Conspiracy Theories and Mainstreaming the Fringe

Conspiracies aren’t fringe anymore. They’re at the heart of American politics. In this episode, we explore how conspiracy theories have taken root in everything from social media feeds to White House discourse. Today, the internet acts as a megaphone for conspiracies, from flat earth theory to racist ideology such as the "Great Replacement Theory.” When there’s declining trust in media, science, and politicians, conspiracy thinking often fills the void. We dive deep into why people embrace false cures and disinformation, seeking hidden forces to make sense of their own powerlessness.  

Follow us down the rabbit hole as we examine how Donald Trump has embraced and amplified conspiracy culture, using it as a political tool to manipulate public perception, and how the Trump administration has normalized what was once considered extreme. We also look at a few government coverups and lies (there are far too many to fit in one episode) to argue how historical reality is often far darker than the worst conspiracy.

"Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts." – William Burroughs

Episode Transcript

(00:07):
It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves.
Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where the news gets weirder, and
so do we. Today we're talking about
conspiracy theories, so take outyour tinfoil hats and come with
us down the rabbit hole. If you trust us, I'm your
shadowy skeptic Lola Michaels with a Deep State dropout, Ezra

(00:28):
Saeed. I went outside and saw the moon,
then I checked my phone and the battery was at 66%.
Moon equals lunar 66 equals route 66.
You travel on the routes. The moon landing folks, it's all
connected. And hi everyone.
And our paranoid prophet Cam cruise.
What's up, everybody? Check out our new website,

(00:50):
unwashedun-ruly.com. You can find all our episodes
and extra content. Join our mailing list or buy us
coffee. And don't forget to rate and
review the show or we'll assume you're part of the cover up.
The earth is flat, stationary, and enclosed by a glass Dome
known as the firmament. Mandela Effects are just the
government gaslighting us and trying to see what they can get

(01:11):
away with. The reptilian, as you call it.
Remains of Atlantis are located in the eye of the Sahara desert.
They. Introduced their DNA into these
lower hominids and made human beings chemtrails over American
skies. Are they part of some secret
chemtrails and contrails? Do you know the difference are
in a simulated reality, which the evidence suggests is true.

(01:34):
So how exactly did the CIA try to recruit the 9/11 hijackers?
6 celebrities Who Have Been Supposedly Replaced by clones #1
Jamie Foxx The adrenochrome conspiracy suggests that
celebrities and elites harvest achemical called adrenochrome
from the blood of children. The Great Replacement of white
people is far more sinister thanany redistricting project.

(01:57):
Conspiracies aren't living in the shadows anymore.
They're mainstream. They're at your family dinner
table, your social feed, the media, the White House.
Some conspiracies aren't even fringe.
They're a central part of how people make sense of the world.
In this episode, we dive into the anatomy of conspiracy
theories, what they are, why people believe them, and how Big

(02:19):
Power uses them to manipulate us.
We'll explore the real life consequences of disinformation
and how decades of government lies and financial crises
created fertile ground for paranoia, doubt, and collective
delusion. Conspiracies feed on
uncertainty, distressed religiosity, and economic
insecurity. In the digital age, they're

(02:40):
amplified by algorithms, anonymity, and mass reach,
creating a perfect storm where belief becomes identity and
facts lose their grip. We'll talk about what
conspiracies turned out to be true, and how capitalist reality
is often more disturbing than any conspiracy.
Let's get into it. The late, great writer Gore

(03:05):
Vidal said in his later years that he was not a conspiracy
theorist, but a conspiracy analyst.
He was an anti establishment aristocrat critical of the
ruling class. He was both an insider and an
outsider and highly rational. I think the point is that when
US imperialist policy and the domestic agenda is always driven
by economic interests and manipulates the public through

(03:28):
lies and cover ups, it is often hard to tell what's real and
what's not. So let's kick it off with a
question for both of you. What do you think fuels
conspiracies and why are there so many right now?
I mean, I think as long as there's been people and
governments, there's been conspiracies.
In a lot of ways, I look at conspiracies and the same way I

(03:48):
look at religion. There's an element of something
that makes sense in terms of theheart of the heartless world,
trying to figure out that what you see but can't understand.
And at the same time, their growth and wider dissemination
in the current period and in thelast couple of decades in
particular in this country, I think are very much tied with
the desperate situation that a lot of people find themselves in

(04:11):
and that sense of both distress of the government and
powerlessness in terms of how toexplain things.
And so there's a tendency to look for nefarious forces that
are hidden behind the man behindthe curtain, whereas I think the
reality is both very much in plain sight and very much worse
than any conspiracy. Yeah, I totally agree with that,

(04:33):
Ezra. I think a lot of the reasons why
people believe so much in this right now is conditional or
based on the conditional realitythat people are living in.
People are desperate, people areangry, people feel betrayed by
their government, by institutions.
And I just like to add that the Internet plays a really, really
big role in this. People are getting their
information in a different way than they have in the past, and

(04:57):
news and information spreads quickly, and the kinds of people
that the public trust have shifted over time.
So I think it's a combination ofthose two things.
Yeah, there's a massive erosion and trust in government and
science and the media. We're also in a really socially
reactionary period. People have less control over

(05:17):
their lives and power makes conspiracy theories very
appealing. There's also the religiosity
point. Supernatural and paranormal
beliefs are very widespread in the US, and conspiracies have a
lot of tentacles. There's a lot of overlap in
propaganda and disinformation, superstition and lies and cover

(05:38):
ups and unexplained mysteries. And there's a massive range of
conspiracies. Right.
Like there's the ones that seem kind of incomprehensible in the
modern era, and the ones that are really terrible and
dangerous. And it's sometimes very hard to
separate this skepticism from fallacy because in this world, I

(05:59):
think everyone feels like they've done their research.
Yeah, totally. And The thing is, because of the
way the Internet is, you can do your research and really find
any conclusion that you're looking for.
I would recommend for anyone, ifyou find anything that you agree
with, as a general rule, find the dissenting view, especially
when it comes to these factual questions, so that you can hear

(06:21):
what the other side has to say and reach a conclusion.
The other thing is always try toknow what you don't know.
There are times when you need experts, people who have devoted
their lives to the study of a particular question that most
human beings aren't going to be able to do it, nor should they
have to. Now, that doesn't mean blind
trust, but it does mean you haveto at least take into account

(06:43):
what somebody who claims to be an expert says, and then see
what other experts say. Yeah, Speaking of experts, it's
clear that the Flat Earthers don't have a good map maker.
Because if you guys have ever seen the map that Flat Earthers
subscribe to, it's pretty wild. I've never.
Actually seen that. I'm going to look it up as yeah,
look at that. We.
Speak. The Pacific Ocean is huge.

(07:04):
It covers about 1/3 of the map. It's pretty much like a
flattened, warped version of theworld map, but it's warped in a
way that makes it impossible to scale.
There is never a scale included on this map.
I would put Flat Earth in the incomprehensible category like
1, where I cannot believe that people still think this way.

