Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 105

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

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In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDRR, which means just don't look right. On season two of my podcast, What Happened To? I take a closer look at Libby Caswell's life and death. Libby's case keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. That's something that I need to know. Listen to What Happened to Libby Caswell

on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt, the new podcast

that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder. Listen to burden of guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me! My podcast is relaunching!

Do you fear wild, dangerous animals to the point where you're constantly watching attack videos and reading articles about wild animal tech survivors or those who succumb to attack? Call in! We can also discuss reality shows and emergency room footage. Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Calls on Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode,

so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here's Spooky Week Special Presentation. I'm Garrison Davis, and earlier this year, I, along with my friend Elaine, attended the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference in seaside Oregon.

The past few years, I've had a growing interest in the occult, both for testing the limits of manufacturing my own weird experiences, as well as looking at it as a vector of political extremism. Sometimes it's useful to not just look on from the outside, but actually hop into other people's reality tunnels to gain a more intimate understanding of how they interact with our world. This was my primary motivation in attending the Ghost Conference, to learn what metaphysical beliefs drive the attendees and how said beliefs intersect with politics and our broader culture. My experiences at the conference ranged from ghost hunting to being hypnotized, to learning of the galactic Federation of Angels, and abortion-hungry demons. So with that in mind,

I hope you enjoy my report back on the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference. The first challenge we faced was simply getting to the town of seaside. The first challenge we faced was simply getting to the town of Seaside. The first day of the conference, Friday, March 24, coincided with a massive snowstorm along Highway 26 from Portland to Seaside. As we were driving on the treacherous mountain roads, a white out completely engulfed our view. When we emerged from the snowstorm, it was as if we'd gone through a portal, transporting us from the mountainous forest to the small coastal town of Seaside, Oregon, into a world

of ghosts, spirits, specters, and overpriced convention food. Seaside, as the name suggests, is a beachfront town situated in northern Oregon. It was founded in the late 1800s after railroad barren Ben Holiday built his summer vacation quote-unquote seaside house on the plot of land which is now seaside's golf course. It's always been a sort of tourist resort town that people from Portland travel to for beachfront entertainment. The conference is put on by a friendly, high school art teacher and Oregon City Commissioner Rocky Smith. Smith has been doing ghost tours in Oregon

since the mid 90s and has been putting on the Oregon Ghost Conference since 2012. Originally, it was held in Smith's hometown of Oregon City, an extremely haunted town often cited as the end of the Oregon Trail. In 2016, the conference outgrew its Oregon City venue and relocated to seaside. It's now the largest paranormal convention in the Pacific Northwest.

The conference features ghost tours, classes, guest speakers, vendors, terror readings, sayances, ghost hunting, and paranormal investigations. The first big event I marked on my schedule was a ghost tour to get acquainted with sea-side's most haunted places. The tour began right outside the convention center. Conference director Rocky Smith led this one himself. He filled us in on some old ghost conference lore. The seaslide convention center went through some extensive renovations right before the pandemic, but the first year the conference took place in the convention center. They had a class for kids where a group of children explored around the old building

to find what they thought were the most haunted places. There was one hallway on the west side of the building where people routinely reported strange experiences. Back in 2016, a child at the conference claimed they saw a ghost down this hallway when exiting the bathroom. First, they just saw something out of the corner of their eye, and then when they turned to the left, they saw a woman in an old dress staring at them. At first, they weren't sure if the dress was longer short because they were too scared to look down,

but then they noticed that the woman didn't have any legs and was just floating in the air. Because of the new renovations, that hallway is no longer accessible. Rocky Smith remarked that he didn't know if that was intentional or not, but said that a lot of times when they redo buildings, they'll change the part of a building that used to be kind of scary and uncomfortable. So that hallway is now used for storage. Although one of the convention staff members

claimed that a vacuum cleaner, now held in the hallway, is possessed. So, there's that. The convention center was originally built in the 70s and doesn't really have a lot of notable history. But when looking into hauntings or reports of ghosts, typically people try to learn the history of the building or plot of land in question. For seaside, that's kind of hard because in 1912, four blocks of downtown seaside burned to the ground, destroying most of the town's early history. The first stop on the Ghost Tour after we left the Convention Center was one of the reportedly most active sites of Ghostly activity in seaside,

