Angry Planet - ICYMI: Why QANON Matters And Why It Won't Go Away

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

Conspiracy theories are as old as the republic. Actually, they're a lot older than OUR republic. In every country, in every culture, people believe powerful forces are colluding in ways they know nothing about.Why is that?In this week's bonus episode we talk with Jesse Walker, books editor of Reason magazine and author of "The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory."-----------------------------------Qanon is a conspiracy theory that supposes President Donald Trump is at war with an ancient pedophile cult. When Qanon believers began to show up at Trump rallies, the mainstream media took notice. In early August, BuzzFeed published an article: www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…-is-probably-a that theorized the whole thing was an elaborate prank by leftists activists. Their evidence was a 1999 book about religious rebellions during the 16th century. It’s title? Q: www.amazon.com/Q-Luther-Blissett…e=&qid=1538017365.Wu Ming 1, one of the authors of that book joins us today to talk about Q, Qanon, and the importance of conspiracy theories in modern life.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, War College listeners, it's your humble host, Matthew Galt. We're taking a bit of a break ahead of Memorial Day, so today's episode is technically a rerun, well, two episodes that have been re-edited and remastered for your enjoyment. These are bonus episodes we did in the past, but I'm stringing. bringing them together here because they share a common theme. They're all about America's most popular new conspiracy. White isn't really anything new and how these kinds of stories have the power to create real political change for good and for ill. There's a long series of conspiracy theories that basically amount to the country being governed by secret putophile rings. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast.

that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Conspiracy theories are as old as the Republic, but the latest one seems stranger and more elaborate than most. QAnon is the internet-driven conspiracy theory that supposes Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against satanic pedophiles from inside the White House. And that's the simple version. It seems ridiculous on its face, but QAnon has a loyal following,

and they've actually been spotted at Trump rallies holding up Q signs. Recently, QAnon proponent Michael Lionel LeBron visited the White House and even took a picture with Donald Trump. Here to help us sort through all of this is Jesse Walker. Walker is the book's editor at Reason Magazine, and the author of The United States of Paranoia, a conspiracy theory, a book about the history of American conspiracy theories. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you for inviting me on. So I ask my first question is, is Q&ONM really anything new? Q&N itself is sort of the latest and maybe most elaborate, remixed version of a bunch of older stories. And in fact, the way it's set up, the open-endedness of it has really encouraged the remixing. I mean, all conspiracy theories people build on them. adapt them, you know, jettison a bit,

add some more, maybe radically revised them if someone encounters them, but they're coming at it from a different ideology. But the whole sort of Q&on system of someone's sort of dropping clues and then inviting people

to come up with their own ways to connect them has really allowed a whole lot of different fears that are in the air to get mixed together. And on top of the fact that there's a fair chance, not just that the original

person dropping these clues as a prankster, but that a number of the people, you know, participating and coming up with the versions of the story may well be pranksters. You know, there's a part of what I think has fueled, you know, the absurdity of it. And this really is, I mean, some conspiracy theories you hear them, you say, well, maybe some of that there could be some truth to it. In this case, it's such a parallel reality that it's very difficult to take seriously unless you've got a reason to be just committed. to the idea, unless you're coming at it with some mentality that makes you really want it to be true. It's very difficult to believe. But people do believe it, right? People do believe it. People coming at it. It really is, number one, people definitely do believe it. Some people take it very, very seriously.

But number two, it is, how shall I put this? A lot of people compare it to alternate reality games. These were, they still happened, but they were kind of, you know, all the rage for a bit about a decade ago, where often to promote a new movie or other sort of media release, someone would drop these clues and people would, you know, participate in, you know, one, it would be like a combination between, it would be like a game that kind of spills out of the computers into reality, into the physical world, almost like a scavenger hunt. But you might have, in one case, one of the clues was actually literally, written on a bathroom wall for people to find. People would even be getting phone calls and faxes that would have more clues coming to them. And I think a lot of the appeal to this is that it's like one of those games.

I'm not the first person to make that comparison. And so that kind of leaves open to question. How many of the people are really, really believing it, as we know some are. How many of the people are just sort of having fun with it and not taking it seriously? and how many are in this sort of in-between state where they're kind of thinking as if. You know, well, what if this is true? And the thing is all three of those people can add their speculations to the pot, you know, online, and someone else might take it seriously and pick it up.

So it's, and obviously we don't have good survey data or anything like that on it. I mean, what we have is things like how many people watch a YouTube video. And as everyone knows, people watch YouTube videos for all sorts of reasons. It might be because they believe it. It might be because they're laughing at it. It might be because, you know, it started and it took them 30 seconds to turn it off. So we're really coming at this with a lot of just, I mean, as outsiders, open questions about the different ways people are using the stories, the different way people are processing the story. And again, it's, I mean, since I think we're all, you know, who are not really far gone, I mean, outside of like the collection of believers, the rest of us kind of us kind of.

recognize that this is nonsense and there's uh and that therefore the person you know dropping these things is either deliberately doing some sort of disinformation or is acting as a prankster or as a profiteer i mean that's certainly a one thing that's very likely and one of the stories i've seen it tries to look into who might be behind it uh certainly kind of leans in that direction so it's uh when you've got that kind of i mean creativity is kind of a misleading word for it because that's kind of a positive word. You know, that kind of, you know, mixture of creativity and combustibility, it really just keeps spiraling in different directions. What's interesting now is that it's harder to maintain

belief in it because, you know, the most recent events and, you know, the Mueller investigation, you know, what happened with Manafort, also what happened with Cohen, which I know is not strictly speaking part of the Mueller investigation, kind of cuts against this theory, which had it, you know, that the special counsel and Donald Trump were secretly working together to clear out this grand putophile conspiracy. So the question then becomes, how do people deal with this? Well, a lot of Q&N predictions have not come true in the past, so someone can keep on ignoring elements of the story or revising the story in order to make it fit. But at some point, this probably starts to fall apart. People sort of drift away from it, but it never completely dies because elements,

of it are still there to be remixed in the future. Just like parts of this story have been used in conspiracy stories, you know, going back decades. Can you get into that a little bit? I'm wondering what some of the historical antecedents are, what some of the older stories are that are being dredged up now. Well, I mean, there's a long series of conspiracy theories that basically amount to the country being governed by secret putophile rings. Kathy O'Brien is probably the most infamous or was, I mean, until recently, the most infamous example of a conspiracy theorist like this. She claimed that she had been a part of a government mind control program that involved for being passed around among different leaders of the elite. And she wrote a book

called Transformation of America. It's two words, transformation, that you know, made these allegations back in the 90s, and she had, you know, been talking about it earlier than then. And there were previous allegations, you know, going back to 1980, maybe in the late 70s, people making claims like this. And of course, then if you even go back earlier than that, I mean, also you had things like the McMarden preschool case. I mean, it's not just fringe stuff. The whole satanic panic of the 1980s,

this didn't usually involve the leaders of America being involved in this, at least not in the versions that caught on in the mainstream. But this idea that there were these networks of child molesters and Satanists who were working behind the scene to capture children, to molester, and some versions of the story, sacrificed them. You have things like, in a case of the McMarton preschool, alleged secret tunnels underneath them, which, of course, we saw the same sort of thing being claimed in the Pizza Gate story.

