Angry Planet - We All Believe Conspiracy Theories

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Conspiracy Theories are part of the foundation of the United States. Our first strong third party, the Anti-Masonic party, had its roots in the belief in a conspiracy theory. Years later the John Birch society shaped American politics. Things feel different now. Lies are doing something to the United States that no foreign enemy has been able to achieve: Shredding it. The bizarre QAnon, imaginary purple elephant and, far more dangerous, the big lie of a stolen election.It’s time to talk about our gaslit nation and what this conspiratorial bullshit means going forward.Joining us to do just that is Joseph Uscinski. He’s professor of political science at the University of Miami. He’s the coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford, 2014) and editor of Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oxford, 2018). And we’re lucky to have him.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.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. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I am Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Today, we're going to talk about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are part of the foundation of the United States. Our first strong third party, the anti-Masonic party, had its roots in the belief in a conspiracy theory. Years later, the John Birch Society shaped American politics, but things feel very different now. Lies are doing something to the United States that no foreign enemy has been able to achieve, shredding it. the bizarre Q-Anon imaginary purple elephant and far more dangerous, the big lie of the stolen election,

it's time to talk about our gaslit nation and what this conspiratorial bullshit means going forward. Joining us to do just that is Joseph Yushinsky. He's a professor of political science at the University of Miami. He's the co-author of American Conspiracy Theories, came out in 2014, and editor of conspiracy theories and the people who believe them, which was from 2018, and we're very lucky to have him. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Can we start with something really basic? What is wrong with this country? Why are so many people so eager to believe things that are provably untrue? That doesn't feel like a basic question to me. Well, it's just the foundationals may be better than basic. Well, people believe conspiracy theories for the same reasons they believe all sorts of other ideas. And one thing that's interesting is you said that things feel different now. They might feel different now.

But are they different? That's a very different question. And that's something where the data tells a story that is different than what we might feel, right? Partially because what's going on is that we're paying very close attention to conspiracy theories in a way we never have before. In fact, news organizations, many of them have desks dedicated to misinformation, conspiracy theories, disinformation. Even the government has tried to put together a board just to focus on that. And there have been congressional committees, you know, having hearings on these topics. So we're paying attention, but that's very different than saying there's more of something than there has been in the

past, right? Those are two different claims. And, you know, when I started out as a political scientist, I was studying media coverage of events and how does the media cover things. And one thing that is very clear with the media is that more coverage of a topic doesn't actually mean that that thing is actually happening more. Those are very different things, right? So that can be the same thing with conspiracy theory. are paying a lot of attention now, but is anyone really different now than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Feels like it, but isn't. Is it? And that's where the data has to come in. Well, I'm wondering about the impact, really, in terms of when I talk about it being different.

I mean, your point makes perfect sense to me. And I remember very well the summer of the shark attack right before September 11th, where all of a sudden there were, we thought, a billion shark attacks and it was total crap. Ari, is there anything qualitatively different, if not quantitatively different, to what's going on now, in your opinion? I think the quantitative difference, and we can call it qualitative because it's such a small number, really comes down to one person, and that was the president, right? So you take a bunch of conspiracy theories that were probably floating around anyway,

and you put them in the hands of somebody who has a huge audience, and all of a sudden, things are going to feel very different, right? So why did the media have to start covering conspiracy theories so much? Well, because you have a major party candidate in 2016 talking in conspiracy theories all the time, and then becoming president and continuing to engage in conspiracy theories all the time. So at that point, it's not just Trump's conspiracy theories that are the issue, but it's also conspiracy theories as a thing unto itself that journalists have to start paying attention to. And what's the effect of Trump's rhetoric having on people and what are the outcomes of this? So in terms of the mass public and what they believe, and the numbers tell a fairly convincing story that most conspiracy theories are not.

increasing in the percentage of number the percentage of people who believe them they're fairly stable over time either people people believe an idea or they don't right um but it doesn't look like that simply because of the effect trump and a few other people have had on our mainstream discourse do you think the media there's some responsibility here too i mean just by covering it by having desks about it by focusing so much on it by putting it out there constantly. Do you think that helps the spread or is it just kind of a, is it just kind of an indicator of where our focus is and where our interest is at the moment? So how much am I allowed to swear on this podcast? You can say whatever the fuck you want. Well, this is what's happened in the last few years.