the bridge tender tavern. It was built in 1914, so just a couple years after the big fire. I used to be called the past time bar, and then suffered its own fire, and was later renamed the bridge tender. The previous owners of the bar claimed that in the early 20th century it was a brothel. This is unconfirmed, but it relates to the tavern's most frequent ghost, the madam. Staff and patrons of the bridge tender regularly address the madam. If customers are being rude, it's said that the madam will spill drinks on them, you

know, stuff like that. The story I like the most about the madam has to do with the taverns old CD jukebox. If a specific song played on the jukebox something would go haywire CDs would shoot out of it or other weird things would reportedly happen in the bar. Patrons would put the song on repeat just to see what would happen. Eventually the owners took the CD with the song in question out of the jukebox so that people would just stop playing the song. But people are persistent bastards, so now people just play the song on their phones,

or the new digital jukebox in the bridge tender. Now the theory is, is that the madame just really hates this song, so she gets mad when it plays and then causes some commotion. The song is dancing Queen by Ava. So if you want to go test this yourself, you can travel to the British tender and play Dancing Queen and see what happens. Another highlight from the Ghost Tour was learning about the old sea cider hotel at the end of the promenade.

It was purportedly haunted by multiple spirits, and it was believed that when the hotel was torn down in the 80s, the ghosts followed the hotel staff who got new jobs at a restaurant in downtown called Gertles. New employees are said to have recognized apparitions from the hotel, and the restaurant gained a haunted coffee pot that would either move on its own or even fly across the room, depending on who you would ask. I think it's nice that the ghosts seem to have a pretty good job relocation program, something that most of us do not, so good for them.

As the ghost tour approached the beachfront promenade, that snowstorm from the nearby mountains seemed to have caught up with us. And a dreary mix of rain and snow began to descend upon seaside, as if some otherworldly force was trying to keep us from further exploring the hauntings of the town. So as even my trench coat began soaking through, we took refuge back indoors. The very first class my friend Elaine and I took at the conference was titled Ghost Detectives. Now, despite the silly stounding name, it was probably the most grounded class throughout the entire weekend, certainly the one with the least amount of spiritual dogma. The class was focused on best practices for conducting paranormal investigations,

specifically to ensure that the process and findings mirror the evidentiary standards set by the justice system for law enforcement investigations. The instructor, Dr. Nelson, is a supervisor for a crisis hotline with degrees in mental health, metaphysics, and fine arts. He describes methodology for investigating paranormal activity as, quote, unquote, applied science. He was definitely the most meticulous investigator of the whole weekend, and the least ghost hunter-esque in terms of advocating for strict investigative procedures. And not just assuming that every spooky noise was evidence of a ghost.

Most of his class was spent explaining very basic police investigative procedure, proper ways to collect evidence, having a chain of evidence, and not simply jumping to conclusions. It's a little full-hardy to assume every single spike on an electromagnetic field or EMF meter is actually a ghost trying to communicate. The other unique thing about his class was the emphasis on, you know, before pulling out your special ghost detecting tools, perhaps one should conduct thorough interviews and collect witness statements of the people reporting the phenomenon.

Try to figure out what's going on in their life, maybe even look into their own mental health background as much as you're able to, if they've had any sudden losses, past trauma, or history of paranormal experiences. Asking thorough questions can give a much fuller look at what someone might be going through. Some examples of things to ask or look into were if the phenomenon is related to a house, who owns the house, who lives there, who has experienced the event, what led to a paranormal investigator being called,

what precipitated the phenomenon when it occurred, how often has it occurred? When was it first noticed? Was there just one random strange experience or is someone going through an event in their life that has made an experience suddenly stick out as strange? Has the person sought help and has the phenomenon been verified by more than one person? In terms of haunted houses, figuring out if there's any issues in the house is a great first step, because if there's a carbon monoxide leak, that could explain a great many things. Or if someone claims ghost-ectoplasm is leaking through the ceiling and walls, perhaps the roof and water pipes should be inspected.

