increasingly
isolated from your family, you know that this is even
(19:23):
more the case now that we're in a pandemic, which
is why you've seen it grow so much. But like,
that's a mind altering state of affairs. To being abandoned
by your family is like like and that draws you
in and makes things that maybe you would never have
done before seem like reasonable things to do. Which there
was a really good analysis done of the Q and
on fellow who um took his family on that terrifying
(19:45):
drive trying to flee from the police, and um like
very nearly got some of them killed. And somebody like
walked through his radicalization um process. And it was like
a month or two, you know, between when he started
watching Q and on content and when he attempted to
like flee from a police, like police chasing him in
a car with his kids and like risked all of
(20:06):
their lives. Like, it was a very short period of
time that this person got radicalized. And it's like that's
not a thing that happens because people are in a
normal mind state, right, Like, that's a thing that happens
because people for whatever reason, like hyper suggestibility isn't like
it necessarily an individual characteristic, I don't think, as much
(20:27):
as it is something that happens um to you when
you're in certain points in your life, right Like that's
the point of you. You two could be taken in
by a cult. Yeah, anyway, that's I don't know what
that was. I guess something that occurred to me just then.
I mentioned that the in a real life friend you know,
(20:48):
back into team is trying to give me help with
their parents and stuff. They said it was like the
same thing. It was just like almost overnight they started browsing.
I think it was like the above to secret forums
and and these these people like they are boomers and
they weren't even like Trump supporters. They were new age types.
They liked Diane teeny and stuff like that. And then
(21:11):
she said it was a columnist. Over night they were
just watching. I was like, what are Q tubers. They're like, oh,
they baked the breads. I'm like what, yeah, And it's
it's that's part of what allows this to that's part
of what's so frightening about this right because we've hit
the point now where because of the prominence q has Um,
(21:35):
it's I think going to start growing even faster and faster.
And sorry have been growing at a pretty significant rate.
So we're we're looking at the case where like you
can make a strong argument that it's the fastest growing
religion in the country at the moment um. And I
am very concerned about the growth we're going to see
(21:55):
over the next you know, four or five months in
particular Um. And I don't know what to do about it,
Like that's my issues. Sarah's like, i I've I've most
of my reporting on this matter has just sort of
been trying to get the work that you and a
couple of other people like Travis who seem to have
a handle on this, like help help get that into
(22:16):
the in front of other people's faces. But the question
that I've been continually left was left with is like
what do we do now? But that's the question everybody's
asking me, Yes, solve this problem right now? On our podcast, Sarah, Yes,
I need you to deprogram my mom. I'm like, okay, Well,
(22:37):
first of all, deprogramming isn't what you think it is.
Deprogramming means like locking them in a room and like
playing Jacob's laddern starving them and basically abusing them back
to what you think they were before. Yeah, that is
something people. Yeah, people believe that that is more like
it started and I think that like modern kind of
(22:58):
concept of CULTI deprogramming start it in nineteen seventy seven
with that guy Benji Carroll Um who was a member
of the Unification Church, which is like a a South
Korean New Age Christian moment movement. They're called the Moonies
is the other thing people call them. Um. They actually
own the Washington Times if you're aware of that particular
propaganda mouthpiece. UM. So this guy like gets kind of
(23:21):
drawn up in this cult and a bunch of his friends,
UM fly down from Quebec and like meet him at
a hotel in San Francisco and hold him captive for
days and to quote unquote de program him. UM. And
like what they did to him is not what you'd
call like a like a like a nice thing. UM.
(23:42):
And like that's I guess part of the problem because
like deep programming became more popular after this, and people
would like high hired deep programmers who a lot of
whom were very sketchuling sketchy individuals themselves. And it's um
a lot of the same techniques involved in deep programming
that like colts use to kind of bring people like
it was all very shady set of affairs UM. And
(24:04):
I don't think people realize the extent to which that's
still kind of the entire um de radicalization d programming,
Like a lot of it is um is a mix
of grifters and people who are just kind of different.
I don't know, a lot of it's very unsettling, Like
when you start talking about trying to very quickly alter
(24:24):
someone's mind. And when people are talking about like just
deep programming in the popular sense, what they're really talking about.