We have some people who have become very puritanical about truth. And at the same time, not very even-handed in how they apply their standards to deciding what's true and what's not and what needs to be moderated and what doesn't, and what's open for being censored and what shouldn't be censored. You know, conveniently, everyone wants to censor the other guy's ideas because the other guy's ideas are the ones that are false. It's the other guy that believes in conspiracy theories because my conspiracy theories are true. They're conspiracy facts. So everyone's pointing the finger at everybody else's ideas to have. have them have them censored but here's the thing there's a lot of mainstream media coverage saying oh my god social media is spreading all these conspiracy theories and everyone's becoming a conspiracy

theorist now and they're all acting on these ideas so the blame is put squarely on social media i mean some media outlets even just say it right out zuckerberg is a bond villain he's coming for your children that's a quote from the cardian right and and and there's a lot of people saying you know, big name, celebrities and whatnot, saying, oh, the misinformation conspiracy theories are worse than they've ever been because of social media. It's Facebook's fault. It's Twitter's fault. Well, go put on TV and look at all the crap that's on there and look at all the different programs that are either patently false or just aren't very well evidenced. How many shows about Bigfoot are there? How many shows about hibernating vampires who are responsible for

murders in California are there. What was the biggest show on animal planet? Oh, it was the Navy conspiracy to kill the mermaids with supersonic weapons. What's the second biggest show on that channel, which I thought was supposed to be about real, real animals? No, it's finding Bigfoot. Guess what? They still haven't found them. Go put on all the other channels and they're hunting ghosts and paranormal experiences and demons and Lochness monsters and all sorts of stuff. And there's all sorts of TV shows about all sorts of conspiracy theories. So to turn around and say now, oh, it must be social media's fault. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? I mean, this stuff is everywhere. Even go to the newspapers. I mean, many still have horoscopes.

Many engage in conspiracy theories. How much coverage has the New York Times of Washington Post in the last few years given to all this alien nonsense in which there's nothing there? but it drives clicks. So here's another story about some grainy video that doesn't show anything, but it could look like an alien. So what bothers me is that this is everywhere. Even the conspiracy theory you brought up earlier, QAnon, the idea that there's a pedophile deep state working against the president. That's not new. That's the plot of Oliver Stone's JFK movie, right?

Joe Pesci was the pedophile character who was involved in the sexual underground of New Orleans and one of the people involved in shooting Kennedy in 1963. So the ideas are not new. This is all around. It's been everywhere and it's been in the mainstream. It researched in the 1980s, too. They tried to link some Reagan staffers with it, I believe, right? They said they were having rent boys come in to parties and also, of course, the satanic panic stuff.

Like, again, all this stuff comes around and around and around. Yeah, and he just had a representative saying that he's been invited to a bunch of eyes wide shut type parties. Now, whether that's true or not, you know, I don't think the evidence is in his favor. I hope so for his sense. But these claims are coming from the mainstream to coming from the top. So to act as if it's social media's problem or if it's new, it's just there's no evidence for that. Okay, so I have a question to try to differentiate some of this stuff, if we can. Because it sounds like it's all the same bucket of slop.

But is there such a thing as the big lie as opposed to, which I love that phrase with the capital B and the capital L versus your run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory like Hitler and the stab in the back? And of course, you know me and you know enough to know that my wife were, you know, there's going to be the Holocaust and there's going to be, you know, Adolf Hitler for a second. we can get rid of him in a second too. But yeah, is there something different? Is there something like, is there a big line? Is that a conspiracy theory or not a conspiracy theory? Is it the same crap? Well, the question is, why are we calling it big? There could be a lot of reasons. I'm not saying that it's wrong to call it that, but is it big because of the number, the percentage of Republicans that believe it? I mean, if that's why we're saying it, then sure, right? Are we at the big lie because a lot of Republican leaders believe it and are acting on it,

trying to hurt our democracy by restricting voting. That seems big to me. But in terms of the idea itself, there's nothing really new or big about it. Every election, there's beliefs that it was rigged. And it's always the losers who think it was rigged against them. Right. So there's nothing new here. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, certainly. But we must remember 2000, right? Two thousand and two thousand four. And there wasn't that Obama against Romney, even though ACORN didn't even exist at that point. And then 2016, oh, it was rigged by Trump and Russia, right? And then, and then now, oh, now Biden must have rigged it. So the losers always think they were cheated a certain amount of them. Usually it's

30 to 40 percent of the losing party. Now, after 2020, it's like 60 to 80 percent of the losing party, right, which is abnormal. So the question becomes, why is it so much more this year than the past years? And it's because of Trump. Mitt Romney didn't go on TV and tell all Republicans it was rigged against me. I was cheated. Romney conceded and moved on with his life. Right?