(07:24):
I mean, there's so many middle school level projects that you
can do to prove the world is around.
It's also confusing because I feel like embedded in each of
these conspiracies is an anxiety.
But what is the conspiracy? How is pretend ending that the
world is round benefiting anybody?
You can go back more than 2000 years to an ancient Greek
philosopher and mathematician named Christophanes, and he

(07:48):
demonstrated without any satellites, without going into
space or anything, by just basicmath, that the earth is round,
and he actually calculated the size of the earth pretty close.
And this is not even unique to that culture.
I know there are stories of cultures all around the world
that understood that the world was round many, many years ago.
Yeah, flat earthers today are kind of like this.

(08:08):
Silly, incomprehensible, becauseI just don't even understand
and. It's like without motive.
I think another one that is alsowithout motive is the reptilian
theory, the idea that the government is full of alien
lizard people who wear this kindof human flesh disguise.
But sometimes you can see their eyes glitch, so you can see the

(08:29):
cat eye for a moment. Celebrities are sometimes lizard
people. So if you go online, you can
find all these really great compilations of, like, Lindsay
Lohan, what is the point of this?
I don't get it. But I think it demonstrates how
alienated people feel from the elites, pun intended.
I guess they just feel like they're just not of this Earth.
They're not of us, you know. One question, if you're an alien

(08:51):
and you come to Earth and you'regoing to go through all this
trouble to where the disguise and the lizard people that you
are, the person you would present yourself as is Lindsay
Lohan. I mean, Mean Girls does have a
pretty. I know, but that was one movie
many decades ago or many years ago.
I mean it's. Really funny.
Yeah. Another funny celebrity one is

(09:12):
the idea that celebrities have clones.
Like the real celebrity died a long time ago or something
happened to them. Like so Avril Lavigne and
apparently is a clone. Paul McCartney is a clone.
Ryan Seacrest is a recent clone.How do you determine that the
person has become a clone? I'm so glad you asked because I
think one of the things about this is Americans have this

(09:33):
really crazy relationship with the celebrities that they love.
And if the celebrities change inany way, they get upset about it
in this way where it's like, oh,there's going to be an article
written about how this person gains 40 lbs or how they have a
little too much fillers. So people get like upset that
the celebrities that they love look different or change over

(09:53):
time and then it's a clone has replaced them.
What about the idea that celebrities didn't really die
and they're still alive? Yeah, Tupac is out there on the
islands. This is where it drives me
crazy. Let's say Tupac is alive or
Elvis or whoever you want to pick.
If they're not releasing the albums, if they're not out there
doing their thing, what's the point of believing this
conspiracy theory? What are we getting out of it?

(10:14):
They escaped the paparazzi, OK. Maybe it's like too sad for us
to that Michael Jackson has died.
It's better for us to think thathe's living happy somewhere,
going to supermarkets just like he wished during his lifetime.
So some of those are silly. What would you say are some of
the low stake conspiracies? Well, among the more fun ones, I
really like the Mandela Effect. So the Mandela Effect is a

(10:37):
phenomenon where large groups ofpeople remember events or facts
or details differently from how they actually occurred.
So there's a lot of people who say they remember watching
Nelson Mandela's funeral in the 80s, but when Mandela died, a
bunch of people were like, wait,I already saw Nelson Mandela
died. So like, they were confused
about it and they were like, this has been changed.

(10:59):
There's some shift of the timeline or the government is
trying to like, change the past.And you can see it leading out
into other things in the culture.
I think that the Mandela Effect existed or people started
promoting it before he actually died, when he was still alive
and in power in South Africa. Yeah, I was going to say, those
people who think he died in the 80s, who do they think ran South

(11:20):
Africa after the fall of apartheid?
Then there became this whole list of things that people
remember in a different way. But they are always quick to
suggest wild theories like alternate realities or like
timeline shifts. Those Internet forums started
accumulating other stories of other things that people noticed

(11:40):
had changed. There's a lot of them.
So one of them is Looney Tunes. People thought Looney Tunes was
spelled like the word looney andthen T0 0NS like cartoons tunes,
but it's actually spelled tunes like the sound tune and they're
like, this has been changed. Berenstein Bears is another one.
Fruit of the Loom cornucopia. Everybody's like, I used to have

(12:01):
a cornucopia, but then they're like, no, it didn't.
But everybody's like, I rememberthat.
Couldn't possibly be that their memory is just mistaken?
Exactly. And a lot of these are just
logos. Your mind is easily malleable.
And so when they look really similar, you might go, oh, I
think I remember it that way. I think I remember it this way.
When you have this kind of social reinforcement of people

(12:22):
saying, Oh no, this is what it used to look like, then it
becomes kind of embedded in yourmemory as a fact.
And so the main way that people get obsessed with it is that
there are these alternate realities or like timeline
shifts and that proof of these Berenstein versus Berenstain
Bears or Shazam the movie Shazamand Sinbad, and they remember

(12:44):
you don't know the Shazam. I mean, I know the movie, but I
don't know what on earth this one I.
Know nothing about Oh my God yougot Mandela infected.
There is no Shazam. Movie.
Yeah, I know that because I I know I always confuse it that
way, but I know it's not Shazam.Yeah, exactly.
So this definitely falls into a low stake silly category for me

(13:04):
because. I am.
I am. Curious.
Obvious that it's like a logical.
I'm curious though, that's seemslike a fuck of a lot of effort
to go into, you know, wiping people's memories, changing
timelines, all of that just to change the Fruit of the Loom
logo. Underwear is a powerful thing.
It is. What about the controversy about
the moon landing? I won't call it a controversy.

(13:24):
The conspiracy. I would say this is a proper
conspiracy. Yeah, this is one of the old
classics, and it's one of the ones that when people pull it
out, you're just kind of rollingyour eyes, like, all right,
already Ezra and me were talkingabout this, and he made some
really good points about how essential the moon landing was
in the space race and how the level of surveillance that the
Russians had on us at the time would make it virtually

(13:47):
impossible to fake something like that.
Yeah. You know, ever since the Second
World War ended and especially going into the 1950's, the US
and the Soviet Union were in a space race over who could get
satellites into the orbit first,who could get animals into
orbit, can you bring them back alive?
And eventually who can get a human being up there?
The Soviets did that, and so then the next step became who

(14:07):
can get to the moon? And it was partly seen as a
capitalism versus communism thing.
But it was also deeper than thatin the sense that it was a
driving force for technology that was mainly used in the case
of the US, but also in the Soviet Union to drive military
technology. It's such a nationally narrow
way of looking at things like the US is the only country in

(14:28):
the world they fake the moon landing.
Think about it for a second. The Soviet Union was in this
tight space race. They had already pulled ahead in
one way and they are like Hawks keeping an eye on everything the
Americans are doing and vice versa.
If they thought for a minute that the moon landing was fake,
and by the way, if you remember it's multiple moon landings,
they went until the early 70s. If they thought for a minute

(14:49):
that the moon landing was fake, they would have done everything
in their power to publicize in order to embarrass the United
States. There's no logic to it.
What about, like, intriguing mysteries?
Do those fall into conspiracies?They're not called UFO's
anymore. Uaps.
Yes, unidentified aerial phenomena.
Yeah, what about Uaps? What about these mysteries

(15:12):
around the building of monumentsand ancient ruins and things
like that? Some conspiracies grow out of
curiosity. Ancient ruins and Uaps and plane
crashes. All of these things we know
exist, right? The pyramids are there.
There's many many videos of UAP's.
We know that a plane took off and it never came back.