Now there are some post-Pizagate conspiracy theories about, I was just reading this morning about a donut shop in Portland where they were claiming there were secret tunnels beneath it. And in fact, this goes back a long, long time ago, stories like that because in the 19th century, some of the tales people told about convents were very similar in terms of the abuse of children, secret tunnels underneath. And one that I wrote about after the guy showed up at Cometpizzeria with a gun back in 2016, I pointed out that in 1834, a guy didn't just show up with a gun.

A whole mob showed up and burned down a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, because they were convinced that the people who worked and lived there were, you know, holding the students and young women in sexual slavery and that there were secret tunnels and so on, everything you expect in the Bistaria, right? And there was, and in that case, it was, you even had, I mean, people talk about, quote, unquote, fake news like it's something new. well, you had handbills and placards that were written anonymously and being passed around, that were making all these claims about what was going on in there. And in fact, if you want like an optimistic takeaway from this,

compare them, you know, burning down the convent to like one guy showing up with a gun and not managing to hit anything. I mean, maybe the trend line is in the right direction. But yeah, there's, there's, and it's not surprising that stories like these, this keep coming back because, you know, it speaks to the same sorts of anxieties. People are always concerned about terrible things being done to children. I mean, that's something that's just hardwired into us, although it manifests in different ways. So it shouldn't be surprising that people would tell stories in the 1830s that are similar to stories people are telling into 2000 teens.

It's interesting to me, though, that it's become so tied up with politics now. Do you see a reason why it's transformed from, you know, convents to, is it just whatever the authority figure is of the day? Well, the convents weren't the authority figure of the day, obviously, because this was in the United States. Yeah, but the church is sort of, yeah, but the church was feared as outsiders, or at least by the people who went to burn it down. I mean, those were Protestants, not Catholics, who went after the convent. But yeah, I mean, it's really just a matter of, you know, different stories get combined. I mean, in the case of Q&N, you've got this sort of history of.

fear of pitiful conspiracies. And that's been flaring up recently, you know, in the mainstream, you know, all these concerns about human trafficking and often reaching into the realm of the sort of dubious and conspiratorial. If you look at some of the stuff that gets passed around on Facebook or even gets repeated in the local news. And then you've got these other stories going around about the deep state. And it's kind of natural that people would try to combine them. I mean, I'm not natural. I mean, that's the sort of cultural evolution you might expect to see. In the case of, I mean, the stuff I was mentioning with Kathy O'Brien and some of the other folks who claimed to have been victims of pedophile rings in the 80s and 90s, that's the earliest I've seen of combining it with fears of government conspiracies. That doesn't mean it didn't happen before then. I'm not going to make a strong claim like that's the first time it ever happened. But I think there were particular reasons why people would start mixing it then. You would just had a bunch of, a genuinely. scandals in the mid-70s coming out of the CIA doing like genuine terrible things in the name

you know mk ultra is the one that people point to where they were doing you know giving people psychedelic drugs without their consent and and things like that and it was sort of tied up with how do you resist brain how do we train people to resist brainwashing is this something maybe something that we would be able to do to people as well so that stuff comes out and then that obviously I mean naturally gets adapted by people who've got sort of broader conspiracy fears around brainwashing and mind control and things like that. And so once you've got that current going strong at the end of the 1970s, at the same time that you've got this resurgent, and really at the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s, you've got this intense wave of fears of pedophile rings and missing children conspiracies and things like that, just starting to crest. it's not surprising that they would combine that.

And so now we've got another moment where you've got the two sets of concerns both cresting at the same time. And not only can people combine them, but they can look back at this whole literature that's emerged over the past few decades of people who have mixed them in the past. And so that allows it to happen more quickly and constant combination, recombination, evolution. Do you think the Internet has just kind of allowed all of this to happen faster? How has it changed the conspiracy game? I think the Internet has allowed the news cycle in general to work faster, and that includes, I guess you could call the alternative news cycle, or this is maybe three steps removed alternative,

but everybody is writing and transmitting things more quickly. I don't think that the Internet has increased the general volume of conspiracy thinking. I don't think there's strong evidence for that, and to the extent that we have evidence of like the level of conspiracy, thinking in America, if anything, it's probably a little lower now than it's been in the past. Although, again, that's very hard to measure. But I've seen one study that attempts to, and that's basically what the conclusion it reached. But the Internet does mean that a new story can be written more quickly and spread more quickly

and then be debunked more quickly and mixed with another story more quickly. Everything happens faster. There might not be more people thinking about conspiracies, but they, might come up with more conspiracy theories that morning before breakfast. Kind of another one of the pillars of this is the idea of this deep state or a shadow government, kind of separate from the pedophilia accusations, I think. And this is an idea that predates even the Republic itself, right? This goes back to the colonial era.

Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, it's, oh, what was the phrase that I quoted Edmund Burke using? I think it was the double government. two systems of administration were to be formed, one which should be in the real secret and confidence, the other merely ostensible. So, you know, this is literally centuries ago, and the person who's very prominent and influential and intelligent, you know, using that kind of, that same basic idea. And of course, there's something to it. I mean, it's especially in the context of, you know, the British court. I mean, court intrigue is famous. There's a reason

why that phrase exists. I'm not trying to make Edmund Burke out to be a nut in his ability to think what's going on in public is not always the same that's going on in private. We know that is in fact the case. But then you can take it in all sorts of extreme directions. I mean, Burke also, this is moving away from the secret government idea, but it's one thing that I had and didn't fit into the book. Burke was believed that the Bavarian Illuminati was behind the French Revolution.

evolution and actually wrote a fan letter to one of the people who wrote a tract to that effect, and I wish I had the letter in front of me. But, I mean, he basically said, yeah, I think you're on to something. I may even know some of the folks who are involved in stuff like this. So he was sort of prone to conspiratorial thinking. But, you know, it was not absurd to think that there's a difference between what's presented in the public and what's going on in private. And, of course, in the 20th and 21st century, the sort of the real, you know, the real sense of

room for thinking that expands because government gets so much larger, all these new bureaucracies are formed, secret bureaucracies are formed. In some cases, bureaucracies with secret budgets, you don't know how much is being spent on this intelligence agency, or I mean, some people who are briefed on it know, but the general public doesn't. And that lack of transparency, of course, opens the door not just for all kinds of actual misbehavior, but for all kinds of speculation about what misbehavior might be going on. And that makes room for all sorts of theories. Do you see that as kind of the function of this

is kind of a folkloric way for people to process not being able to know what's going on in a FISA court? Well, I don't know if it's, I should say, as specific as the FISA courts, because I don't know how many people who don't follow politics would recognize that phrase, but it's more of a general sense that they don't know everything that's going on in the...

Well, I mean, we'll back up when you say this, Are you referring specifically to sort of the deep state conspiracy theories around Donald Trump and so on? No, no, no, I'm talking about conspiracy theories. I'm using that as kind of a segue way to get into, why is this part of the American landscape in general? Why are conspiracy theories so popular? What function do they serve in our society? I mean, I think in general, if a story catches on, even if the story doesn't have anything in it that's true, if it catches on, it tells you something true about the anxieties in this. the experiences of the people who believe it. And so often you have stories that are just sort of a mythic way of talking about something, something that people have experienced or just something that they're afraid of for whatever reason.

And in general, I don't want to suggest that a lack of transparency is essential for a conspiracy theory, because that's not true. It's not as though sunlight would bring all conspiracy theorizing to an end. But I think it is very much the case. that when people don't know what's going on, they're more likely to fill that in with speculations, often dark speculations. And that's not just true of the government. There's a reason why people have, there's this long history of conspiracy theories about what's going on in secret societies, what's going on in churches that, you know, meet in secret. I shouldn't say, you know, churches, I should say religions in general, where people meet in secret.

Or just the fears that people have of outsiders, of foreign cultures, are obviously magnified by the fact that they have less direct experience of that culture, especially if it's overseas. But if there's, you know, if say there's been a wave of immigration and there's, you know, an ethnic group that's largely speaking its own language and their folkways seem mysterious to, you know, the people who are now sharing a country with, all sorts of stuff gets projected onto those folkways. onto that language. And, you know, that's had resulted in all kinds of conspiracy theories and often, you know, very tragic results. So it's in general, it's not just a matter of government transparency, but any time there's just some mystery about what's going on over there, that just opens up all sorts of more room for conspiracy thinking. There's one conspiracy theory that is interesting to me just in this context. You know, Donald Trump brought up the JFK assassination during the 2016 campaign and directly linked 10 crews to the conspiracy theories. So I have a question, which is, I mean, this is one of the more studied ones. And there have been so many reports. And there have been so many various theories, of course, that are, you know, still around. I find that it's impossible at this point, having read some of these theories. I have no idea what happened in the Kennedy assassination, even though I guess my tent.

is to believe the Warren Commission. Long story short, do you think that no matter how strange or out there conspiracy theory is that it has an impact on American consciousness? I wouldn't say no matter how strange. I mean, obviously, some of them don't have many followers or they only have or they have a lot of followers only in this very limited area that's not going to have a big impact. Although I say that sometimes an idea that's unpopular or just kind of obscure can suddenly zoom into prominence after 10 years in obscurity. Some of the satanic panic ideas of the 80s that were being touted in places like 2020 were circulating in much more out-of-the-way venues back in the 1970s. But it's – and with the JFK assassination, I mean, you know, every death of a president, leads to conspiracy theories

of some kind or another. I mean, that's just a fact. Every single president who's died in office there have been conspiracy theories. The Kennedy ones have had a staying power thus far that the others haven't. I mean, except Lincoln. I mean, Abraham Lincoln is so central to American history. People

will be talking about that as long as the U.S. is around, and if not after longer. John of Kennedy, it's more interesting, though, because he wasn't present for that long. He didn't have any really big accomplishments, probably his most notable accomplishment. I mean, he set some things rolling, which range from, you know, the moonshot to the Vietnam War in terms of how good people feel about them.

But in his case, it's more about this sort of, on the one hand, this feeling of possibility that was cut short for the people who lived through it. And then the chaos that followed, which I think really got linked in people's head to the death of the president. And this idea that perhaps there could have been a different path. And that whole sort of period from 1963, you know, about two decades starting there, everything that happened, other assassinations, riots, the war in Vietnam, scandals. You know, there's this notion that we kind of were set on that path in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963. And I think that that gave it a lot of it, it made people more likely to speculate about a conspiracy because it just made that assassination seem so central to American history, probably more central to American history than it really was. Because I think a lot of that stuff would have happened anyway. I don't think JFK was going to pull us out of Vietnam, for example.

I think Lyndon Johnson's liberal reforms probably would not have gone nearly as far if John F. Kennedy were not dead, in fact. So I have a hard time imagining that you'd see things playing out differently in terms of the ferment and unrest of the 60s and so on. So it's kind of the centrality of that assassination to American – you was recently. U.S. history is a myth, but that myth and the effects that all those things have on people's lives kind of, I think, encouraged all that conspiracy speculation. And the question for me is, as the people who are alive then die off and fade away, will people care as much about the Kennedy assassination? The last few years, the poll numbers that show how many people believe in it have come down. I mean, it's around half the country right now. It depends on which poll you look at.

But in the past, it's been up around 80%, at one point, more than 80% of Americans saying some sort of conspiracy was behind Kennedy's death. And is that going to keep coming down? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. Does it ever pay politically for a politician to indulge or play with these kinds of conspiracy theories? Politicians have used conspiracy theories to help themselves for a long time. I mean, in part, I am talking about conspiracy theories that don't get acknowledged, or at least not acknowledged at the time as conspiracy theories. You know, like war propaganda, you know, making claims about what the enemies of the country are allegedly doing that later turns out to be false, but, you know, can help get people behind certain policies and things like that. So in that sense, certainly there are people who have, politicians who have benefited from playing with that sort of story.