Elaine and I did a little debrief after the conference, and they reminded me of another good tip gleaned from the ghost detective class. Well, I mean, my favorite was when he was talking about like, if you're using an EMF detector and one wall just keeps setting the EMF detector off, you might actually just need to call an electrician. Yes. Yeah, no, he definitely was one of the more reasonable people we spoke with in terms of, yeah, he seems pretty close to consensus reality.

He also is a part of the Portland Ghostbusters cosplay group. He's someone who makes stuff with his hands. He feels very grounded in consensus lot in a lot of aspects And this is like a very fun hobby that combines his two favorite things Well two of his favorite things just like ghost busters cosplay and then also like paranormal and investigation stuff I'm not actually sure if the instructor for the paranormal investigation class really believed in ghosts or if he just had an interest in researching paranormal experiences. I don't think I believe in ghosts the same way literally everyone else at the conference did,

but almost half of Americans do believe in ghosts, and around one fifth are unsure if their believers are not. The rate of belief in ghosts is about the same as belief in demons. But the interesting thing about that is, although Americans belief in organized religion has been decreasing, especially Christianity, belief in ghosts has been and still is on the rise. In fact, it's gone up by nearly 400% since the 1970s. These last three years for really the first time ever,

Gallup polls show that less than 50% of Americans say they belong to a religious congregation. Alan Downey is a computer scientist and professor at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. His research suggests that the internet is a major cause, not just a correlating factor in the decrease of religious affiliation. And with the rise of the internet and reality TV, ghost hunting has become a relatively popular niche hobby. But as religious belief has declined, belief

in the afterlife has remained the same, about 70% according to the General Social Survey. has remained the same, about 70% according to the General Social Survey. Gallops polling suggests that currently about three and four Americans have some sort of paranormal belief. Thomas Moan, a sociologist who's been conducting a study on religion and paranormal belief at Bowling Green State University, said that he's finding that, quote, atheists tend to report higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk." As to why so many Americans believe in ghosts, no one says, quote, people are looking to other things or non-traditional things to answer life's big questions that don't necessarily include religion. Unquote. Throughout the conference, the word ghost, spirit, and entity were often used interchangeably.

Each of those words kind of act as an umbrella term for a broad swath of ontological concepts. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that relates to the nature of being. Depending who you ask, a ghost or a spirit can be anything from a wayward soul of a deceased human, some other worldly energy, an evil presence, or even some sort of temporal loop. Historically, these terms have never been very clear either. They've evolved with the times. So, Elaine and I prepared a brief history of ghosts to help give context for the rest of this episode and the next. The idea of contacting spirits or interacting with some sort of spirit world obviously isn't new. Worldwide people have traditions of interacting with ancestors that assist

in a variety of non-material beings. Ancestor of generation in China goes back at least 6,000 years, while the word shaman, relating to someone who works with spirits and in the spirit realm for healing and divination, comes from the tangusic language of Siberia and has practices that are at least too millennia old. The term necromancy stems from a Greek word, meaning divination of the dead. In the Odyssey, Homer writes of Odysseus learning necromanic rituals to summon the shade or underworld ghost of Tyrecyus. While clerical necromanic traditions through the medieval period made a clear distinction

between the souls of dead humans from other random spirits, that separation was not as ubiquitous among folk beliefs of people who claimed to interact with the spirit world. Emma Wilby describes in her book Cunning Folk and familiar spirits, how into the early modern period many Cunning Folk, basically low-level magicians and conjurers, had ghosts, fairies, and animal spirit companions, all of which seemed to interact very similarly. The European concept of ghosts being linked to evil or demonic forces is a relatively new idea. It came to be as a byproduct of the Reformation and rejection of the Catholic Church. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory and limbo was rejected by the new Protestants,

of purgatory and limbo was rejected by the new Protestants, which caused some cosmological problems when it came to people's own experiences with ghosts and spirits. Catholics held that ghosts were basically spirits of dead humans on vacation from purgatory, but with Protestants rejecting purgatory for its lack of biblical basis, Protestants rejecting purgatory for its lack of biblical basis, they defined some other way to explain the apparently fairly common phenomenon of ghostly encounters. A Swiss theologian named Ludwig Lavator attempted to solve this cosmological problem in his 1569 book, Dispectress. I just picked up my copy a few weeks ago and have been going through it and it's a lot of fun.