They're talking about things like exit counseling, exit groups, and
they're talking about like a strategic intervention approaches and things
like that. You know, they're talking about your Peachey's, your
Stephen Hassans, things like that, Exit USA, exit UK, things
(24:47):
like that. They're not talking about like nineteen seventy nine
Ted Patrick, go kidnapped my son pack from Children of
God or whatever and lock them in a room. Stuff.
But they don't have the history of ant de cult movement.
As if they don't know the history, they don't really know.
It's it's like brainwatching and deep programming, that's all they know.
(25:09):
So what what do you think actually helps here? Like
That's the kind of question I'm left with, is like,
how do you you have so many people who believe
who who are locked in a set of beliefs that
are fundamentally incompatible with the survival of our society, right,
(25:31):
Like if you have millions of people who think that
there's a vast pedophilic conspiracy that reaches every level of
government and has been embedding um uh messages to society
in every sort of form of media imaginable. That can't
go on forever, can it? Like? So, but so what
do we what? I don't know. I keep asking you
(25:53):
what we do? But right, because there's so many it's
so many people now, and I feel like if if
things that we've been talking about today we're more known, way,
way way earlier on, it might have at least dampened
it just because you have these instead of pushing people away,
making fun of them, dismissing it, encouraging people to like
(26:15):
reach out and just be as compassionate as possible and
as patient as possible to help these people. But now
the individual level, what can you do when there are
so many people UM across the globe? Now? Sorry, I
was just like, I mean, what do you think I
was trying to do two years ago? Desperate and weird?
(26:38):
Like read Robert Jay Lifton read Margaret Singer talked to
Stephen Hassan at least could could you explain who those
people are in kind of brief and what you think
people would would get out of them? Because this is
this is I think one of the um one of
the things that it was difficult and sort of getting
what you were talking about this group two and a
(26:59):
half years ago or so um out to people, is that, uh,
the understanding you have of it and sort of the
research that people do into groups like this is so nuanced,
um that folks just don't have much of it. People
don't really understand cults, um. And so yeah, like when
when you're like, it's not enough to say you got
(27:21):
to read these people because most people aren't going to
read them, what is it? Like? What is the like? Okay,
So the thing that I always try to think about
when I'm trying to explain something like eight chan, right
like in two thousand nineteen, when there's all these shootings
going on and I'm trying to explain this very complicated
and strange thing that's happened on the Internet to a
group of people who are never going to look much
(27:44):
deeper into it than whatever thousand word article I've written,
is like, how can I how can I lay the
critical concepts out to people, um, without who are not
going to look much further into this? And I guess
what are the critical concepts from those individuals? Like? What
is it when you say you need to read Stephen Hassan,
What is it that you've gotten from his work that
(28:05):
has influenced your understanding of this movement? Instead of Hassan,
let's walk it back to lifting. Okay, So, yeah, which
I lifted. I mean, he's basically the godfather of what
we know. It's like cultic studies. I mean, like he's
he's this amazing psychologist. He was the one who accidentally
gave us the term brainwashing to begin with. With all
(28:27):
this sudden he was doing these research projects into prisoners
of war, you know, uh, communist ree education camps, things
like that, and he he authored this thing called the
Psychology of Totalism and brainwashing. You know, that term came
down from psychology totalism. You don't actually have to read
the entire book. You just have to look at at
(28:47):
the little principles, the Goudian principles he's laid out for
what he called totalist groups. And I think it's like
maybe eight or nine points. I think maybe it's like
three pages at the very most, depending on what it is.