But even moving away from that kind of example, because I tell that to people and they say, oh, that's not what I mean, my conspiracy theory. One politician I'm really fascinated by, especially in the Trump era, was W. Leo Daniel, who was the governor of Texas and then a senator from Texas in the 1930s and 1940s. And he's better known as Papio Daniel. If the name rings Adele, it's probably because they put him in a Cohen Brothers movie and moved him to Mississippi, which was O Brother were Arthal. But he got elected president, I mean, he got elected governor in a sort of Trumpian way.

He was a radio star and he went around doing these big rallies. And at first the press was ignoring him or sort of poo-pooing his chances. But rallies get bigger and bigger and, you know, gradually he surprises, eventually he surprises everybody and gets elected. And then another way he resembles Trump is that he was whatever skill he had at campaigning in a non-traditional way. In his case, going around with a band. on top of a bus, you know, and things like that. He really hadn't the faintest idea how to pass a legislative agenda and didn't have a very big legislative agenda of his own to begin with.

There's some vague ideas about abolishing the poll tax and having bigger pensions for senior citizens in Texas. And he, as he had trouble getting stuff through the legislature, in part because he was constantly alienating the people he needed to work with, he went looking for scapegoats. and at one point claimed that he had a list of communist Nazi saboteurs that it infiltrated the state's factories. Of course, he wouldn't tell anyone the agent's name, the names of these alleged subversives.

He sent a wire to Franklin Roosevelt to tell him he had confidential information about the conspiracy, and he was going to send some of his best man over to brief them. And the people in the agencies that he was saying had this information, they didn't have an idea what he was talking about. But, you know, he opened up, but he said, like anyone out there, anyone in Texas who's got information about un-American activities, send it in, and all these letters start pouring into the Texas Rangers, talking about, you know, conversations people overheard, weird things they saw, what might be going on.

And then the Texas Rangers have to chase down all these tips, which, you know, led pretty much nowhere. And people saying, I mean, literally people saying some Jehovah's Witnesses were coming through, and I think we're up to no good and things like that. In that case, there was a specific letter that claimed that Jehovah was, when they used the word Jehovah, it was like a code word. They were actually meaning Hitler. So there was, he set off this witch hunt and, you know, it worked for him. He didn't get much passed, but he got reelected. And the only reason he eventually stopped being governors because he got elected senator. He's one of the few people ever to beat Lyndon Johnson in an election. And in that case, it was partly because some of the local industry that couldn't stand having him as governor. But getting them out to Washington would be a good way to get them out of their hair. And they arranged some ballot box stuffing.

So that's a real conspiracy. So it was, but, you know, it worked for him. It worked for his style. And it sort of just a classic case of the way a politician can invoke scapegoats, even in really vague and contradictory ways, and have it to help keep him afloat. We've definitely seen this in other countries, too, right? I mean, it's not just simply America. the most famous case being the Nazis themselves, which came up with the ultimate conspiracy Jews and Bolsheviks trying to take over the world.

Well, they didn't come up with that one. Yeah, they really managed to, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is done in all sorts of places, of course. And I should say, because some people misread me on this, I say it explicitly in the book, and sometimes people still miss it. I am not claiming that Americans are more paranoid than anyone else on the planet. I wrote this book in order to look at American history through the prism of what have people been afraid of, but I'm sure someone could write a similar book about Russia, about Iran, about China. Yeah, it's pretty much any culture, and some of those I mentioned are notorious, right?

Actually, I just got a review copy. I haven't read yet of a book about conspiracy theories in Russia. And I know there's a lot to work with there. And, you know, in general, many people have gotten ahead by scapegoating groups. And one way to scapegoat a group is to read conspiracy theories about them. Jesse Walker, thank you so much for coming on War College to talk to us about all of this. Well, thank you. You can't really do an effective parody of conspiracism because it gets immediately co-opted into the paranoid style and the conspiracist frame of mind.

There's nothing that cannot. be believed. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I am Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields.

We're back with another episode of the War College Annex. These are those bonus episodes that go off the beaten path. And again, we're talking about QAnon, the popular internet-driven conspiracy theory that supposes President Trump is at war with an ancient and powerful pedophile cult. When QAnon believers began showing up at Trump rallies, the media took notice, and in early August, BuzzFeed published a report supposing that Q was an elaborate left-wing prank on believers. The evidence? A book published in Italy in the 1990s titled Q, with us today's Wooming One, one of the authors of that book. He's here to help us disentangle Qaeda

Qaeda from the novel, talk about the importance of conspiracy theories to culture, and what makes a good cultural prank and how you can use pranks to debunk conspiracy theories. Wu Ming-1, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So my first question is, are you responsible for QAnon? Because not. All right, well, let's, can you explain the plot of the book and why people might think that you are? Okay.

The novel Q was published for the first time in springtime of 1999 in Italy, the Italian edition. Then it was translated into 18 languages and published in 30 countries, including the US. Of course, on that side of the Atlantic, the book was far less successful than in Europe. It became kind of a cult novel in some niches, but it was never as famous as it was in Italy and several other European countries. It was published in 2004 in the US. The novel Q was the final contribution that I and three other co-authors gave to the so-called Luther Bliss project, which was a final contribution that I and three other co-authors gave to the so-called Luther Bliss project, which was a project of cultural agitation and communication guerrilla that lasted from 1994 to 1999. I think we can talk about that later on.

Now I'll focus on the novel. The novel is set in the 16th century on the backdrop of the radical uprisings that followed Martin Luther's reformation. and especially the first part is focused on the peasant's war, which was with huge peasant insurrection in Germany, led by a guy named Thomas Munza, which means Thomas the Koiner. And then the plot moves to other attempts at revolution in the course of that century. It was a very turbulent century, but then with a lot of religious wars and a lot of heresies springing out like mushrooms. Okay, and we follow the main character. The main character has no name. He changes name every time he changes town.

Chapter by chapter, he adopts several names and new identities. We never really get to know his real name. He's a radical and a Baptist revolutionary, a former student of theology at Wittenberg, which is the same town in which Martin Luther wrote his famous thesis, and he nailed them on the door of the cathedral of the Cathedral, of Wittenberg Cathedral. Well, this guy is followed at a distance by another guy who's the villain, in our novel. This guy is an agent provocateur.