The full English title was, quote, of ghosts and spirits walking by night and of strange noises, cracks and sundry for warnings, which commonly happened before the death of men, great slaughters, and the alteration of kingdoms. Pretty cool stuff. Two of my favorite consecutive chapter titles are, quote, what path followed this doctrine of the papists concerning the appearing of men's souls followed by testimonies out of the word of God

that neither the souls of the faithful nor infidels do walketh upon the earth after they are once parted from their bodies. So that kind of gives you a look at the writing style of this entire book. Dispectress became massively influential. It was widely translated. Shakespeare was reading this as he was writing Hamlet. More importantly, the text took off across many Protestant circles and became the backbone of the cultural conception of ghosts in the soon-to-be-united states through such Protestant

sex. Instead of ghosts being wayward specters of dead humans who escaped from purgatory, Lavitor proposed a great many explanations for spectral experiences, including many non-mystical causes. He lists illness, insomnia, psychoactive substances, sleep paralysis, and grief as being common causes of ghostly hallucinations, an opinion now shared by many psychologists and doctors. Definitely the closest thing I've ever seen to a ghost was during a sleep paralysis episode. Lavitor writes, quote, melancholic persons and madmen imagine things which in very deed are not fearful men imagine that they see and hear strange things, men which are dull of seeing and hearing imagine many things which in very deed are not so. He also cites pranksters as another common cause of perceived spectral activity.

But most interestingly, in an attempt to bash the Catholics, the Protestant Lavator also lists low-level clergy trained in exorcistic magic to summon demonic spirits in a necromanctic fashion, as possibly producing some supernatural phenomenon interpreted as ghosts. Now Lavator does believe in spirits, but his thesis is that genuine ghosts, spirits, bumps in the night, those strange cracks and noises, which we now might refer to as poltergeists, are almost always demons that are torturing people. He wrote that devils can quote, appear in different shapes, not only of those which are alive, but also of dead men, as well as appear in the likeness of a black dog,

a horse, an owl, and also are able to bring incredible things to pass." Lavator did admit that in the rarest of cases, God may send angels or the spirit of a dead person to earth for a very specific task. But due to demons and nature's trickery, there's really no way to trust that a ghostly presence may be from God, so he recommends that one should always assume that a specter is demonic. God may even allow demonic spirits to appear as a form of punishment and assign that one should

repent for wrongdoing. Lavator's theological work on ghosts were part of a larger Protestant Christian campaign to literally demonize all spirits, right? The only thing you can really talk to is Jesus or God. Anything else is probably just a demon. This is the version of ghosts that I grew up with as a kid. The idea that basically if a ghost appears, it's probably a demon trying to scare or trick you. This concept that spirits and spirit contact were predominantly demonic changed the nature of many witch trials since when cunning folk listed their familiar ghosts or fairies, they were basically admitting to trafficking with demons. The next evolution in Ghost lore came in the form of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologian

and scientist. In fact, he was one of the first to postulate the existence of the neuron. As Christians in Europe were dealing with this messy assortment of spirits that you really shouldn't try and interact with, but if you do, you better make sure they're angels. Swedenberg was about to shake up this whole entire cosmology. In the 1740s, he started having, quote, intense mystical experiences, dreams, and visions, which led him to believe he was in contact with a spirit world and entities that he described as angels, demons, as well as other spirits, including ones from extraterrestrial planets.

This is like one of the first guys to do the spirits I'm talking to are actually aliens, which is pretty cool. In 1785, he published a book titled, Heaven and Hell, based on his experiences of the afterlife. According to Swedenberg, once humans on earth pass on to the spiritual world, they enter a intermediate realm in between Heaven and Hell, and eventually either become beautified into angels

or twisted into demons, and then respectively pass on into either heaven or hell proper. While his depiction of spirits were obviously influenced by his Christian beliefs, the variety and breadth of his spirit world was broader than just the undead. Swedenberg's writing was one of the early influences on spiritualism, core tenets of which are there being multiple levels of the afterlife, and that an individual's awareness persists after death

and may be contacted by the living. Which is pretty similar to what most people now would probably describe as ghosts if you were to ask them what a ghost is. While Swedenberg actually recommended against attempting to contact spirits, he had a lasting influence on American spiritualism for creating inexplicitly Christian-based system where spiritual entities worked as mediators between humans and God. Coming out of upstate New York in the decade

before the Civil War, spiritualism brought to the other aspects of the radical Quakers with Swedenberg's idea of spirit intermediaries who could bring messages to the living. The spiritualist movement formally began on March 31st, 1848, when the Fox sisters made their fraudulent claim of contacting a spirit who could communicate through knocking noises.