Key body. You can find it online for free, like
the Cult Studies Institute or the International Cultics Studies. I
just thinking, yeah, Wikipedia, Yeah, it's even on Wikipedia. Control,
(29:13):
mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language,
doctrine over person, dispensing of existence, and Q and I
has already had dispensing of existence. Q and ON has
already decided. Did you get you're worthy of salvation your
fake news media? You're a shill. Yeah, there's an element
(29:36):
of like that's a lot of where this started, right
because they've been taught trying to prepare each other from
the beginning for like the day it's their day of
the rope, right that the Nazis have this day of
the rope, where like they've been excited for forever that
like they're going to get to hang and execute all
the journalists and the race traders and the people in
internet interracial relationships and stuff, um and with Q and on,
(29:56):
it's kind of what you were saying earlier, like there's
all these there's a lot of anti semitism and stuff
buried in this, but it's just not they they don't
frame it exactly the same way. Uh. And you've got
like they're they're talking about when they talking about these tribunals,
they're talking about the day of the rope. It's just yeah,
within sort of a somewhat different context. So I don't
(30:18):
think people. I think people. I think people. One of
the things that, like lad, made it take so long
for people to take this seriously is that they folks
were sort of laughing at how silly the claims this
group was making were, and not that this group was
saying that like, at some point there will be a
moment where there are mass trials and executions and that's
(30:39):
our whole that's the thing we're all working towards from
the beginning. But it was also silly from the beginning. Um,
and it was hard to sort of yeah, look at
look at that whole PICTUREQ and on is basically like
an extremely online posse commentators. Yeah, and the Posse commatato
(31:00):
Us was a right wing like movement in the it
was the nineties early nineties, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And
and that tied in a lot to sort of the
a lot of what was happening and kind of the
militia culture in the United States around the time that
that a a friend of the podcast, Timothy McVeigh, was
(31:22):
getting up to the stuff. He got up to what
talk about Timmy times, good old m Yeah, Um, jimmythy
evil twin brother. Yeah, I mean, it's it's weird because
like a lot of what's happening with Q and ON,
(31:42):
it's just sort of um. It's like it's like somebody
took this old car and they've they've they've they've repainted it, um,
which I guess is kind of what what has been
continuously happening with these groups from the beginning, because like
you can find a lot of similarities between even sovereign
citizens and some of the US fascists in like the
nineteen twenties and whatnot. So like a lot of this,
(32:05):
I don't know, there's certain things that appeal to people.
What do you think is what what are the things
that strike you as like most important that are new
about what we're seeing with Q and ON. I think
it might be just the introduction of the new Age
stuff into that mil you that already resembles, you know,
the far right, anti tax protesters, sovereign citizen patriot militia,
(32:30):
Christian identity stuff from like the eighties and the nineties
until okay, see okay, but now you've got this this
new Age element to it and a lot more conspiracies.
I mean, they're they're they're incorporating everything. They're incorporating a sorry,
I guess Sarah and the Galactic Federation of Light, the
Ashtar sharing like the aliens that that look like Nordic
(32:51):
Couberman's or whatever, which is like this has been sort
of a common thing, Like this has been like a
common sort of thread in the the Conspirator real us
uh like subculture for a very long time, like like
the like these are the these are the folks who
would set up like um it takes like a lot
of them would take over a little small towns in
(33:11):
New Mexico and stuff right, and like have their their
UFO conventions and they you know, march outside of like
Roswell or whatever. Um, Like what is sort of the
significance of because these have always been such like a
fringe thing, like the people who believe in all these
different this like very detailed cosmology of aliens. Um, it's
(33:32):
never struck me as a huge movement. What do you
think it is about sort of pulling all that stuff
in with a lot of conspiracies that sound very similar
to like ship the Nazis believed right like stuff that's
basically the protocols of the elders of Zion, Like, what
is it about merging all this stuff that makes it
so much more viral? Because like I felt like I
(33:53):
could pretty safely ignore, you know, most of kind of
the UFO community um for quite a while. And I
guess I'm curious, like why, why do you think that's
sort of the merger of that stuff with kind of
a lot of more like traditionally far right kind of
conspiracies is so um makes it so virulent? Honestly, I
(34:15):
don't know, because it's not new to me seeing these
things together and blend together. It's not new to me.
I'm an olmswikio expert, and I also happen to know
quite a bit about other far right movements that have
been blending these sort of esoteric things together for a while,
up to and including the outer space stuff. So it's
(34:37):
like it's it's near to y'all, like from where I'm sitting, right.