He's a spy, a secret agent. He works for the Pope, for the Vatican. And he sends letters to Thomas Buntler and other radical leaders deliberately spreading false information, you know, fake news, in order to make the peasant army fall in. to a trap. So he keeps sending this letter posing as a fellow radical. He says that he writes from kind of, you know, top levels of power in a way. He claims to be an infiltrator, but of course he's doing, he's double crossing them, he's doing a double game, and he keeps sending these

letters, which are signed cohelet, which in Hebrew means a preacher, of course it's a a book of the Bible, you know, Coelette. At the same time, he keeps sending reports of his own activities to his boss. His boss is Giovanni Pietro Carraff, Cardinal, later to become a Pope himself, Paul the 4th, okay, the guy who renewed inquisition in the 1540s. Well, these dispatches are signed Q, simply as Q. And he reports about his misleading activities. He's spreading urban legends and false pieces of information and stuff like that.

He is the main cause in our novel, not in actual history, but in our novel, he is the main cause of the peasant army's defeat in Frankenhausen. In 1525, the whole revolutionary army led by Thomas Luther moved to march, towards this city in Thuringia called Frankenhausen, in which they had a field battle. They thought it would be the final definitive battle for victory, and they were confronted by a huge reactionary army hired by the princes and the bishops. It was a crushing defeat.

They were not only defeated, but practically, exterminated. So it was the end for that early example of modern class revolution. Then our character moves to this other town called Munster, in which revolutionary take over and kind of start a commune like the Paris commune in 1871. But this guy, Q, is infiltrates this struggle too, and he keeps spreading false information. until they defeat. It's like that all the time until the end of the novel. So people in this country find this book relevant because, well, is it because they think that it's an allegory? Or do they think that it's a conspiracy that started then and is still

going on today? The book was an allegory of our own activities, the activities of the Lutheran Breast's. project in the second half of the 90s in Italy and other countries of continental Europe and also a little bit in the UK. We conceived it, we constructed it as an allegory. It's about, you know, psychological warfare, it's about techniques of communication guerrilla. It's about pulling pranks and on a level. There are other levels of interpretation, of course, but that was the one that caused a sensation in those days when it was published in Italy. In that, it became kind of a night table book, Lever de Cheve, as they say, in French,

for a new generation of activists. The generation that after the so-called Battle of Seattle at the end of 1999 started to confront neoliberal globalization and they started to protest at big summits, big meetings of WTO. the World Bank, the G8, like in Genoa in 2001. That generation of activists took Q as a whole set of references. People used to call themselves with the names of the characters of the novel and stuff like that. So it was a bestseller. It's a long seller.

This side of the Atlantic, not the other side of the Atlantic, which is less known. All right, well, let's zoom out a little bit. And let's start, because I want to dig into the project that kind of gave rise to the book and this idea of, I guess, conspiracy theories or cultural pranks for good that are kind of righteous. But first, can you explain to us what the paranoid style is? I think that's a really important concept to grasp here. Okay, the paranoid style is what defines a conspiracy theory. It's a rhetoric, it's a frame of mind.

It was defined for the first time by a political scientist, an American political scientist, Richard Hofstadter. Back in 1964, he wrote a seminal essay, a very important essay called the Paranoid style in American politics, in which he dealt mainly with the kind of conspiracies that the John Birch society used to talk about at that time But it traced the origins of the paranoid style, at least in the US, back in the 1830s. And, for example, he demonstrated that such important figures like Samuel B. Morse, the inventor of the Telegraph and the Morse code, indulge very much in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stuff like that.

Okay. So the paranoid style is a useful concept because it can help us. make the correct distinction between actual conspiracies and conspiracism. Because we shouldn't make the mistake of saying that conspiracies don't exist. Because of course, some conspiracies do exist. What is a conspiracy? You have a conspiracy when a group of people, or more than one people, agree in secret to take some action against someone else, a third party, against someone else's

interests at least. Okay. So there are some requirements, some characteristics. There must be most of the one person, otherwise it's not a conspiracy, of course. The agreement between those persons might be secret, because if you do things in broad daylight, that's not a conspiracy. Everyone can see what you're doing. and the most important characteristic, at least according to me, action must be against someone.

The example that I usually make is if you organize a surprise party for your dad's birthday, that's not a conspiracy because you are agreeing in secretly with other people, but not against someone else because you're not conspiring against your dad by organizing a surprise party. It must be a very awful party in order to have that characteristic. So you can say that conspiracies do exist, but real actual conspiracies have some key characteristics that make them very different from the kind of convoluted, cumbersome conspiracy theories which conspiracies dream about and share and spread. Okay. Well, give us an example of a real-life conspiracy, like one that was actually true. Watergate. Watergate. I held a lecture here. I'm in Montreal right now. I held a lecture yesterday about these issues, and they made the example of Watergate. Okay. Watergate was an actual conspiracy.

There were some aids and collaborators and lackeys of Richard Nixon, who effectively agreed in secret in order to take some action against the people whom they perceived as Nixon's enemies. Of course, that's why those burglars were wiretapping the Watergate Hotel that night. And they were caught in the act. The fact that they were caught in the art is very interesting, okay, because that gives us the opportunity to focus of the, I don't know if the English term is correct, the imperfectness of actual conspiracies. They are not perfect. Okay, so usually real conspiracies have a very specific aim, okay, a precise focus. In that case, the focus was on Nixon's enemies and there was a set of, limited practices, which those people used to call rat facking, okay, it was a way of sabotage the activities of, you know, democratic leaders and people whom they perceived of Nixon's enemies. Real conspiracy, second characteristic. Real conspiracies usually involve a limited number of actors. In that case, there were five or six important people belonging to Richard

Dixon's team and then there will yeah some other Lakeys and agents but the number of people taking part in the Watergate conspiracy always remain very limited okay the people who went on trial later on okay the other one is

actual conspiracies usually have a somewhat shaky development they're not as coherent as the imaginary conspiracies and the fact that those burglars were caught in flagrante, okay, is a demonstration that things we were,

these people acted in a very clumsy way, actually, okay? So you have a shaky development and a narrative of the conspiracies that's not that paranoically coherent, okay, and it's usually very easy to sum up the narrative of an actual conspiracy is usually very easy to summarize. I just did that in the case of Watergate the other thing is that actual conspiracy usually

don't last long before they have discovered and exposed in that case it lasted a few years and it was discovered people found out about it and there was an investigation, a journalistic inquiry

you know Woodward and Bernstein and the conspiracy was exposed a few years after it had started. And the most important one, the fifth one, at least to my advice, is that once a real conspiracy is exposed, it's over. The end, over. Its effects may persist, but operations stop.