And so did McCain, right? So whereas Trump is saying it's rigged. He's still saying it's rigged. And people are listening. And you've got members of Congress saying it was rigged. and the conservative radio sphere in Fox News are still engaging in this. So, yes, it's a conspiracy theory, but oftentimes these theories are coming, you know, from one place or another. But here it's like a mainstream view coming from the entire conservative media sphere and the GOP leadership.

So in that sense, it's just taken on, it's become just like any other partisan beliefs. leave, right? Many of the party leaders and the conservative media support it, and everyone's just following along in the party. Is there a point for you when, you know a lot about this stuff, you know the history of it. Is there a point for you when something crosses the line from business is normal into dangerous? it's it's hard to know what that line is and i get asked this a lot like how can we differentiate the okay conspiracy theories from the really dangerous ones and the answer is i don't know if there's a good way to do that that i can just say oh well here's an idea and that's dangerous

you know i i guess i would put ideas that target vulnerable populations into that category because if someone were to act on it, they would be attacking vulnerable populations, in which case they could do a lot of damage. But in terms of a lot of other conspiracy theories, it's hard to guess in advance which ones are going to attract lots of followers, which ones are going to lead people to act on them in some deleterious way. I mean, I guess the danger signs for me are when you have politicians adopting them and then acting on them with an authority of, or,

or with a monopoly of authoritative force. Because when they do that, that's really, really bad. Right. But someone could take something like the idea that lizard people control the world. And for most of them, oh, that's stupid or silly, or some people have fun with it on YouTube or whatever. But somebody just stabbed his kids and killed them because he thought that they were lizard people. Now, the question then becomes at that point, is it the idea as far?

that he did that or the fact that he's probably insane that he did that, right? And further, and I think he's been part of the conversation in America, certainly. Do you then ban David Iqbooks because they contain that idea? I would ban them because he's a terrible writer. I've had to read some of that stuff. Take something else. Take like vaccine hesitancy, right? We've got all these vaccine conspiracy theories going around.

So the question becomes, are these ideas dangerous? Well, if they lead people to issue the vaccine, then yes, right? And people wind up getting sick and dying. But what if it's not the conspiracy theory that's really doing it? I mean, maybe they're just adopting the conspiracy theory after the fact to justify actions they were going to take anyway, which seems to often be the case. and this issue was compounded further with the fact that a lot of people believe true information and will come to the conclusion that they don't want to get the vaccine.

So you will hear people say, oh, wow, you can get vaccinated, but you could still catch COVID anyway, which is true. And then they say, therefore, I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get vaccinated. So are we going to ban the true information now because we want people to do the right thing? I mean, these things are really, really complicated. And just saying, well, these ideas are too dangerous for anyone to be exposed to, sort of overestimates the power of ideas and exposure to those ideas and takes away anyone's agency to be able to, you know, not believe things that they're exposed to or to not act after exposure.

This is, I think, and we've talked about this before, I think, with Danny Gold, Jason, but I'm not sure if we talked about it. off air. We may have talked about it off air, but like I live in this intellectual space of my brain and have for maybe the past 10 years where I want to believe in the power of ideas and their ability to change the world and do things, right? Like, why else are we communicating? Why are so we talking to each other and spreading these theories? But I also, I don't quite believe that someone reads the Turner Diaries and that alone is the thing that sets them on like a path to white nationalism and committing a mass shooting, right? And so it's hard for me to square in my head the power of communication and art with the fact that if that's true,

if there is power in communication and art, is it not possible that some things could be quite dangerous and that if the wrong person reads the wrong thing, it could set them on a dangerous path? Does that question make sense? It's not even a question. It's just a observation. Yeah, so the action really comes down to the wrong person, right? So is the problem the information of the problem, the fact that some people are inclined towards violence, right? Because they can find, people will find a reason to act violently if they, if they're violent people. Let's look at the case from just a few weeks ago with the, with the white genocide believer shooting people at a grocery store in New York. What's come out about this person is that he says,

he was bored, so then he went to 4chan. And a lot of people are saying, well, 4chan radicalized him. Now, that's an interesting thing to think. It's sort of like saying, I was bored and decided to read a book. So I went and got Mind Comp. You know, there's other books you can read. So the question is, why did you pick to read Mindomph? Just like, you know, I was bored, so I went to Fortune.