So I started paying attention to like the kind of
different conspiratorial subcultures in the United States in the late
nineteen nineties. My introduction was a guy called Robert Anton
Wilson who was kind of, um lovingly making fun of
a lot of what was happening, um, right, Like, he
was a guy who was clearly interested in a lot
(34:58):
of this conspiratorial subculture without taking it too seriously. And
in the late nineties early two thousands, you watch a
lot of documentaries about these people, folks who went to
the conventions that they held, and you can see some
of the Nazi stuff. You can see some of the
scary stuff going on in these UFO UM colts and
sort of these other like the channeling and and and whatnot,
(35:18):
like the people who are are supposedly like acting as
mouthpieces for alien intelligences and stuff, all of which is
kind of yeah, gotten absorbed into this katamari of Q
and on. Now, and there weren't a tremendous number of them, um,
and a lot of them, Like there's some good Louis
throu documentaries from around the turn of the century, UM
(35:38):
where he's kind of meeting a bunch of these people,
and most of them are kind of living on the
edge of substance, um in some weird chunk of like
the Southwest. Um. And I'm I'm curious as to how
this all exploded to the point where now, um, these
(35:59):
are not really fringe movements anymore. Um, and I'm looking
for is like, is the is the explanation as simple
as the internet, like added fertilizer to this ship? Or
or is there something more about our times? Like what
what is it that's made this all? I don't know.
I guess no one has an exact answer here, but
(36:20):
I'm curious for your thoughts. I think it's both. I
think you've got high speed internet and we've got social media.
Even very very lonely people who didn't leave their house
before the epidemic, they might be very alone, but they're
they're not really alone because they're connected. We're all connected
(36:42):
now they we're connected, but we're still alone. That's part
of it. But also, I mean, we were around when
you had your your big w K panic and stuff
like that, had that little spike in uh you know
their political millinarianist you know buckery back in all these
(37:03):
weird little groups popping up. You know, the comment's gonna
come or it's gonna be the end of the world,
or God's gonna come back, or the Ailiens are gonna
come blah blah blah blah blah. Are you just everybody was?
The concept wasn't as awkward or as strange then, because
you know it's the turn of the millennium. Who knows, right,
it's almost like that's coming back twenty years later. Yeah,
(37:27):
it does act like a wik I mean, that's why
they call it the Awakening, right, Like that's yeah, a
a rebirth of burst into like a new world. Um.
I think even like the Internet, the isolation and just
sort of the lack of meaning maybe I uh, you're
(37:49):
talking about like the alien stuff. I keep seeing these
TikTok's from like teenagers about being a star seeds. Are
you feeling with star Seeds? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And it's
like it's clearly cult stuff and and like people who
are running cults like taking advantage of these young people
to sort of like make them feel like special and
(38:11):
connected in a way that I think people are striving for.
And uh, the Internet just gives so many tools to
people to pray together everything down. One of the things
(38:33):
that I guess I think back to a lot y'all
remember a book series called Left Behind. I'm sure you do, Sarah, Um, yeah,
well he was in the movie version, right right, That's
who I do. I associate with it because and that
was kind of like prior to Q and On, the
most mainstream like, um, the most mainstream apoca liptic Christian
(39:01):
uh uh like indoctrination that I think that like that
like so blatantly we're like yeah, like my mom Christmas,
yeah right right, because it's not just yeah, it's not fantasy.