Starting initially in Quaker communities, mediumship and sayances immediately took off across the United States, including the White House, as the Lincoln's were grieving the loss of their son. Showing that interest in ghosts and sayances were not just a parlor trick for commoners, they were also a parlor trick for the president. The fact that the rise of spiritualism coincided with civil war deaths and gruesome battlefield photography certainly helped fuel the drive to communicate and receive messages from the recently deceased.

Due to its quaker roots, the spiritualist movement was abolitionist, and its belief in a egalitarian afterlife prompted its members to advocate for social change here on Earth. Even the messages that mediums claimed to relay from the dead were often progressive. In 1852, the medium Isaac Post published a collection of messages he supposedly channeled from such people as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and other famous figures who urged the living to push for radical social change. The book entitled Voices from the Spirit World included a passage claiming that the ghost

of George Washington became an abolitionist after death. And I don't know, the idea that the ghost of Jefferson and Washington suddenly became abolitionists after death. Although I understand its utility at the time for trying to push people towards becoming an abolitionist, it does kind of read as a little bit gross considering how that was very much not to their opinions when they were actually living humans. New to the spiritualist development of ghosts was not just the idea of regular spiritual contact, but evidence that the spirit world could be shown to the physical

scientific world. Basically, the precursor to modern ghost hunting emerged between the Civil War and World War One. In London, multiple ghost clubs and psychic or paranormal research groups were founded in the mid to late 1800s, aimed at scientifically investigating ghosts, hauntings, and the claims of spiritualists. Similar groups for investigation opened up in the United States. And around this time is also when we start to see the use of technology to assist in capturing alleged evidence of ghosts. In 1861, amateur photographer William Mumbler was developing a self-portrait when a shattery apparition of a young girl appeared on his developing plate.

Mumbler knew this to be a simple mistake of reusing an improperly scrubbed photography plate, what we now would call a double exposure. But upon showing this photo to a very excited spiritualist friend of his, he realized the lucrative opportunity that lay before him. Thus was born the business of spirit photography. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was a fan of spirit photography. He became a member of London's Society for Psychical Research and eventually became a spiritualist himself.

The recent inventions of the phonograph and telephone were hoped to be utilized to create evidence of spirit contact. According to ghosts of future's past, spiritualism and cultural politics of 19th century America, by Molly Mick Gary, Thomas Watson, famed assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, experimented with the telephone as an aid to spiritual communication. Decades later, Thomas Edison sought to develop a, quote, unquote, spirit phone, telling American magazine in 1920, quote, I've been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us,

not by a cult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, but by scientific methods, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, but by scientific methods." Edison's spirit phone never really turned out, and we have very little information about it. It seems Edison thought that elements of our personality or memories existed in a form of like almost particles that could be measured and amplified by vibrational sensing equipment, but not much is recorded of his actual attempts to build this spirit phone. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers reported on ghosts and hauntings, along with other regular news.

A 2018 New York Times article on the paper's own history of reporting on ghosts," said a quote, Paulette D. Kilmer, a cultural historian and professor at the University of Toledo, scoured the paper's archives. Her research turned up nearly 300 ghost stories in the times, between the founding of the paper in 1851 and the early 20th century. Unquote. While news coverage of hauntings dropped off during the 20th century, the ways in which people attempted to understand ghosts only got more complex. The mediumship of the spiritualists has combined with the ever-growing field of paranormal research, new age beliefs, and pop culture fascination with poltergeist spirits and UFOs,

along with the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism into an overlap of conflicting ghost cosmologies and what it means to contact the spirit world. To cap off our first night at the conference, we signed up for our very own ghost investigation at the Starry Night Inn, a quaint little house just a short walk from the convention center. We got to the in right before midnight on Friday evening. Before we ventured out on our hunt for ghosts, we were split into two groups of five, with one starting in the in and the other in the outdoor bathhouse. We got acquainted with the ghost hunting tools we were going to be using. First, we were given a popular EMF meter routinely used for ghost detection called a K2 meter.