They cease. Okay. On the contrary, the kind of conspiracy that's imagined and built up and talked about by conspiracy theorists, it's exactly the opposite. Usually, an alleged conspiracy has the widest possible scope, not a specific purpose, but the widest one. Because usually this kind of conspiracy allegedly aims at ruling or conquering or destroying the planet, you know, the whole world. Okay. The second characteristic is that that this kind of conspiracy, of alleged conspiracy, involves a huge and potentially unlimited

number of actors. And this number seems to increase and increase and increase at every account. Because anyone who denies the existence of the conspiracy is immediately denounced as part of it. So the number keeps increasing, increasing, increasing. And at the end, there are multitudes of people. allegedly being part of the conspiracy. We saw this with Pizza Gate, we saw this with Q and none as well.

Okay. And this is contrary to Occam's razor. You know, Ockham's Reisor said, non-sunt, multiplicand a entia, which means keep things easy. It keeps things easy to explain. Don't multiply factors, you know,

don't add useless complexity to your description of reality. Okay. The other one is that the alleged conspiracy usually is carried out in an extremely coherent, ultra-consistent way. Because in the narrative of that kind of conspiracy, things always go exactly as planned. Everything confirms the narrative. Every detail fits perfectly in.

Okay, every piece of the jigsaw puzzle fits perfectly. So, ultra coherent. The fourth one is that this kind of conspiracy is eternal. It goes on indefinitely. Some of these conspiracies are described as being going on for decades and other ones, even for centuries or millennia. Okay. And fifth one, this.

kind of conspiracy allegedly keeps going on, on, on, it goes on, despite the, in spite of the existence of hundreds of books and articles and websites and videos and postscuts, allegedly exposing it. Even if it's exposed, it keeps going on. Okay, so it's exactly the opposite of an actual conspiracy like Watergate. Each one of these five characteristics is exactly the opposite of the previous set of characteristics. And you've designed some conspiracies yourself, correct? Or you've been a part of it? We practically debunked some conspiracies.

We devised pranks as a practical critique and a direct intervention against conspiracism. That's what we did with the Luther Blissert project with some of our extremely elaborate media pranks. because we pulled some very complex pranks, kind of larks, because it was so complex that they required the assistance and the collaboration and the imagination of doses of people all across the country, all across Italy. We pulled those kind of pranks, for example, in the middle to late 90s in order to show how dangerous the great pedophilia slash satan ritual abuse scare was, okay, because there was mass paranoia about satanists and pedophiles

back in those days. It was the same wave of moral panic that had invested the US in the 80s, you know, after that book Michelle remembers that was this satanic ritual abuse scare, child abuse scare, that kind of stuff. That same wave invested Europe a few years later. Okay, especially after this serial killer, this guy, Mark Dutroux, the monster of Marconel in Belgium, was arrested and it was discovered that he had tortured and killed a lot of kids, etc. After that, it was a huge wave of moral panic, and several innocent people were victims of that climate, you know, of that atmosphere, extremely paranoid atmosphere, and they were arrested. with horrible charges sent to prison in solitary confinement on a basis that was the basis of conspiracism, okay, because there was this vision of secret dungeons, secret tunnels, where ritual, child abuse was taking place with the cooperation on several people, secret operators, even politicians, and staff,

like that. Okay. So we devised some pranks as part of our counter-investigations and sometimes as solidarity campaigns to show that some defendants in important trials that were accused of satanic ritual, who were actually innocent. And in fact, they were all acquitted. They were all acquitted. And the money even gave them, and the state even gave them money as a compensation for their unjust imprisonment. So we devised some pranks that aimed at showing

that it was all bullshit. For example, one of the most complex one was played by really dozens of people in a near Rome, in a town near Rome called Viterbo, in the backwards around the town,

that prank lasted a year. We, simulated the existence of a satanic sect of black masses taking place in the woods. And even we faked the existence of a group of Christian anti-Satanist vigilantes looking for satanists in order to beat them up, to disrupt their rituals and stuff like that. It was all made up. Okay. There were neither satanists nor vigilantes, no black mass, no.

ritual abuse, nothing like that. There were only fake pictures, uncanny objects which we left in the woods, and especially some particularly crazy communique, you know, press releases which we sent to the local and national media, and they were signed by this group called the Co-Samour Committee for the safeguard of morals, it was this group of anti-Satanist vigilantes, and the media, the local press at the beginning and there's also the national media media they believed everything they published everything with no fact checking at all because we were in the middle of us of a you know of a moral panic wave and everyone was talking about ritual abuse and pedophilia and satanists so also politicians at a certain point jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia and the

tipping point was when we managed to get footage of a fake satanic ritual, broadcast in the national TV news, in prime time TV news on a national level. It was a very clumsy and blurred video. You didn't see anything, actually. It was all in the shadow with people with hoods on and candles and stuff like that. And they broadcast it. commented upon it. At the end, we claimed the responsibility for the whole thing after a whole year. It lasted a whole year. We claimed responsibility and produced a huge mass of evidence,

proving that we were responsible for that, and satanists and vigilantes had actually never existed. We caused quite a sensation. But also, the Lutheran Brescent project was responsible for a huge counter-in-quieting on the cases of false, you know, false accusations on child abuse. Let me ask you a question, though. So once you revealed that you were behind the prank, do you think that there were people who continued to believe it anyway? I mean, is that a concern? No, no, not in that case.

Not in that case. Because we had a reputation. Okay, we already had a reputation. We had been pulled pranks like that, maybe not that complex all the time, four years. Okay, so because our project started in 1994. This prank, this pseudo-satanic prank was in 1998. So for 40 years we had been pulling pranks, okay, organizing pranks, and the name Luther Brissett was associated with this kind of activities. I mean, the purpose of the whole Luther Bisset project thing was to adopt the same moniker,

the same pseudonym, the same name. Altogether, hundreds of people, hundreds of artists and activists, cultural agitators, adopted the same name and used it in order to sign their works of art or writings or performances or claiming responsibility for pranks. So Luther Blysset was famous, kind of a Robin Hood. of a digital age, a social bandit, a prankster. Every action added to the reputation of this imaginary guy, who was a collective entity, actually.