It's uh, not just what they believe will happen, but
what they want to happen. Yeah. It does seem that
(39:23):
one of the things we're seeing with Q and ON
is a lot of that same kind of apocalyptic urges
that desire to um believe that the end of things
is coming, which I think is tied to and I
think some of the growth in quan On is tied
to this kind of broad understanding that almost everyone has that, um,
this can't go on forever, right, Like things are not
(39:47):
healthy and that can't continue forever. And there's a number
of like if you if you if you kind of
feel that in your bones, there's a number of ways
you can interpret it. You can try to like analyze
it or study it historic lee or you know, understand
the material conditions and like how they like how that
might be a literal truth. Or you can kind of
(40:07):
let that feeling take you places, and it does feel
like that's an aspect of what's happening, Like it's it's
an aspect of kind of what was what's happening every
time you have these these sort of Christian apocalyptic movements coming,
because they've happened before in the past, and it's always
at times when the fundamental order that sort of had
(40:28):
had shaped culture was was in the process of crumbling
and giving way to something new. Um and it does
seem like that that has to be a part of
what's happening, right is you've got this gut understanding that
things must be, that things are on the edge of shifting,
and this is for whatever reason, the easiest thing for
(40:49):
a subset of the population to imagine about what is
coming next. Always just one of hundreds of these new
religious movements that that popping up in Japan and taking off,
and in the eighties and the nineties, right, I said,
the thing is Japanese society, in Japanese pop culture, if
(41:10):
you look, they were they were not just enamored with
seemingly the concept of the end of the world. It
just sort of accepted it that a lot of people
were thinking, you're like, hey, you know, maybe this No
Tadama stuff, maybe there's something to it, Maybe maybe the
world really will And kids were even like going to
(41:33):
school and then they were hearing about the prophecies of
no Damas for the first time and they'd come home scared.
And never that happened, where like it was a little
boom on its own, things like esp. Telekinesis, yoga, invitation,
all of these things sort of cussed at the time,
so all wasn't even really am didn't really stand out
(41:56):
that much, except like it was a little weirder because
they were obsessed with us. The thing is, they're obsessed
with what Sahara. Yeah, yeah, so I'm gonna need you
You're gonna need to be a little explain kind of
the basics a little bit more so. Choko A Sahara
was the like, I don't know, most people would say
he was the cult leader behind No Shinrico. Yeah, yeah,
you know, he was the absolute god figure. They were
(42:19):
best with him like that. But what I'm trying to
get at though, yeah, it's sort of the same things
happening here. Now we're open and like we're open to
a lot of weird stuff right now. And it does
not feel like the end isn't that far fetched? Yeah,
And when the end feels like it's happening, anything can happen.
(42:42):
When we've been told for so long, I mean like
they are real. They're real problems that we face. Um.
Obviously like the most prevalent one in terms of like
the world is gonna like it's like climate change has
been looming for a long long time. But I think
also like at least with the American culture, we've always
been sort of told that the world is probably gonna end.
(43:05):
Not sure how, I'm not sure when, but uh, we
absorb and consume so vraciously, like the like all these
post apocalyptic movies, dystopian movies, UM, whether it's Independence Day
or just or any sort of thing that sort of
creates this uh expresses an anxiety I think from decades
(43:29):
ago of like something's gonna happen, Something's gonna happen, and
then we absorb that and not only expect it, but
like some people want it to happen. Um, And now
we're in this state where ah, literally the guy who
has been uh for decades in these dystopian movies, the
example of like a bad dystopian president. He's the president now, um,
(43:55):
and we have all these looming disasters and current disasters
and sort of feeds into this expectation, I guess, um
as well as uh sort of a desire for for
some people to get there and to compare it to
Japan again during the eighties and nineties and the time
of the Own affair, UH, their society, their economic bubble
(44:18):
was busting because they have been doing really well economically,
but then all of a sudden, that economic bubble is
starting to bust. That they were worried about, like the
breakdown of the traditional family unit because everyone was out
in the work, more kids weren't going to school, kids
were starting to fight the teachers. Sometimes the teachers would
even kill students. It's kind of just sort of feel
(44:40):
like everything's little upside down on top of the other
things that I discussed. So it was the beginning of
the Lost Generation. And like, yeah, there's definitely parallels because
like it's kind of I don't think anyone would have
trouble believing that, like we're seeing kind of a lost
generation situation happen here. You've got like this this huge
(45:02):
group of young people who school just shut down. Um.
Any chance that it's starting a career for most of
them is put right now. UM. And there's been like
the story of their their lives previous to that, the
folks who are kind of a little bit older in
their twenties and early thirties has been collapse after collapse.