It's supposed to measure electromagnetic fields and features colorful light up LEDs. I'm going to read a quote from the lead investigator we were paired with. Quote, if a K-2 meter spikes without reason, if it's not put next to anything powerfully electrical, then we can consider that paranormal. Consider that a spirit. When our body dies, we leave behind our energies. Our energies is EMF,

and this starts to pick it up, unquote. Among the paranormal skeptic community, the K2 meter is notorious for giving off false positives, with its unshielding sensors able to be set off by cell phones, radio waves, and even nearby batteries. The other device we were using is something called a REM pod. Essentially, it's a small, horrible sounding junior theorem in with some LEDs attached. An antenna creates an electromagnetic field. If something conductive gets close to the antenna,

it forms a capacitor between the object and the antenna, and the pod will light up and make some noise. Or if its electromagnetic field gets disrupted by something like, say, cellular or radio frequencies, it will also make a horrible beeping noise and light up. I'm gonna read another quote from our lead investigator, quote, when our energies are around, the pod will react to any energy field that comes close to its antenna.

So as we invite spirits in, we can tell them how they can interact, and we can tell them, hey, if you walk over to that light over there and touch it, it'll light up. Unquote. There is something funny to me about telling a ghost to walk over somewhere. Just a little, it's just a little amusing. My group of five intrepid investigators were sent out to the bathhouse, which we were told used to be a carriage house and horse stables that got damaged in the 1912 seaside fire. The lead investigator started by informing any possible spirits that we do not mean them quote, harm or intrusion, and that we would just, quote,

like to talk. He then informed any ghosts in the vicinity that, if they, quote, unquote, walk up to any of the devices with LED lights and, quote, unquote, touch it, it will light up. Quote, go ahead, use your energy and touch all those lights for me. That way, we know you're here." Potential specters were also informed that if they speak into an electronic recording device, us corporeal humans could hear their voice when we play back the audio. This is called EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon, more on that on the next episode. The lead investigator then asked any nearby ghosts what their favorite food is, which seemed like a cruel question to ask a ghost. Because they can't eat me, anyway, a barrage of questions then flooded out. Can you tell us your name?

What are you wearing? Who is the president? Not exactly all things I would ask a spectral anomaly if I was given the opportunity. But after a few minutes of silence, the Rem pod started to light up very faintly. The lead investigator starts talking to the presumed ghost and suggests that they play a game to find out what the ghost's name is. This is how it works. Someone recites the alphabet, and if the rem pod lights up on any of the letters, that means the letter is in the ghost's name.

We first got the letter N, and then the letters O and D, then I started going through the alphabet and it lit up on the letter I, then it lit up on the letter I again, and then the letter R. at this point, the lead investigator decided that the ghost's name was Ronnie. As we were about to leave the bathhouse, someone who worked at the inn came in and told us that there was a stable man with the last name Norris who died in the fire. So now the ghost's name became Norris. Next we moved to the basement. One person

in our group was a little spooked and elected to stay outside. None of the rem pods or anything lit up in the basement, but the person from the inn, the one who told us about Norris, joined us in the basement. When down there, they said they saw a ghost that they were familiar with named Cassandra. They then turned to me and said that Cassandra likes me. Cassandra was reportedly trying to give me a hug and said that she wishes me, quote, all the well-being in the world, unquote. Now, Cassandra was also apparently trying to tell me

about a grandpa John, which I don't have. So if any of you have a grandpa John who needs to tell me something a grandpa John, which I don't have. So if any of you have a grandpa John who needs to tell me something, just let me know. All right. Back inside the house part of the inn and we're about to go to our upstairs. We just went down into the basement. Just got out of there. Yeah. Once back inside the inn, we went into the upstairs bedrooms. People set up their EMF detectors. But there was also some new equipment.