(15:33):
I think humans are intrigued by mysteries.
I think people love to try to solve a mystery and put together
pieces and speculate about all the different things that could
have happened. So sometimes I think
conspiracies are just kind of fun and interesting to think
about. Yes and no.
In my mind, sometimes you get a mystery and you can have fun
going down a rabbit hole. But I never, ever hear anyone
saying the Roman Colosseum is soamazing.

(15:55):
Aliens must have built it. Yep, it's it's African
artifacts, maybe artifacts in the New World that tend to fall
into that category. And I think, I think there's an
element of racism in this. And I don't mean that by
everybody who says it, but I mean in terms of it being part
of a widespread meme in society that these people in Africa or
in the New World couldn't have built these amazing structures.

(16:18):
It must have taken aliens to build them.
I have never in my life heard anyone apply that logic to
European architecture, which is complex.
Look at Roman architecture. Those arches are holding a
ridiculous amount of weight and no aliens were involved there.
Yeah, I'm really, really glad you brought that up, because the
idea of quote, UN quote, ancientaliens is really about the

(16:39):
pyramids. It's about the Mayan and Aztec
ruins, anything that's like brown people.
The only thing I would say that fits outside of that, that gets
the same kind of speculation is Stonehenge.
But Stonehenge is kind of beforeit was civilized, people quote
UN quote living there, right? Yeah, but it gets that aliens
built. It gets the alien treatment
sometime. That's the only one though.

(16:59):
That's the only outlier. I just had to bring it up, but
you're totally right and I do think that there is a huge
element of racism. In terms of planes and things
like that, I mean, Uaps or UFOs or whatever you want to call
them, sure that you look up in the sky, there's many things you
don't identify. Sometimes it's a military drone
that they're testing, things like that.
I mean I personally think it's human hubris to think that in
this vast universe of billions and billions of stars and even

(17:24):
more planets, we are the only living thing that's not the same
as aliens landed in Iowa and probe me up the ass.
I'm sorry, I just don't that's that's a far fetched thing.
So just to put it out there, I have really, really strong
opinions about aliens. Go for it.
I'm super into like paranormal world and the government has

(17:44):
come out and said that there areunidentified flying objects.
There's stuff that they admit toopenly.
There's been within the last five years a lot of really
exciting hearings about it. Military leaders come forward
and they're like, there's these tic tac shaped objects coming
out of the ocean. We have no idea what they are.
And there's all these videos andstuff and.
I also don't know what the military technology of other

(18:05):
countries are. This is way beyond that.
So you say. They move in a way that defies
physics as we know it. I would find that very hard to
believe. Right, we'll have another
episode where I'll show you the evidence.
You show me the evidence. All right, let's talk a little
bit about the dangerous ones. When I think of dangerous, I
think of things that have real life consequences that will

(18:27):
cause people to die or mob hysteria, you know, will cause
people to act in violence. I think of all the Satanic Panic
conspiracies. Yeah, there was one that
happened surprisingly recently in Hempstead in Britain.
So in Hempstead in 2014, there was a satanic panic started.
A mother and her children accused some teachers and local

(18:50):
residents of satanic activity where they would kill babies and
drink babies blood and do other kinds of horrific things.
And there's all these recordingsof the kids that she released
where they're saying, yes, they keep the babies in these drawers
and they do this and that. And these actually went viral.
And people in the community latched on to them.

(19:10):
And even though the police didn't find anything, the rumors
persisted. And the people who were accused
of these crimes, a lot of them lost their jobs.
Their reputations were really destroyed.
Their kids were being affected at school.
So many families uprooted their lives and had to leave town.
So. That is the definition of a
witch hunt. You just can call someone a
witch and it doesn't matter. You don't need any proof to it
at all. Yeah, the accusation alone is

(19:32):
enough. It's an old European tradition.
I guess it happens in Britain every couple of decades or so
because there was a whole other thing that happened in the year
2000. This isn't another Satanic panic
you're talking about. It's a pedophile panic.
OK, to protect the children is kind of at the heart of all.
Those exactly. So it's a parallel panic.
So a doctor named Yvette Cloet, a specialist in pediatric

(19:54):
medicine at a hospital in Newport in Britain, was
literally driven out of her homeby a mob because they confused
the word pediatric. With the word pedophile.
No. Are you being serious?
I'm being serious. I'm actually as I'm talking to
you, I'm looking at the Guardianarticle from the Year 2.
Thousand, Oh my God. And the neighborhood Beauty and
the Beast Eater. Yeah.

(20:15):
I don't know what happens in Britain every couple of decades
that they go down that rabbit hole.
I mean, we've had some here too,a really big one in the 80s,
right? Yeah.
And I mean, obviously, we're going to talk more about Trump
later on, but how can you not talk about all the many
conspiracies that are part of this administration and touted
every single day in terms of vaccines, the most recent one

(20:38):
about Tylenol and the devastating effects that this is
actually going to have on pregnant women and on the
already declining state of healthcare in this country?
I would put medical conspiraciesin the category of some of the
most dangerous. So, so many people lose their
lives because of misinformation about medicines.
Like you said, in the 20 twenties, we've had measles

(20:59):
outbreaks in this country. We haven't had measles outbreaks
in decades. A lot of people were unhappy
with the COVID vaccine. I would say the criticism of it
not being an actual vaccine obviously has a lot of merit,
But the measles vaccine, polio vaccines like these are top tier
vaccines. These have saved so how many
lives? So having somebody in the White
House who's saying to not vaccinate your kids in 2025 is

(21:24):
really, really scary and really sad.
And the repercussions could be pretty devastating.
I sometimes get the sense that people seem to have the memory
of a goldfish. This stuff is not ancient
history in terms of how many people were dying from diseases
that vaccines, at least in countries like the United States
have basically eradicated. I the numbers if you go like in
the early 1900s was in the 10s of thousands every year people

(21:45):
die. That's on top of the people who
become paralyzed, lose limbs, disfigured, etcetera.
There's an element here where a completely understandable
hatred, distrust towards the medical industry becomes
translated into going after probably the one thing that's
most responsible for increasing life expectancy outside of
things like clean water and shelter and antibiotics.

(22:08):
And the ruling class, when it implements these things, it's
not out of the goodness of theirheart.
And it's not that the medical industry doesn't make a shit
load of money on vaccines. They make decent profits.
It's not as much as people think, but they do make good
profits on them. It's more that if you're the
ruling class of a country, you don't want these diseases
rampant in your country. They destroy morale, they hurt
your workforce, they hurt your military.