Why did you go to 4chan and then pick a bunch of anti-Semitic pages in it? You know, you didn't slip on a banana peel and wind up there. It wasn't by accident. So the choices were driving this person to everything that he exposed himself to. And we have to give him the agency. He made choices of things that he wanted to see. And he kept making those choices over and over and over again. Right.

Because we can all be exposed to anti-Semitic ideas and racist ideas. And we'll be like, that's not influencing me. I'm rejecting that. Right. So it comes down to why was this person so open to it? And it's almost as if we give these online platforms incredible powers as if, you know, it's that scene from Clockwork Orange where someone goes to Fortune and all of a sudden they're locked down in their chair with their eyes gripped open and getting drops.

So they're just being exposed over and over again without any choice. And that's not what's happening. So we have to sort of step back because often the story we're hearing is social media, than violence. And we've got to say, what is it about this person that made them amenable to these ideas and then to go seek them out over and over? And then also to want to commit violence on them, which is almost a separate question. I'll give you a quick example. So there was a, I think, an NPR story that came out a few weeks ago. And it was about a woman who refused the vaccine and then died of it. And now her family is heartbroken. She died of COVID because she wasn't.

vaccinated. And I think she refused treatment even once they got her to the hospital because she said this is all fake. So people are saying this is the misinformation and disinformation that killed her. And even her family is saying this. Disinformation online killed her. But read a little bit deeper. I mean, she had been engaging in nonsense for decades. She was reading horoscopes or doing astrological signs and doing readings for people. So she was already prone. to believing a lot of unscientific stuff. And on top of that, anytime anyone brought up these issues to her,

she would get angry. So her husband couldn't negotiate these ideas with her. In fact, he had to leave the room whenever he would bring these things up. So is it the information that's the problem, or is it what this woman was bringing to the table? And I feel bad, you know, no one wants to blame, you know,

or a woman who passed away of COVID, but she made choices. Are we all susceptible to the right conspiracy theory? I mean, are we all just sitting here waiting for the correct one to hit us in the soft spot and will believe it? Yes. And this is the interesting thing. So the more and more conspiracy theories I put on any given survey, the less and less people there are that don't believe any. So there's no distinction between us and the conspiracy theory. us, right? We all fall into that category from time to time. So if we're to ask enough questions,

we're all going to buy into one or a few. The distinction is between people who buy into a lot and people who buy into a few. Which ones do you do? Yeah, and then we can make another distinction between which ones people will buy into, which is usually determined by who they are, what their politics are, what groups they belong to. So I haven't met a person who, who's like, I don't believe any conspiracy theories once you start listing off a bunch, right? And maybe I'm the exception to the rule only because I don't believe anything anymore. I don't think that I'm that resistant to conspiracy theories if the right one were to hit me. But it's just in general, I'm just like, I'm not believing anything because I've spent so much time on this and so many things.

I'm just wary that it's probably my own bias. He's driving me towards it. What are the most common ones? What are the ones you bust out at the cocktail party to make people go like, oh, I guess I do believe this? Well, JFK is probably the most consistently and widely believed conspiracy theory in the U.S. So only a few weeks after the assassination, it was polled and it came in at 50 percent, 5-0. By the 70s, it was 80 percent. And it's only come down in the last 20-some-odd years to where it's back. around 50% again. So that's with us. I don't know when that's going to start dipping because it's

so ingrained in the culture. I mean, we hear about it every November to mark the anniversary of the assassination and we've got movies and all sorts of stuff. There's always going to be a new document dump from the government and things like that. So I think it's here to stay. And that's consistently higher than most other conspiracy theory. Jason, what conspiracy theory do you believe? What do you think about Kennedy lone gunman? That's really a great one, you know, because I've covered that and the anniversaries, obviously. Even I am too young to have been a reporter at the Kennedy assassination. But yeah, there's part of me that does ask questions.

I hate to say that, but it's true. I think the more you learn about Oswald and his activities leading up, like really get into the minute details of the couple years of his life leading up to that assassination. And yeah, it was him. It makes a lot of sense that it was him. There's a pattern of writings and ideology that makes sense that it was him. There was a previous attempt on a huge right-winger that he probably was responsible for. It's just, you know.