So when we claimed responsibility for that, everyone believed it because we already had a track. We had a reputation. This reminds me of Houdini or James Randy, who are both magicians that would debunk spiritualism by showing you how you did the trick and then explaining the trick to you. Yeah, yeah, there are some similarities. Yeah, actually many similarities. We were always being very much interested in magic. It was about claiming responsibility by explaining in detail what kind of tricks we had

used and what kind of bugs in the information system we had taken advantage of in order to pull the prank. So it had an educational aspect because I can say we focused on cultural automatisms and then said it and then we usually

told people you acted following a cultural automatism. You are in the middle in the middle of a moral panic wave so you instantly believed that kind of bullshit

because everyone's Everyone's talking about that kind of bullshit by claiming that it's real. We proved that we faked it. For one that we fake it, how many more are fake and are faked by the media or are automatically generated by a cultural automatism? Because there's no conspiracy behind this kind of stuff. Nobody decides that there will be a wave of moral panic about a particular dissent. sensitive issue. Nobody decides that there's no conspiracy on that level. Of course, there's culture. Culture has some mechanisms. It undergoes many phases, you know, things happen. Okay. So we always

explained the kind of, you know, flows in the media system we had exploited in order to pull the prank. And it was kind of an educational DIY aspect. Okay, you can do that too if you organize. You can do that too. You don't have to be a passive consumer of the media. You can counteract in cases like this. So our pranks had the three important aspects, the content that we choose to put into them. Because these pranks were always pulled in order to raise awareness

on some sensitive issues. and especially on how the media talked about those sensitive issues. Okay, so the content was never produced at random, you know, it was very deliberate. Okay, we had meetings and we decided what to do. And then there was this do-it-yourself aspect and this kind of reverse engineering aspect, explaining what we had done, and the account of how we did the prank was always more important and then the prank itself. Okay.

And then there was this aspect of, which I would call communitarian, because each prank added to Luther Blisett reputation and made, calling yourself Luther Blissett, ever more appealing. So you have to build a myth first. Yeah, exactly. You were part of that myth.

You were not a passive contemplator, a passive consumer of that myth. You were part of it in an active way, in an engaging way, and you felt being part of a warm community of people sharing the same purpose. You shared a certain style, a certain imagery, even if you never met the other members in person, because there were cases in which some people gave important contribution without ever meeting in person. For example, we had regular meetings in which we met in Bologna.

we were about 50 people. Also in Rome, there was a huge group, okay, but there were other individual contributors to the Luther Brizab project that were, you know, scattered apart in the whole country or even in other country. Sometimes communicating with each other via the male art network. No, because the Luther Bistler project came out of the, yeah, there were some underground currents in,

culture, you know, in the 80s and small pieces of art and zines sent via the snail mail, via the surface mail. And it was a huge network predating the internet. And some people communicated with each other about Lutheran Brisset via the male art network. Okay. So there were three aspects, the content, the DIY aspect, and community. That was the most important thing. But it's revealing.

It's very interesting that you talked about Randy and Houdini, because we strictly collaborate with magicians. This guy who's part of the Women's Foundation called Mariano Tomatis, who is a magician, a historian of illusionist. He focuses his work on exploring ways of revealing the trick behind the magic act in a way which doesn't spoil. the magic act, but makes it even more magic. There are some example of that yesterday I showed a video,

pen and teller, you know, I think pen and teller are the best illusionist in the world. There are some magic acts in which they show the exact tricks that they just used. First they perform the act and people are in all. They look at them and say, wow, and then they repeat the act, for example, with transparent props, so you can see all the secret moves that they're

doing, you understand that you've been misdirected the first time, and you see that there's a lot of work behind a magic act. Seeing that, you're even more in awe than before, and you go, wow, wow, because there's a way of revealing

a trick that makes magic even more magic, and that's what we did with our pranks. Well, so let me ask. Do you think that that kind of prank is what's happening in the United States? Is that behind any of these really outlandish conspiracy theories? Or do you think that the conspiracy theories we have now are just organic? Yeah, I think they're just organic.

There's something in Western culture, not only in American culture, which keeps creating conspiracy theories. There are some key elements that keep resurfacing. For example, this thing of child abuse and secret dungeons, it faded out at the end of the 80s, so in the early 90s, in the US, and then resurfaced with PizzaGate in 2016. Then Pizzagate seemed to fade out, but it became Pidogate for a while and then took the definitive shape of Q and on. but there's obviously a thing of secret rings of pedophiles or dungeons. I mean, comet ping pong in Washington, D.C. didn't even have a dungeon. They didn't even have a basement.

But people kept saying that there was a basement in which ritual, child abuse, took place with the complicity of top democratic officials and leaders and stuff like that. So there are some archetypes that keep resurfacing. Do you think your kind of myth-busting techniques would be affected? now or is the world too different? Is the media cycle too different? Mutates mutandis, as I say in Latin, we change in the necessary things to change.

We're still exploring that kind of stuff. Even we don't pull prank anymore, but we keep exploring that way of, you know, we called it showing the stitches, you know, like the stitching on the body of the Frankenstein monster. You see the stitches, so you understand that is composed of multiple parts of multiple cadavers. Even in our fiction, in our way of telling stories,

of writing novels or even writing non-fiction, we say we keep the factory open. We show our tools. We always explain the kind of techniques that we use because we're still looking for that particular way of revealing tricks that doesn't spoil. magic. Okay. So that's what we keep thinking. When we tweeted about Q&O for the first time, okay, a lot of people were interested in including you, Matthew, and we received several

requests of interviews from several countries, not only the US, also Germany, France, and Italy. Okay. What we did in that particular case was, okay, seed in doubt about the origin. of Q and on. Always saying we're not sure it started as a prank. If it started as a prank was a miscalculated one. If it started as a parody, they didn't take into account what Umberto Echko showed in his masterpiece Foucaultz pendulum that you can't really do an effective parody of conspiracism because it gets immediately co-opted into the paranoid style and the conspiracist frame of mind. There's nothing that cannot be believed. There's not. There's not. nothing that's too much.