(22:29):
Every war, basically until the modern era, more soldiers died
of disease than they died of actual fighting.
They actually extend a chance ofinfecting you because guess
what? Disease germs and viruses and
things like that, They don't care what class you're in.
And so it's actually in the interest of the ruling class to
have at least some basic things like vaccines so these kinds of

(22:52):
diseases can be controlled, if not eliminated.
Don't forget, you actually had an American president from a
very aristocratic family, FDR, who was in a wheelchair because
of polio. Again, it's not ancient history
that tells you that stuff reached throughout all the
classes. So the other side of it is, I
think the government, the way itdeals with this stuff and the
way it conducts itself has made a bad situation worse.

(23:15):
So I'll give you 2 very simple examples. 1 you touched on was
the COVID vaccine. The COVID vaccine is essentially
like the flu vaccine. Yeah, it's not a cure.
It's it's effective in so far asit gets that particular strain
or strains it's targeted at. If it's a different strain it's
less effective or not effective.You should get it because they
usually target the most dominantstrains.
But the way they portrayed it was like this was going to

(23:37):
eliminate all of COVID. They made promises that you
couldn't keep and basically openthe door for all the anti
vaxxers to step forward and justshow that they were lying, which
they were. And then the other side of it is
the third world. the US government multiple times in the
past through the CIA, has used vaccination programs in let's

(23:59):
say a country like Pakistan where you do have polio, still a
polio vaccination program as a cover for really murderous
covert CIA operations. And when you do that a few
times, people just aren't going to get vaccinated because
they're going to associate vaccines with CIA programs that
result in their homes and families being droned.
And that's the government's doing.

(24:19):
Yep, they created that monster. So as Ezra was talking about
this distrust of the pharmaceutical companies and the
American Medical institutions, another result of that is this
romanticizing of Eastern and holistic medicine.
And another thing that you'll see if you go online is all of
these alternative medicines. Is a cancer killing fruit?

(24:45):
This is a dog dewormer only use eastern medicine.
Infamous miracle broth. Organic sulfur.
Compresses. Vapor cut seeds.
Red Clover, two more frequenciesand resonance.
AOH 1996 that the recordings of Bayhaven Symphony #5IN C minor.

(25:06):
Wheat grass juice every day. Fresh wheat grass.
Juice grape seed extracts. So instead of taking
chemotherapy, maybe you can try eating apricot seeds or dog
dewormer. There's this guy Joe Tippins,
and he has this quote UN quote protocol that starts with you
taking dog dewormer. Because another piece of

(25:27):
disinformation that's going around is that cancer is somehow
linked to parasites. There's like a whole branch of
people on TikTok, even outside of cancer, who are like really
fixated on the idea that everybody has parasites and
parasites are causing all of these ailments and everybody
just needs to get dewormed. While I was researching for
this, I was listening to an interview with a woman who was a

(25:49):
doctor and she was talking abouthow as a surgeon, she is always
performing on women, giving themmastectomies and, you know,
other kinds of cancer related treatments.
And they would ask her about this thing they found online or
that thing. And it was very frustrating to
her because she had been a doctor for a really long time
and she knows the real information.
And instead of taking the treatment that she recommends,

(26:11):
they go online and they find allthis other stuff.
But then she got cancer herself.One day she got breast cancer.
And the first thing she did was she went online and started
looking things up because the prospect of getting chemotherapy
sucks. Dying sucks.
So like when you're desperate and you don't want the
traditional answer, of course you're going to seek other
alternatives. So there's there's a lot of
snake oil salesman too, and people who benefit from false

(26:32):
cures. Yeah, but again, the people who
have dealt with medical abuse intheir lives and discrimination
and bigotry in the healthcare system, they feel scarred by
that. And there's doubts around, is
this going to kill me or make memore sick?
You know I don't trust this system to make me better.
Yeah, and it's justified becauselook at how many people suffer.
Look at how many people don't get approved for things that

(26:54):
they need. And then this country throughout
its history, medical experimentson people have been a repeated
thing that happened here to the point that even today, while
it's not, as far as I know, at least, I'll write medical
experiments, the treatment of black patients get is so
atrocious that there is going tobe a certain high degree of
mistrust in the medical industry.

(27:15):
The question is, again, you haveto think this stuff through.
What has actually made people live longer?
I think some of the stuff that you're speaking to in terms of
skepticism about the healthcare industry also applies in
politics. And there's there's a range of
really dangerous political conspiracies.
And then there's also governmentconspiracies that are just

(27:36):
politicized. But then there's the ones that
are kind of politically debatable or potentially
plausible because they fall intothat framework of, well, the
government is so corrupt and so full of cover ups that this
could be there could be a different explanation.
Yeah, and I would say that the JFK assassination fits into

(27:57):
this. And I would even go so far as to
say that 911 fits into this, too, because anytime the
government has something to gainor there's an agenda, you kind
of just are like, I don't know. And especially when it comes to
assassinations, there's always alot of ideas about what's really
going on, who the real color is,what the real motive is.

(28:18):
And that's just, I think, fair game.
Yeah, I think assassinations andattacks are always going to fall
into that category because there's always classified
information, the official narratives never feel very
credible or there's fabricated evidence, and then like the
culprits and the motives are always used as some sort of
political justification to carryout crimes against the
population. So post 9, 11, obviously, like

(28:40):
the War on Terror. So that just creates like, yeah,
so that just creates fertile ground.
I think even just recently in terms of the Charlie Kirk
assassination, within minutes there were 10's and thousands of
posts alleging that Israel was behind it.
And the more that it was clear that the government was going to
use it to go after leftists, andthe more this bizarre story came

(29:01):
out about the suspect, the more people started circulating
accusations that Israel was behind it, that the Mossad did
it. And the more evidence started to
come out that Kirk had these Zionist backers that were
turning on him. And then Netanyahu started to
come out and repeatedly and explicitly deny Israel's
involvement, that he just sounded completely guilty to

(29:23):
people. And so that created this
feedback loop and more people started pushing it after that.
Yeah, I thought it was really crazy that while we're setting
up for this show, we had this crazy event happen and all these
conspiracies around it. But like I was saying about JFK
and 911, when the government, the Israeli government in this
case, has something to gain in silencing this person who is

(29:44):
starting to criticize him. And the US government has
something to gain by having thismartyr.
Because the way that they've capitalized on the death of
Charlie Kirk has just blown my minds.
Never in a million years would Ihave expected this person to be
lionized to this degree by not only conservatives, but even by
liberals. It's pretty mind blowing.
I'm not going to speak to Mr. Kirk.

(30:06):
Assassinations happen all the time.
I know nothing about his assassination.
I have no particular knowledge of the JFK assassination to say
anything. I can look at any assassination
of anybody and come up with fairly intricate theories as to
who benefits and why and how this could have happened and how
that could have happened, and there may even be truth to it,
or they may not, and I wouldn't know.