What about Jack Ruby? What about Jack Ruby? He, like, he's an idiot. It's an idiot mobster in the Dallas area that thought he was doing everybody a favor, probably. Thank you. I mean, here's the thing. This has gone on for decades, obviously. And, you know, anyone can pick out a bunch of anecdotes and say, well, there's this data point and that data point.

And, you know, it makes it look funny and, you know, suggests a conspiracy. But when you take all the evidence together, all of a sudden it doesn't really look that way. I mean, I used to be convinced that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. But and a lot of it was driven by the Oliver Stone movie, which came out when I was in high school. But having shown that movie in class over and over again, that movie doesn't even stand on its own. It's internally contradicts itself. And further, even Stone said, I made a lot of this stuff up. Right.

So in order to get there, you have to start filling in all the holes of the conspiracy theory with a lot of things that aren't necessarily true. Sure. I mean, we can go back and forth with anecdotes, but I mean, it's been looked at quite comprehensively in the evidence for the conspiracy is not there. Now, here's the thing with me is I don't walk around telling people their conspiracy theories are false. I mean, that's not what I do. I'm not a debunker. I'm not really interested in that. I'll leave that to people who are experts in the particular subject matter at hand. Like, you know, I'll let people who are into studying guns and assassinations and forensic evidence and things like that.

Look at the Kennedy assassination. But, you know, my general view is that if the appropriate bodies of experts with open data and evidence haven't concluded that there's a conspiracy, then I'm not going to do that either. And I'm not the one you need to convince. Right. So just the same thing, just to put this with evolution, if you think evolution is fake or a fraud, don't convince me.

Go convince the majority of biologists out there. It does sound like, okay, is any of this a factor of intelligence? I think we'd like to say yes, but there isn't good evidence of that. I mean, I don't want to close the door on it and say that intelligence doesn't matter at all. I'm sure it matters a little bit.

But I think the closest I could get to saying yes would be that consistently we find that people with less education tend to believe more conspiracy theories across the population. But that doesn't mean that highly educated people don't buy into conspiracy theories. I mean, I've been to faculty meetings. There's all sorts of conspiracy theories there. The administrations have to get us.

Right? So having a PhD doesn't make you immune. And a lot of the pushback I get on my papers comes from PhDs, some of whom were convinced that some of the things I call conspiracy theories are not really conspiracy theories, but true. So. Do you think there's a reason why human beings are programmed to believe? these things? Well, I don't think they're programmed. So I don't like the word, unless we're saying

there's a bunch of factors that sort of make them amenable to these ideas. Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Not that there's somebody that's making us believe these things, but it's just kind of the way we're wired. So it's not the chip in the neck that's doing it. No. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, that's used for something else, actually. Yeah, that's just for tracking. So, Here's the thing is that the reasons for people believe in conspiracy theories are largely the reasons for believing anything else. There's often this view like, oh, why do you believe something? Oh, it's because it's true. That's why I believe it.

But you can find someone else who believes the opposite thing, right? And why do they believe it? Well, because it's true. So it's not like ideas have magic shining qualities that let us know that they're true or false and that the people who believe things we think are false are picking them out because they're false. Right. Nobody sees a false idea and says, well, I'm going to believe that because it's false. It doesn't work like that. People believe things because they think they're true. It's just that separating fact from fiction is very difficult and we're all biased in numerous ways. So it leads us to adopt ideas that some are true, some could be true, but we don't know and some are probably false.

right and and in those that set of factors operates for all the beliefs we we adopt right so you know you can ask a question why do people have political opinions well some of the big reasons are their partisanship drives them to adopt certain policies and they listen to leaders in their party and they say what the issue agenda is and what the policies are going to be and people follow cues from their leaders to adopt particular positions. But that works with conspiracy theories too. People listen to trusted sources and they adopt ideas that they think are likely true. So there's really no difference there, right?

Just as a Democrat might listen to what Obama says and Trump supporters would listen to what Trump says. And if Trump engages in conspiracy theories, then his followers are going to adopt some of those to an extent, right? And just the same, you know, the groups we belong to drive which conspiracy theories we adopt. Who's conspiring? It's always the other groups conspiring against us. Our group isn't the villain.

