Angry Planet - Interviewing the Alleged Secret Master of the Qanon Conspiracy

Episode Date: September 27, 2018

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 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.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.Take our listener survey!https://podcastsurvey.typeform.com/to/C5LsSOSupport 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. You can't really do an effective parody of conspiracism because it gets immediately co-opted into the paranoid style and the conspiracist's frame of mind. There's nothing that cannot be believed. You're listening to War College.

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 Field. We're back with another episodes 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 Q&OND believers began showing up at Trump rallies, the media took notice, and in early August, BuzzFeed published a report posing 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 Q&on 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. Bunk 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? Of course 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 the 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. published in 2004 in the US. The Nobel Q was the 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 Coiner. And then the plot moves to other attempts at, you know, at revolution in the course of that century. It was a very turbulent century back 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 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 of the cathedral of the cathedral or 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 into 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 book of the Bible, you know, cohelet. At the same time, he keeps sending reports of his own activities to his boss. His boss is Giovanni Pietro Carraza, Cardinal, later to become a pope himself, Paul the 4th, 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, you know, 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 takeover and kind of start a commune like the Paris Commune in 1871. But this guy, Q, 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 Bricist 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 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. That it became kind of a night table book, Lever de Cheve, 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 January in 2001, that generation of activists took, 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. Okay, but he traced the origins of the paranoid style, at least in the U.S., 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.

Okay, 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 and 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 secretive 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. Okay. 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. 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, okay, and they were caught in the act. The fact that they were caught in the act 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. Okay. So, usually real conspiracies have a very specific aim, 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. 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 were, yeah, some other Lakeys and agents, but the number of people taking part in the Watergate conspiracy always remained 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, okay? And the fact that those burglars will 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, conspiracy 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, okay? 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, okay, 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 is 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 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, you know, of people allegedly being part of the conspiracy. We saw this with Pizza Gate, we saw this with Q and on as well. Okay. And this is contrary to Occam's razor.

You know, Occam's razor 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.

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 postcards 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 Blisset project with some of our extremely elaborate media pranks. Because we pulled some very complex pranks kind of lARPs because they were so complex that they required the assistance and the collaboration and the imagination of those. 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 satanic ritual abuse scare was, okay, because there was mass paranoia about satanists and pedophiles back in those days. It was the same wave of much. 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 Marseignele in Belgium, was arrested and it was discovered that he had tortured and killed a lot of kids, etc. After that 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 course, 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 stuff 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 abuse 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 okay so we devised some pranks that we're that aimed at showing that it was all bullshit Okay, 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 backwoods 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-Sammo Committee for the Safegrored 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, they believed everything, they published everything with no fact. fact checking at all because we were in the middle 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 the 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 and 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-inquiry on cases of false accusations on child. 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 pseudas satanic prank, was in 1998. So for 40 years, we had been pulling pranks, okay, organizing pranks, and the name Luther Brisset was associated with this kind of activities. I mean, the purpose of the whole Luther Brisset project thing was to adopt the same moniker, the same pseudonym, and the same name. All together, hundreds of people, hundreds of artists, 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 Bristead 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 kind of because I can say we focused on cultural automatisms and then said it and then told we usually told people you acted you acted following a cultural automatism you are in the middle in the middle of a you know 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. Okay.

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 discerality. 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 than 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 Brisset 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,

felt being part of a warm community of people sharing the same purpose, okay, you shared a certain style, a certain imagery, even if you never met the other members in person, okay, 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. in Rome, there was a huge group, okay, but there were other individual contributors to the Luther Bistam 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 Luthorhorst of project came out of the, yeah, there were some

underground currents in culture, you know, in the 80s, and of 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 Luther Brisset via the male art network. 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. You know, this guy who's part of the Women 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 mess. There are some examples of that. Yesterday I showed a video of Pen and Teller. 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 awe. They look at them and say, wow, and then they repeat the act, for example, with transparent props, 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 or in the early 90s in the US and then resurfaced with Pizza Gate in 2016, then Pizza Gate seemed to fade out, but it became Pedogate for a while

and then took the definitive shape of Q and on, but there's obviously a thing of secret rings, of pedophiles, of dungeons. I mean, comet ping pong in Washington, D.C. didn't even have a dungeon. You don'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.

Okay. So there are some archetypes that keep resurfacing. Do you think your kind of myth-busting technique? would be effective 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. understand that he's composed of multiple parts of multiple cadavers. Okay, we show, even in our fiction, in our way of telling stories, of writing novels or even writing non-fiction, we always, 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. So that's what we keep thinking. When we tweeted about Q&O for the first time, okay, a lot of people were interested 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, seeding doubt about the origins 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 Eko 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's frame of mind. There's nothing that cannot be believed. There's 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. At the banking that's 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 suprematista, racial supremacist, 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, 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, the banking of conspiracy, while retaining the same sense of wonder which conspiracists 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 camtrails. You know, camp trails are a distorted version of a legitimate, you know, preoccupation for climate change.

the system cannot deny itself okay it always it always bans every feeling and emotion tries to bend every feeling and emotion and anxiety and preoccupation towards a dive 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 can trails conspiracy theory was born because of that. Because you have people, okay, that see the signs 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 their 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 that's a climate change 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. 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. Okay. 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 that people are insecure about who's in power, is that there are all these, you know, 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 want to 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. Gustavile himself, to cope with

this and you know, kind of feel the gap between what they thought he would do and what he's doing. And so the result is, you think 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 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 on the show and we're talking us through all of that. Thank you very much for having me. It was fun. That's this week's episode, dear listeners. Thank you so much for joining us, recording this outro during a thunderstorm, which feels appropriately spooky given the subject matter. We ran into some technical difficulties in the past two weeks here at War College, and I wanted to apologize for that. We'd originally planned to run two episodes this week,

but we only had time to run one. It was the bonus that we'd recorded first. Everything is straightened out now, though, and in the coming weeks, We'll be talking about what makes a good comic book war memoir, delve into a little ancient Greek history. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. You can find War College online at Warcollegepodcast.com, Facebook.com forward slash war college, and on Twitter at War underscore College. If you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps others find the show, and Jason just might read your review on the air.

Until next time.