Okay, so you do a parody, you do a satire, and you will find people who actually believe it. Okay, so if it started as parody, it was doomed to be completely ineffective. If it started as a prank, you know, people, either from the left or even from the most, you know, irreverent currents of the alt-right, you know, started as a prank in order to troll

gullible rightists who would believe that kind of bullshit it immediately got out of hand and took a life of its own. So we, you know, it started to see the doubt, but in a rational way. But what we also did was revive

the spirit of our old pranks. I mean, because we think that popping the conspiracy balloon is absolutely ineffective. A demanking that's all, that's only rational, you know, with rational arguments, falls flat.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work. That's what we, in Italian, we call it debunking racios suprematist, a racial supremacist, which is because it establishes a supremacy of reason, you know, with a sound argument and with facts, unassailable facts, you can debunk a conspiracy. It doesn't work like that because conspiracy theories operate on the level of myths, okay? which is completely unassailable by reason alone. You have to do something else.

So what we did in that case was to inoculate into the debate on Q&O, the word prank. After that, as you noticed, the frame in which Q&O was discussed was slightly rearranged. And there was some sense of bafflement that spread in some rightist milieu. okay, because the word prank was enough to, you know, to raise suspicion. But we also did, we weren't sure about that. But the most important thing is that we made the examples of our work, our 90s work. So we tried to inoculate some sense of wonder, something that was fun. Because the problem is that debunking is not fun, while conspiracies is people who are into conspiracies

enjoy that dimension very much, okay, because conspiracism and the paranoid style, in a way, in a very worded way, encounter some basic needs that we as humans have, okay? Conspiracists play in the same league as psychics, astrologers, you know, sorcerers, you know, sorcerers. magicians, healers. It puts a little bit of magic and excitement

back into the world for people. Exactly. That's precisely that. It's precisely that. Because we do need a sense of wonder in our lives. We do need different angles from which looking at things.

We need that. And they provide it while rational debunking doesn't provide it. If you could do debunking debunking of conspiracies while retaining the same sense of wonder which conspiracies exploit, that would be great. It's the right thing to do.

That's why we focus the attention on those illusionists who explain the tricks because they are kind of debunking themselves, but retaining the sense of wonder. And the other thing that's important is that every conspiracy theory, even the craziest one, has a kernel of truth. And if you don't talk about that kernel of truth, you reinforce the belief in the conspiracy theory. We made a lot of examples in the past few weeks and also in my lecture yesterday at McGill University.

For example, I did the example of chemtrails. You know, chem trails are a distorted version of a legitimate, you know, preoccupation for climate change. The system cannot deny itself. It always bans every feeling and emotion, tries to bend every feeling and emotion and anxiety and preoccupation towards a we call it diversionary narrative. A narrative that's more or less about the same issue

but doesn't address its core. Okay. So the Kemp Trails conspiracy theory was born because of that. Because you have people, okay, that see the science of climate change every day. But they are surrounded by people who deny it or acknowledge it, but don't do anything relevant to stop it. Okay. So there's kind of cognitive dissonance because people think, but if the situation is so bad, Why the people in power don't do anything about it?

How can the situation be so bad if everyone goes on with the habits, with the same things every day, like astrolife could go on forever like this? But there are images of doom on the TV. There are hurricanes, gigantic fires devastating, devastating in the Southern California woods. You have floods, you have droughts, but you have, at the white as a guy, there's a climate change and negationist. He denies even the existence of the phenomenon.

And even the politicians who acknowledge the phenomenon don't do anything about it, okay? Because of the Paris Protocols is a farce. Of course, nobody is doing nothing. Okay. So people have to cope with this cognitive dissonance. and a diversionary narrative is produced, is automatically generated. Even the symptom is correct, because the increase in air traffic with low cost, flights, etc. It's true that you see more chem trails.

Contrails. Contrails. The real thing is a contrail. Condensation trail is what is short for. I just want to, sorry, I just want to stick that in there. But they do call them Kim Trails, the conspiracists do. The conspiracists do. I just wanted to get the real thing there. It's a chemical process anyway. It's not the chemical process they think it is.

But it's true that the increase in air traffic is also increasing air pollution and stuff like that. So the symptom is more or less correct. But the problem is the diversionary narrative that takes people away from the kernel of truth of their conspiracy and prevents them from correctly addressing the issue. Okay. And the real issue behind all this is climate change. Okay, so every conspiracy has a kernel of truth. Even 9-11 truthers have a conspiracy that has a kernel of truth

but is perverted into a diversionary narrative. Well, let me ask you this then. What is the kernel of truth at the center of QAnon? The kernel of truth of QAnon is the people are insecure about who's in power, is that there are all these state agencies, intelligence, agencies that you don't really know what they do. There was sometimes ago there was all the NSA controversy about, you know, the government spying on citizens all the time.

Okay, so there were all the WikiLeaks controversy. There was Snowden fleeing from the country and taking refuge in Russia. So people heard about that in a confused way. So you don't really know what those guys are doing at the Pentagon, at the NSA, at the CIA, and stuff like that. Of course, they're not having child sex. It's not about pedophilia, nothing like that. And that's also another important kernel of truth. I'm not the first one to notice it and focus on it.

There's another cognitive dissonance here. And this is the gap between the utopian, kind of utopian expectations which Donald Trump fans had about his presidency and the grim reality. A boring also for them reality of his presidency because he isn't doing anything for the white working class. Gustav himself, to cope with this and, you know, kind of feel the gap between what they thought. what he will do and what he's doing. And so the result is, you think he isn't doing anything, okay, from their point of view, of course. You think he isn't doing that. But in secret, he's fighting against an evil cabal of pedophiles running the world,

and he's a genius, and he's playing a multidimensional chess game, all in secret, because you don't see anything about that, of course. So there's a cognitive dissonance. There's a kind of fantasy that was. was created in order to overcome disillusionment and disappointment about the Trump presidency, because also them are disappointed by this presidency, because it's no right-wing utopia, as they thought. Woo Ming-1, thank you so much for coming onto the show, and we're talking us through all of that.

Thank you very much for having me. It was fun. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for giving the team a much-needed rest. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell and Derek Gannon. It was created by myself and Jason Fields, who you actually got to hear this week. We're on Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest.

Drop us a line, leave a comment, like, and subscribe, all that stuff. Please enjoy Memorial Day, and remember that not all veterans like fireworks, and there's more reasons for the day than buying something on sale at Best Buy.