(30:28):
I do, however, put a distinctionbetween an assassination like
that and something like 911, because you can always kill a
person or the state can organizethe killing of a person.
When you're talking about 911, if you were to say that the US
government orchestrated this, it's an extraordinary claim.
I would argue that extraordinaryclaims require extraordinary

(30:49):
evidence, and what it would require is for the American
government to carry out an incredible operation on so many
levels through so many differentbranches of the government, and
that here we are 1/4 century later and nothing has leaked
about it. I don't think the American
government is that smart. Nothing it does demonstrates

(31:10):
that level of depths or intelligence at all.
Quite the opposite. These people marched into Iraq
two years later and basically handed it over to Iran, which
could have been avoided if they just cracked open a book about
the region. The other reason I don't buy it
is because all the repressive stuff that they did after 911,
they had started to before 911. Now, did the 9/11 give him an

(31:31):
impetus and an opening to carry it out of even further and
further? Absolutely.
I mean, Condoleezza Rice openly said in front of Congress, we
have to discuss how we can use this opportunity, this
opportunity being the murder of 3000 Americans.
So of course they do. They saw it as an opportunity.
But, you know, opportunities do come up.
There's also the fact that Osamabin Laden said, yeah, we did it.

(31:51):
We didn't expect the buildings to go down, but God damn, that's
a plus. So you put all that together, I
see no evidence to suggest anything else.
Ezra, you bring up a really fairpoint when you talk about
the level of coordination that this would take and also the
number of people who would have to participate in any of this to
stay quiet. And if you examine a lot of
these conspiracy theories, many of them fall apart under that

(32:13):
same logic. So if we go back to Flat Earth
for a moment, the number of people who would have to be
involved in this conspiracy theory is just outrageous.
Because in addition to everybodywho works for NASA, it would
also include everybody who worksfor every other space agency all
around the world, every astronomer, every person who has

(32:34):
a commercial boat where they sail around the world.
Flat Earth would require like 200,000 people to hide this
conspiracy. So it's it's a fair, fair
criticism. And don't forget Eratosthenes
from 2000 years ago or 2200. He's in on.
The He was one of the early oneson the.
He was getting a check from the Pentagon they're sending through
their time machine. But my thing about that is

(32:55):
history is not a conspiracy. But there's plenty of
conspiracies in history, and there's plenty of times where
the US government just straight out carried out a conspiracy
lie. It usually unravels pretty
quickly. Iraq has weapons of mass
destruction. Within about a year, that thing
was in their face. It wasn't a mistake they see
today. The conspiracy is it was a
mistake. No, they knew and they all knew

(33:16):
it. Was a lie.
It was a lie. It was a lie, but it got exposed
pretty quickly because it was demonstrable.
The people who couldn't sell youIraq has weapons of mass
destruction. You want me to believe that
these same people orchestrated what are the most sophisticated
attacks that have ever taken place If if it's really by the
United States government ever onAmerican soil, Gulf of Tonkin.

(33:38):
Gulf of Tonkin, an incident where a US naval ship was
bombed, supposedly, and it was used as an excuse to escalate a
Vietnam War. All it took is a few journalists
and Oh no, that's not what happened.
But that's why people believe other things to be false flags.
There's a bunch of people who think Sandy Hook, it was a false
flag for the US government to try to take people's guns.

(33:59):
You know, So we were talking about how the government's own
actions and behavior have sown this mistrust.
And like, it's exactly what you said.
There have been instances where the US has allowed Americans to
be killed or they've allowed attacks or even done their own
attacks on civilians or militarypeople to get policy started or
get a war started or whatever, whatever else the agenda is at

(34:20):
the time. Yeah, that's kind of the point
is the truth is darker than the conspiracy theories.
And we'll talk about the conspiracies that turned out to
be true throughout this episode.The one that I was thinking
about is the project Northwood in 1962, which was during the
Cuban Missile Crisis and the US was going to carry out fake
terrorist attacks on the military and civilians in order

(34:43):
to justify going to war with Castro in Cuba following the
Cuban Revolution. And the only reason why it never
went forward is because JFK knewit would cause a big war with
the Soviet Union and it was during the Cold War.
I think one of the things that defines conspiratorial thinking
are these huge leaps of logic. One of the clips I wanted to

(35:04):
play for you guys is a man talking about all these
coincidences between JFK and Lincoln.
So if you guys want to roll thatclip.
The real truth, you better wake up and find out has been around
you all of your life, you just didn't see it.
Example Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.

(35:25):
John Kennedy was elected to Congress 1946.
Abe. Lincoln was elected president in
1860. John Kennedy was elected
president 1960. The names Lincoln and Kennedy
both contained 7 letters. Both presidents were
particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both the president's wives lost children while living in the

(35:47):
White House. Both presidents were shot on a
Friday in the head. President Lincoln's secretary
was named Miss Kennedy. Kennedy's secretary was named
Miss Lincoln. Both were assassinated by
Southerners. Both were succeeded by
Southerners. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded
Lincoln, was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded
Kennedy, was born in 1908. John Wilkes Booth, who

(36:10):
assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated Kennedy, 1939 Both
assassins were known by three names.
John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Both names are comprised of 15 letters.
President Lincoln was shot in a theater named Ford.
Kennedy was shot in a car named Lincoln made by Ford.

(36:33):
John Wilkes Booth ran to a theater and was caught in a
warehouse. Oswald ran from a warehouse and
was caught in a theater. Booth and Oswald were both
assassinated before they could go to a trial, and a week before
Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland.
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe.
Isn't that so great, guys? Coincidence.

(36:56):
I think not. It ends in Marilyn Monroes
pants. President Penny, what is it in
Marilyn Monroe? I, I got to tell you when I was
watching that I was wondering, is this an act or is this for
real? And then like the Marilyn Monroe
thing is like, wait, this is an act.
And how far they're reaching to find connections.
It's like he has 8 letters in his name.

(37:16):
So does he. He ran from a theater to a
warehouse. Like the connections are so, so
funny. This is what I'm trying to
highlight by playing this clip is that there's this really,
really huge leap in logic that happens.
So if you guys, I can't guess. This is tied to simulation
theory. So the fact that history repeats

(37:36):
itself is because of programming.
So who still believes in simulation theory?
Can you first explain what is simulation?
Theory. OK, so simulation theory is
pretty much like the movie The Matrix.
Our real bodies are are dormant somewhere and everything we're
experiences in simulation. And then other versions are like
our physical bodies don't actually exist at all.

(37:57):
And our consciousnesses are all just artificial and we're
existing in a simulation. And this is something that
started with tech Bros and it's something that Elon Musk will
talk about in interviews and be like, it's possible.
It's totally possible. We can't know, but it's
possible. Oh my God, is Elon here?
Yeah, so that's the idea of simulation theory.

(38:19):
And people who believe in this are saying that you can see the
programming sometimes, or there's a glitch in the matrix
where something doesn't line up.This clip shows how the
programming just repeats itself over and over and over.
So actually a lot of the things in that clip weren't true.
Like the secretary thing I read wasn't actually true, But people
love to like latch on to these kind of things and retell them.