It's all the other groups, right? But everybody thinks everyone else is the conspirator, never ourselves. So we disagree. And as I mentioned before, we all, to one degree or another, have a disposition towards seeing the world in conspiratorial terms. So some people have this very strongly. some people have it very weakly. Most people are somewhere in the middle. So if you're someone who has a lens, which makes everything look like a conspiracy, then you're going to see a lot of conspiracies everywhere, and you are going to particularly

be prone to believing ones that accuse groups that are in competition with your own. Right. So that sort of explains a lot of it. But Those factors are similar to almost any other belief that we might adopt. So I want to go back and talk to some of the policy prescriptions and response to this conspiracy culture that's kind of going on right now. It seems like from the mainstream that the instinct right now is that the only way to fight these bad ideas is censoriousness. I think about, you know, the New York posts, Twitter account being suspended. did when it ran the Hunter Biden laptop story, which you know, say what you will about the hinkiness of that particular story, like a Mac shop did have a Hunter Biden laptop with some pretty nasty stuff on it.

And talking about the Buffalo shooter, he wrote this 180 page manifesto that is shit posting, bad memes, stuff copied from 4chan. It was considered very dangerous for this thing to be out. And if you were the kind of person inclined to want to... to seek it out and find it, like you can find it pretty easily. Like, I know where it is. I've read it. But there was an instinct on some parts of the media class to say, like, we need to make sure that nobody can see this thing. This information doesn't spread, that it's bad information, that it will make another

Buffalo shooter. Why do you think that this censoriousness is what I will call it is the answer that we have to conspiracy theories right now? Why are we going in that direction? Because like conspiracy theories themselves, blaming the Internet allows us to blame a boogeyman. It allows us to blame some outside factor that's controlling events. It's Zuckerberg. It's Twitter.

You know, it's the Internet. It's something outside of us. It's exogenous. And it's neat and tidy, right? You don't have to deal with any. complexity. Oh, just take it off the internet. Problem solved. You know, who wants to deal with having to, with the fact that just people are prone to these ideas? We know this. We've known for a long time that Nazis exist. It's not a new thing, not a product of social media. We know that people commit

violence for reasons that don't make sense out of hatred or who knows what. sometimes people just do terrible things and we don't want to accept it because it's chaotic and it's messy and it leaves us in a very uncertain place right but if we could just blame something discreet and do something then oh problem solved it's easy to sleep at night then but that's just not the case. Right? So, and, and it's like people, people are doing exactly what conspiracy theorists might be doing, trying to find that simple explanation, find that one thing to blame that they already don't like.

It doesn't, you know, unfortunately, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It doesn't provide that much explanatory power. Simple solutions for complicated problems. Yeah, I mean, what I'm finding more and more is that, sure, exposure to these ideas matter a certain bit, but it's what the people are bringing with them. So people talk about the Internet as if it's the case that, oh, I'm going to go on Twitter and get my share of conspiracy theories today. Oh, I'm going to go to Facebook and get all my, you know, anti-vax stuff today. as if that's all people go to the internet for. And it's just not true.

I mean, when you look at how accessed a lot of these things are, they pale in comparison to more mainstream outlets of news. Right. So when Alex Jones was sort of at his height, say, five or six years ago, we were looking at web traffic, and Info Wars was ranked at like 350 in the U.S. for web traffic sites. New York Times is in like top 10. And in between there was porn and travel sites and dating sites, all sorts of things.

So people are going to the Internet to do all sorts of things before they get their conspiracy theories. Right. So yes, the beliefs are prevalent, but it's not the case that's necessarily being driven by Internet exposure. And it's just not clear that you go to the Internet and it's all. unsubstantiated stuff. I mean, people are going there to get true information. We have the world's library in our pocket. So we have access to more and better information than we've ever had in the past,

yet we're only focusing on the untrue stuff, which was always there in one form or the other. Internet or not. I think that's a terrific place to stop. Joseph Yushinsky, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking us through all this. Thank you. Now I'm angry. Good.

We like to leave people upset. I was trying to shout to keep in line with the name of the podcast. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. We will be, we've got some, we're recording two back-to-back tomorrow. It should be some interesting stuff. I think we're going to get Danny Gold back on the show again.

I know I keep saying that. All right. If you love us, if you really love us, please go to our substack, angryplanetpod.com or angrypranet.substack.com, where for mere $9 a month, you can get commercial-free versions

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