(45:24):
The idea that everyone's living like we've all been living
on the edge of collapse one way or the other
for a long time, so kind of bracing or expecting
that is the UM, I don't know like that that
that's the There's what people need right now is a
(45:44):
vision of what comes after everything falls off a cliff,
because everybody knows that the cliff is coming, right um
Q and on is a number of different people are
trying to all offer that, right Like Marxists are trying
to offer that with their own kind of you know,
beliefs about like what what what is going to be,
like what's going to happen with our culture and like
the way that that things happen historically, um, you know,
(46:06):
obviously like the like mainstream political parties try to offer
that too in their own way and for whatever reason,
the version of what's going to happen, what the collapse
is going to be and like what's going to happen
after it? That this that Qann's offering seems to be
a hell of a lot more compelling to larger groups
of people than any of the other stuff. It's also
(46:28):
very comforting. Yeah, and I guess that's part of them.
To them, it's less bleak because they're the winners, right,
they are in, they're in, they'll be fine and all
of the bad people will be dead and everyone will
know that they were right all along. Right, But every
like most of the other visions of like whatever is
whatever is going to happen and whatever it's going to
(46:50):
look like, uh there more realistic, um, And they're harder,
they're more complicated. It's not as easy as just saying like, oh, yeah,
you're not one of the know that the demon, satanic,
pedophile government employees, so you'll be fine and that's that
makes it really easy to accept. M hm. Yeah, I
(47:16):
don't feel great about where we're headed. Yeah, but they're
the really scary people want you to feel that way,
and they want you to sort of envision it as
like a cliff scenario. They want you, they need you
to be you know that black pilled. Are that fatalistic.
It really only benefits the scary people. You need to
(47:37):
have hope. And I'm not just trying to like pander
or pedal like a false hope and say that things
aren't going to be scary or whatever, because yeah, I mean,
obviously it will. But one of the things that you
can do to help counter some of this stuff is
like you've got to give people some sort of vision
of of like a realistic hope. So like maybe instead
(47:57):
of saying it's a cliff, they give it more like
the wave or a roller coaster. Yeah, even a waterfall.
You're still falling, but it's not. Yeah, but maybe it'll
be one of those waterfalls in like the Jumanji movie. Well, right,
you it's a waterfall. But we're all we're all all
of us, even the people who are getting involved in Q.
(48:20):
We're all in the river headed towards it, and we
can help each other make barrels for each other to
make that fall down the waterfall a little better. Yeah,
let's all make some barrels. I think that is you're
hitting on something really important there, because I think that's
the problem that a lot of like serious political thinkers have,
and it's a problem that journalists have, right, Like folks
talk about how as a journalist you shouldn't be like
(48:45):
all you should do is kind of describe the things
that are happening, um and as as much sort of
raw accuracy as you can. And sometimes that actually leads
if the goal is to speak truth to power um
and speak truth in jim role, sometimes doing that leads
people away from the truth because if all you're doing
(49:05):
is reporting what's happening and kind of the rawest and
most um factually accurate sense UM, that can lead people
into the arms of something like Q and on because
there's you're not providing them with anything else but cold
hard reality, which um may lead them in a state
(49:26):
of sort of anxiety and fear and hopelessness to embrace
something that's that's that's very wrong, um, Which is why
I think there does need to be kind of more
social responsibility in the people who are reporting, in the
way that people are reporting, Like, I don't think raw
facts are always the most helpful thing. I think you
(49:48):
need to be providing people um with with more than
that if you're going to be a responsible sort of
um uh person of fluence within kind of the broader culture. UM.
I think that's that's necessary. People need something that people
(50:09):
need a sense of possibility, um. In order to make
them resilient to stuff like this. They need a sense
that that things. Um. That they need a sense of
hope and a sense of I can be a part
of something hopeful. Otherwise they're going to get caught up
in one of these things that provides that to them.
Sorry you were talking about just like raw facts and
(50:30):
stuff and and that sort of fatalistic thing. But some
of the journalists, and especially some of the journalists on
you know, this particular beat or whatever covering really scary things. Yeah,
they some of them maybe sensationalize it. And I'm not
saying sensationalize it in a sense of they overstate the
dangers or whatever, because obviously the dange was very real.