(38:41):
And I think the entertainment value of them is actually one of
the things that really helps it Prolifer, right?
It was very funny as I was watching it.
One of the things I'm thinking is humans will almost as a
tendency, want to find patterns.That's how you explain exactly.
And so you just throw up a bunchof random numbers and random
dates, and somehow we're going to create a pattern out of it

(39:04):
and find one where nothing exists, because that's just what
we do. Yeah, Ned, that's how the human
brain works. We just organize things.
But we also can find false patterns everywhere and make
false correlations. And on TikTok, somebody
predicted the rapture, and therewas all these people talking
about the rapture. And the person who created that
prophecy was online and they were talking about how one of

(39:26):
the ways they knew is because oflicense plates, and they saw the
numbers in license plates. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
They saw the numbers in license plates of the dates and like
that's one of the most common forms of cognitive bias is with
numbers. There's a special name for it
and everything where it's like, oh, I'm the number 23.
I see the number 23 everywhere. Like the Jim Carrey movie you.

(39:48):
Know, I got to tell you these rapture guys have gotten a lot
lazier than they used to be usedto be you had to sit there and
with calendars and, and actuallydo some real mathematics where
you're calculating, you know, when per the Bible, the earth
was created, where are we now since creation and, and how
we're going to count the dates and, and based on that, make a
projection on, on, on rapture. They just had to look at it,

(40:08):
basically. Yeah, what a waste.
Put some effort into it man. Just fucking go look at license
plates. Did it happen?
I mean, I I'm still. Here as you should be.
Did you really think you were going to go up Cam?
Let let me just say I packed thelunch for the next day.
I was told I should wear clean underwear.
Well, I think this episode is also particularly relevant in

(40:30):
Trump 2.0 because this is a president who's really leaned
into conspiracy theory. I guess that's an
understatement. It's seems more like a
pathology. But, you know, the ruling class
has always lied. Trump is, I think, the most
unhinged, and there's an entire Wikipedia page of all of the
many conspiracy theories that hepeddles openly.

(40:52):
But I did want to talk about a little bit of this false binary
that can conspiracy theorists are all right wingers or
uneducated or MAGA supporters, because conspiracy theorists do
exist across the political spectrum and class and race and
education levels, and it's not strictly partisan.

(41:12):
But let's talk a little bit about Trump because I think the
most dangerous theory that we'reseeing that's been propagated a
lot is the great replacement theory.
The great replacement theory is a far right ethno nationalist
idea that white populations are being deliberately replaced by
non white immigrants. But the claim is that the elites

(41:36):
or the political leaders are facilitating this immigration
basically to change the political, cultural or racial
character of countries. And it's it is pushed by Tucker
Carlson and Lauren Southern, Steve Bannon, Matt Walsh,
Charlie Kirk. And it was used in
assassinations like the anti Muslim bigot murder at the

(41:56):
Christ Church mosque in New Zealand.
So yeah, it is one of those conspiracies that exists,
particularly because it shapes ideology and creates the mob
mentality and effects policy. It's one of those where it's a
conspiracy theory, but it's alsoa call to action at the same
time. He does more than lean into it
or do dog whistles. I mean, he just gave a whole UN

(42:17):
speech where that was a central tenet of his speech, that you're
being replaced by the brown Muslims in Europe and we're
going to stop it here in America.
There are some very, very powerful people in this country
and around the world that are promoting this and are selling
it and doing everything they can, including playing on the
fears that populations like whites in the US feel.

(42:41):
And it serves a purpose too, because it directs any sense of
anger downwards towards people who are worse off than you, as
opposed to the people who actually have made your life
unlivable. As much as Trump is seen as a
buffoon, he is in many, many ways.
But he's also incredibly smart in the way he mobilizes his
base. He knows who his supporters are.
He knows where their hearts are.He knows what's happening on the

(43:04):
Internet space that they inhabit.
So if we even think about his trajectory into the White House,
he came in on this wave of birtherism.
That was one of his things is that he was like, show me your
birth certificate, Obama. And he was able to get all these
racist people to like get behindhim and demand that birth
certificate too. He said he was going to clean up
the swamp, right? He was going to get rid of the

(43:25):
deep state. He called the media fake news.
He really harnessed the anxiety and the mistrust his segment of
the American populace was feeling.
The way that Trump was able to frame himself as an outsider,
the anti establishment guy. He's just the genius businessman
who's going to come in and make the country a bunch of money,

(43:46):
just like he made his businessesa bunch of money.
And really when he was coming infor his first term, I think a
lot of people honestly looked atit like that.
And over time, he went from giving these like small nods and
winks to his base to being open and embracing things.
So one of the things that he does in interviews is that he'll
take whatever the dialogue is that's happening online and kind

(44:07):
of mention it in a speech. So like for the people who are
reading online, they're like, yes, our guy, our guy is in the
White House and he's saying the thing and he does it like with
weird stuff like that. He said Justin Trudeau could be
the son of Fidel Castro. Who could know?
Who could know? We don't know.
Yeah. And I think stuff like that,
like the Justin Trudeau thing, is him playing on the idea that

(44:27):
there are so many secrets, so many secrets that you don't
know. But I know, and I know and I
know, and I'm just going to spill a little bit here and a
little bit there. He is actually a very smart man.
Not book smart, but he's very smart.
A smart con man. And we have to talk about Q
Anon. Obviously, Q Anon is somebody
who claimed to be really high upin the government, somebody who

(44:50):
spoke to the President on a regular basis and they were
leaking information about what was happening, but they were
doing it in these very cryptic kind of Nostradamus esque type
posts. You can kind of interpret in
many ways, Hugh. And on was really, really huge
within the MAGA set. So there's even this moment
where they're in the White House, they're about to take a

(45:10):
photo and Trump is like, you know what this feels like, guys?
You know what this feels like? This feels like the calm before
the storm. And within Q Anon lore, the
storm referred to when Trump wasgoing to come in and clean up
everything. So he was saying something that
made no sense to anybody who's unfamiliar with Hugh.
So he was doing this directly tohis people.

(45:34):
You guys know what this represents, what all of it.
Remember, you could tell it was.Lift the storm.
Could indeed calmly fly the storm.
We. Have the world's great military
people that was really going to tell you that.
And we have a great evening. Thank you all.

(45:57):
For coming. Thank you.
What store, Mr. President? You'll find out.
Give us a hint. Thank you everybody.
I think it's actually very telling that a bunch of people
who were there are saying what is the storm, what is the storm?
And that he won't answer them because it's not for them, it's
for the people who are watching online.

(46:19):
I think you're right. He knows how to reinforce this
outsider appeal. And in that way he's really like
a kind of classic populist strongman.
Like he really knows how to manipulate people and play on
their deprivation to initiate and spread all these lies.
But what's really remarkable to me is even to this day that he

(46:39):
still claims to speak for the people against the corporate
elites and has centralized so much power in his hands.
So you have this authoritarian figure who to his base doesn't
feel like an authoritarian figure.
Like they see it as someone who's strong enough to take on
the system. And whenever he says anything

(47:00):
like the media is lying or the system is rigged, they don't see
him as a representative of that system.
They see him as as an outsider to it.
Yeah, the strongman who is an authoritarian figure, but a man
of the people is actually. Very classic.
It's actually very common in history.
That's usually how the strongmantakes power.

(47:22):
He can appeal to the people overthe established institutions.
I think also the Democrats helped feed his outsider image
because since he left office their campaigns that they ran
against him tended to run on 2 roads.
One was he's not your typical Republican.
We want the old Republican Partyback.
Remember Biden many times givingspeeches like that, that this

(47:42):
guy is outside the mainstream. So that reinforces that he's
outside the establishment. And then you had all the court
lawsuits. Now, was he guilty?
Probably, but they're all they're all crooks.
You know, I begin with the assumption they're all guilty
until proven. Anyone who gets that high up in
the government. So I have no doubt he probably
was of all the things they said he did.
But, you know, let's let's dig into their closets.

(48:04):
But the fact that they actually pursued those cases against him
reinforced the image that he's under some kind of witch hunt,
that he's under some kind of attack and that he's an
outsider, even though he's not. He hobnobs or hobnobbed with all
these people, with the Clintons,with with all of them.
And to mention a conspiracy theory that I don't consider to
be in a conspiracy of any kind is Epstein.

(48:25):
Everybody knows the extent to which powerful men were involved
in it, including him and others.And it's like, what's the
conspiracy? The only conspiracy really is
there. You know, it's like that little
kids putting their fingers in their ears and going la, la, la,
la, la. I don't want to hear it.
I don't want to hear it. It's all out in the.
Air, something you said occurredto me though, because there is a
lot of focus on conspiracies being so integral to the MAGA

(48:49):
movement. But one of the ways that the
Democrats, because they couldn'tdefeat Trump politically, they
had to make up their own lies and their own conspiracies.
And so they did that through Russiagate.
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, the MAGA guys promote themselves
or see themselves as outsiders or even opponents of the
establishment. And then you have the Democrats
who have basically embraced themselves to the idea of being

(49:12):
the establishment. So come the 2016 election, and I
think Hillary Clinton thought itwas her turn and was just going
to be crowned and. Surprise, surprise, here comes
the young upshark, Donald Trump.Yeah, and not only.
Did she lose it? Was it?
Really was an underdog the way he did it.
And so the Democrats couldn't and wouldn't and would never

(49:34):
turn around and say, well, we need to examine what we did
wrong that so many people didn'tvote for us.
No, they're like clinically incapable of self reflection.
Yeah, so they came up with this concocted story of Russia
manipulating the election, and that story kept changing.
The story kept changing from Russia directly actually hacking
things to Russia influencing which is 1 hell of a word

(49:55):
because what does influencing mean?
And then we need they issued some reports about it became
like Russia spent $150,000 on ads on.
Facebook, the funny, which is like, yeah.
And the funniest ones were like,Russia backed these ads about
racial division because no one thinks that there's racism in
society except when Russia intervenes and tells us so.

(50:17):
No American would do that. It's absurd and it's an insult
to any black person in the country because you're telling
them the only reason you who feel any sense of racism is
because of the Russians. I think they really thought that
creating the Russian bogeyman was going to be their winning
strategy. Yeah, the Democrats strategist
needs to be like fucking slapped.
And fired. What is wrong with this?

(50:38):
Person you really they have the worst strategies.
Ever, Lola, you saying that sentence?
I couldn't help but laugh. Yeah, yeah, Everything they say,
they're so fucking dumb, bro. And it's like Kamala Harris, I
didn't have enough time. That demonizing Russia is going
to win you the vote. When was the last time ever an
American election was decided byforeign policy?
American elections are decided only by your pocketbook.

(51:00):
That's it. And race, Pocketbook and race.
Those are the two things that decide American elections.
The fact that the Democrats wereso eager to jump onto this line,
it just shows that both sides are susceptible to this
behavior. Both sides will use conspiracies
when it behooves them. Conspiracy theories have always
existed before the Internet. They spread slowly through

(51:21):
books, word of mouth, you know, family dinners, whatever.
Now they go viral instantly. They can reach millions through
platforms. And I think also in the past,
like the mainstream media and academia really acted as a
gatekeepers of quote UN quote credible information.
And today, anyone can publish anything.
So anyone can look just as legitimate as experts.

(51:43):
And I think that's a mixed bag. There's a good reason for that
because the media are so bought and paid by corporate America
and by the ruling class. But talk a little bit about how
the Internet has kind of supercharged or turbocharged
conspiracies. Yeah, so you talked about a
couple of them. The pretty obvious ones are the
speed and the range. You know, of course, this

(52:05):
information now can spread across a globe.
And in addition to that, the power is really placed into the
least responsible players, I'll say, online in many cases.
So online, we have the benefit of anonymity.
And this anonymity allows peopleto come on and say that they are
doctors or they're some sort of expert in something.

(52:28):
And you don't really know about the credentials of the person
whose advice you're taking. And because they may not be a
professional, they can get online and they can say, if you
drink this tea, it will cure your cancer 100% of the time.
Whereas somebody who actually has a medical license can come
on and say, like, OK, this type of chemotherapy will work for
this type of cancer 80% of the time.

(52:49):
And if they misrepresent those numbers, there's accountability
for that. So people who are working
outside of institutions have a lot more power to make big
claims, to make the kind of claims that really draw people
in, to make the kind of claims that make people emotional.
So they take up a lot of the space on the Internet and they
can produce their information a lot quicker, of course, because

(53:10):
if you're a scientist, the doctor, a researcher, you're
spending a lot of time fact checking, you're spending a lot
of time cross referencing, and you're very careful about the
kind of information you put out.But people who are not experts
and whose intentions may be to make money or they're not there
with the same level of integrityas other players who are less

(53:31):
careful about the kind of information they put up.
They can put up 40 videos a day.Whereas somebody creating a peer
reviewed paper like that takes time.
Another thing that's really affecting this conversation is
the way that people view Main stream news and they're relying
much more on like influencers and on the ground people, people
who are living in the places, inthe situations and reporting
first hand. So there's this kind of blurring

(53:52):
about what is an expert? What does it mean to be an
expert within the new digital media landscape?
Yeah, When you were talking before about experts, I wanted
to challenge that because I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think the main gauge that people have right now is
authenticity. And most investigative
journalists and the journalists who actually are dedicated to

(54:13):
doing authentic reporting on theground have been removed from
mainstream sites and are now on sub stack or doing their own
thing. And so you follow the people
that you believe, you follow thepeople that you trust, and
sometimes you trust people who are just on the street who have
what you believe is reputable content.