(50:53):
Yes I'm not trying to say that, but that the
sensationalism just whips up maybe more of a friends. So like,
if you could take maybe a bit of a work
i don't know, empathetic approach sometimes m and think maybe
people on our rand and things might be a little
less scared. Yeah, how do you if you were approached,
(51:15):
say by like UM. I don't know editor in chief
at the New York Times who said, Sarah, we were
trying to we want to cover Q and on UM,
and we're concerned with the way we've been covering it,
Like what do you think we should look into and
write about in order to UM kind of present the
thing that you think is missing in sort of mainstream
(51:37):
coverage of this movement right now? Where would you send them?
I'd I'd send them to some of the key researchers
like Travis and some of the moderators of the support
subredit for the for the Families. Yeah, and that's a
subgredit where people who have lost family members to this,
you know, uh talk about what that's like. Yeah, yes,
(51:58):
that would send them to them. I've sent some major
media people to those contacts, people like at Poker Politics
on Twitter, Poker and Politics, their Pew researcher and a
moderator of that subreddit they've helped people get out of
and they just talked to people who are dealing, you know,
struggling with losing their families and stuff. Maybe you could
(52:21):
like tell some of those stories so as the people
who got out, stories of people who are like just
coming to terms with what's happening. Things like that. You
could start there. You can talk to other cultic abuse
survivors and uh their former neo Nazis and things like that,
and not just the famous ones. Talk to some of
the ones who aren't out there on the lecture circuit
(52:42):
and the ones who aren't out there with book deals
or TV shows or whatever. I talked to the normal people,
the average yeah right right, people who got out and
they're living their normal lives again. Yeah. Well, I guess
that's as good a note to kind of close things
up on. This has been us trying to talk through
(53:02):
whatever the hell is happening, um, because it's uh confusing
and worrying, but not hopeless. Maybe maybe not hopeless. We
might survive the year. Yeah. Um. I was very quiet
for a lot of this because I had had internet
(53:24):
issues and kept getting logged in and out. So I'm
excited to really listen to most of it, but very
grateful for you taking time out of your day to
chat with us. Um. The parts that I heard were
very interesting. It's kind of cool, like I talked to
Bobart and Cody sometimes, but this is actually my first
(53:44):
time meeting you. And Sophie. So I'm actually really happy
about that. It's me too. It's so nice to meet you.
I'm sorry that my internet is choosing today to kick
me in and out of this room. Yeah. Well, if
there's one thing we've learned about, we can shoot cars
and satellites and stuff into space, but having four people
communicate for an hour or so um via the internet,
(54:09):
UM is bound to not going to happen issues. But
you guys can check us out online. Yes, that's consistent.
What worst your pod on Instagram and Twitter? Um, and
follow all of us and stuff like that if you want,
if you want. And I think I got kicked out again, yeah, asshole.
(54:37):
And Sarah, is there anything I want to plug at
the end here? Is there anything that you want to plug? Sarah?
Is there anything out personally want to plug? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Actually, UM,
I want y'all to go subscribe to The Informant. Nick
Martin snows, Yeah, yeah, y'all should go stay in the
Informant if you want like good coverage, that a coverage.
(54:57):
Do you want to feel good about the year? You'll?
Nick Martin rules, Yeah, he's the best every day, one
of the very best within the field. Of looking at um,
looking at look at Nazi type folks and being like,
what's going on? What's going on over here? Yeah, I'm
(55:18):
gonna cyber bully him and get a shrimp dinner. So
y'all go, y'all go, subscribe to the informant. All right,
subscribe to the informance that Sarah can eat shrimp. Um,
I am going to eat some shrimp myself. Metaphorical shrimp.
I don't know what that means. What what I think
you're trying to say? Because it kicked Katie out of
the zoom meeting again. I love technology is that you
(55:43):
can follow us Where's your pot on Twitter, Instagram. You
can follow Katie at Katie Stole. You can follow up
Cody at dr Mr Cody. You can follow Robert on
Twitter and I right, okay, we have a t public store.
Uh man, so dumb, everything so dumb, and it's not again.
(56:07):
I tried. Daniel. Worst Year Ever is a production of
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