(54:34):
So I think there is a blurring of the line, but I don't believe
anything I see from mainstream media.
But I would say that I'm equallyas distrustful on social media.
I always Fact Check everything. That's just what I what I do.
I always look for other sources.I'm just saying that what has
changed within the last 30 yearsis there was a time where if you

(54:55):
would see somebody sitting on their living room couch with a
camera pointed at them with a T-shirt, you would immediately
dismiss them as like, oh, this person is not a real
professional. And now it's the opposite.
People see high production somebody in a suit and tie and
they're like, I should not trustwhat this person says.
And I'm not saying that's the way everybody thinks.
I'm just saying that's a shift that's been occurring with a

(55:18):
large percentage of the population.
I guess I was thinking more about like how specifically
people turn to conspiracies not only because of the distrust,
but because of that sense of powerlessness over their lives.
And it's a way of basically re establishing some sort of power.
If we look at the big picture, over time, conservatives have

(55:41):
kind of been pushed into anxiety.
Over the 20th century, some of the major changes that have
happened, prayer was removed from school, desegregation
happened, Roe V Wade happened. So over the 20th century,
there's been this move towards progressivism slowly, and those
losses obviously create a lot ofanxiety.
I think it's the conservative fear, like it's about people who

(56:02):
are like church people. They want prayer, they want
Bible, they want family and. They want the old racist social
order. Yeah, exactly.
So to watch that be challenged chipped away at.
Okay, so in my mind, if you lookat something like the Great
Replacement conspiracy, why doesthat get credence in America now
on the face of, you could say, well, you know, there are more

(56:24):
minorities in the US than there used to be, and that's
undeniable, and there's just a racist backlash against that.
But I also think there's something else going on that's a
little bit deeper. These people that are attracted
to this stuff, just specificallyGreat Replacement, are people
who have a keen sense that they are living worse off than their
parents and their grandparents. The heyday of American power was

(56:46):
the 1950s, coming off the SecondWorld War, the American Century,
jobs popping out everywhere. If you were white, getting a
house was very doable. Getting a car was very doable.
Having a one income household was very doable.
And so that was then and then you look now you're living in
the polar opposite world. The proponents of these
reactionary conspiracy theories,what they're very good at is

(57:07):
taking that thread and saying, well, what was different?
What was different back then is the white man ruled.
What was different back then is women knew their place, blacks
knew their place. You didn't have immigrants.
And so it becomes in your mind. There were always immigrants.
You didn't have brown immigrants.
Just be blunt about it. You didn't have brown

(57:27):
immigrants. Your immigrants tended to be
white. You had some, I'm not saying you
didn't have any, but they also knew their place.
And so you have a nostalgia for something of the past that you
didn't live in. And then it's connected for you
with basically racist ideology that you may have been very open
to, to begin with. If I could just interrupt you
for a second, that's one of the interesting things I found about
this is that there are so many people who are slowly

(57:49):
radicalized online. People who voted for Obama and
were excited about it and then went down this rabbit hole by
like watching YouTube video after YouTube video after
YouTube video that slowly escalated into the kind of
propaganda that Ezra is talking about here.
The great replacement theory. The people who didn't consider
themselves to be racist but justabsorb this ideology after time

(58:09):
and became indoctrinated. I don't doubt that.
All I actually think that's the most common version of it is,
you know, most people don't justget up and say today I'm going
to be racist, you know, and I hate this.
But the racism tends to be latent.
It's there, but it tends to be latent.
What usually happens, You voted for Obama.
Obama promised to a bunch of really good things.
He sold you a bill of goods and it never got cashed.

(58:29):
In the eight years under Obama, your life got worse.
And then they got really bad under Biden, by the way, because
you had the massive inflation and COVID and all this stuff.
And meanwhile you have these people propagating the shit at
you and something is clicking. That thing that's clicking is
the connection of the racist attitudes and the sexist
attitude towards a nostalgia fora time when you weren't alive,

(58:51):
but you know that life, you know, standard of living was
better. Yes, the algorithm tends to
favor and push and things like that, but it works because
there's fertile ground for it, that fertile ground being driven
by the economic dislocation thathas become basically the norm in
this country. It also is effective tool
because it distracts people fromwho the actual enemy is and who
the actual culprit is. So it shifts the blame from the

(59:14):
ruling class. And you can believe all these
things, but it's not used to become more radical against the
actual system or to understand the social fabric of capitalism
and who you're exploiting. Yeah, so like instead of being
mad at the actual ruling class, you're mad at lizard people.
Or brown immigrants. You got to be one or the other,
the reptilians or the Mexicans. My one real political point

(59:36):
about all this is a lot of people who buy into conspiracy
theories. And again, I'm talking about the
big political stuff, conspiracy theories, they see themselves as
particularly radical. I don't think they are, because
I think what this stuff does is it lets the ruling class off the
hook. It creates a whole complex web
of intricacies, as though there's a mystery here.

(59:57):
It's not mysterious. They're telling you who they
are. Even though a section of the
ruling class will always complain about conspiracy
theories, they are a godsend forthem and that's why a section
promotes them. It's just they promote the ones
that are good for them, whether it's Russiagate for the
Democrats or replacement theory for the ban and Republicans and
other Republicans or the stolen election, all of those things.
They are as much promoters of conspiracy theories as all the

(01:00:20):
people they decry about. Because what it does is for all
the pretensions to radicalism that a lot of the people who
believe in conspiracy theories have, it's actually very
conservative. What is radical is to recognize
who is actually in charge and dosomething about that.
Yeah, there's a lot of reasons that you shouldn't trust your
government and a lot of reasons you should be suspicious.

(01:00:40):
And if you look at the track record of the American
government, you will see there are many times they have lied to
the public. There are many times they have
hurt the public. One case is MK Ultra, these
crazy experiments that the CIA was doing for years after World
War 2. And going into the Cold War, the
US was experimenting with psychological warfare, so trying

(01:01:01):
to control people's minds and brainwash them and erase their
memories and create Manchurian candidates.
So while they were trying to figure out how to manipulate
people's minds, they were givingpeople psychedelic drugs without
their knowledge. So they were going into prisons
and they were giving prisoners LSD for months at a time.
And there are written accounts of these prisoners struggles as

(01:01:22):
they go through these trials. This is all released and
documented, something that the US government has admitted to.
And these were civilians who were victims of this project,
Native American populations, just people who were vulnerable
and unable to advocate for themselves or generally used for
these kinds of practices. Yeah, most of the stuff that
seems too crazy to be true has actually happened.

(01:01:44):
I think the craziest one was Project Sunshine.
Oh yeah, Project Sunshine. So after the United States
dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, they wanted to know what
the long term effects of radiation would be.
So they started getting dead bodies so they can test them.
And they specifically wanted thebodies of children and babies,
so they resource them from all over the the world.

(01:02:05):
In the US, they actually stole babies like it was an illegal
program. They would take them from poor
people who had lost their children or other vulnerable
populations. That was literally called the
Dead Baby Project. That's what it was.
So what conspiracy are you most excited to propagate next?
I don't know, I can't think of something.
Will you actually ChatGPT? OK, my conspiracy theory is that

(01:02:28):
cats are not just pets, but thatthey are comrades in a long
running global plan to dismantlecapitalism and we are all part
of the Feline Liberation Front. That's not even that far
fetched. That kind of feels right.
I think this conspiracy theory has some legs.
Every time a cat walks across your keyboard, it's an attempt
to interrupt the system. Because you remember when the

(01:02:48):
viral cat videos were like, really big?
Forever since the Internet was invented, you mean.
Isn't that why DARPA developed the Internet?
There was some defense thing, but.
That's all like psyops stuff I see.
Yeah, I see. All right, Yeah, well, I'm going
to go line my windows with aluminum foil.

(01:03:14):
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