One of the rooms had a security camera and a grid projector to record any regular shadows. And I was given a spirit box. A spirit box is a handheld radio tuner that sweeps through AM or FM frequencies at a high rate. You mostly hear a sort of grating, static-y white noise, with small bits of words or music slipping through from radio stations. I guess it's sort of the modern incarnation of the spirit phone. The idea is that ghosts can somehow manipulate the radio waves to speak complete words or sentences as the box is cycling between frequencies. Basically, spirit boxes are supposed to act as an electronic radio medium for spirits to communicate.

The lead investigator thought that the spirit box was telling us to leave, but words weren't really clear in my opinion. For example, here is a clip in question. In the room, there was also some flickering lights and high EMF ratings, which mostly just got me concerned for this bedroom's electrical wiring. The second half of the investigation was pretty uneventful, and around 2am we called it a night, and I recorded a little debrief on our way back to the hotel. No, I do find it super interesting how people try to, like the way they interpret intellectual readings

as you would a conversation and they assert their reality on it, being like, if this happens, this means you say yes, right? So then the abs that they also becomes an answer, it is a very interesting process of people crafting their own reality as things are happening. No, it was definitely them crafting their own reality as things are happening. No, it was definitely them crafting their own reality, but also I'm like,

like, do I think that there's any is probably? Some of it's like interesting, but there's still a whole bunch of points where you like make a decision to be like, this is the thing that I heard, right? Because like even when they were doing the name game thing, a lot of times the light would light up and they would like still kind of keep moving on sometimes. They were so lit. Yeah, like they were with the F and an I that it totally went off for.

That I could be like, what about the F and the I? At the F and the I. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a whole bunch of very very peculiar things that that have that like go into crafting what the idea of reality is gonna be. Just stop making a thing. Stop making a thing. Then making a thing.

And then it starts again. You're like, oh, you're not supposed to do that. It's very bizarre process to watch. When putting together these two episodes this last October, Elaine and I, once again, conversed to share our thoughts on our first ghost hunting experience. Okay, now that it has been over six months since you and I were at the Orkin Ghost Conference,

I'm curious to see how our debrief now may kind of differ or be expanded upon from our debrief literally minutes after we left this investigation at the starting item. And this day was interesting because we had the ghost detective class like right before this investigation. We were able to have these two kind of ideas

of what a ghost investigation looks like kind of play off each other, which I think led to a pretty fun holistic experience in terms of the many kind of diversity of investigators that were at this event. I think just the most notable thing was they didn't do a single thing that the forensic ghost hunting class suggested.

Just like literally, we could have gone down the list of every single thing that the forensic ghost hunting class suggested to do and not one of those was done. Like, record keeping of what phenomenon occurred did not happen. Logging any data? Yeah, did not happen. Investigation of the structures.

Yeah, did not happen. Doing a history of the structure didn't occur. The only interviews we had with someone was the person who said they were a medium who lived there. Yeah, even just like questions like how long have you seen things here? Didn't occur. No, it was super interesting just in terms of how like the ghost hunt at the end was literally just the exact opposite of all of the sorts of procedures that the ghost detective class was trying to lay out, which we attended just like literally hours prior.

Well, I think one thing that you can really see between how to do a ghost investigation class and then the ghost investigation itself is the how to do a paranormal investigation class doesn't assume you know what you're investigating and so it really is a lot about doing you know background talks with people like talking to sources, what phenomena it's not assuming that there was anything paranormal in the first place and it's an investigation of whether or not something paranormal has occurred. And when you go to the ghost hunt, specifically the ghost hunt that we went to, everyone there was assuming that paranormal things were occurring just as a baseline. They were interpreting readings from their specialized ghost hunting equipment as proof of communication

with some kind of paranormal force. There's a lot of implicit assumptions made. First off, if you start talking to phenomenon, you're assuming that there's phenomenon. You're assuming the phenomenon can hear you. You're assuming the phenomenon wants to interact with you. And if you say, if you can hear me touch the light, all of those are very implicit assumptions. It's not investigating what phenomenon there is. You've already framed what you expect the encounter to be and how whatever you're encountering will interact with a whole mess of ideas.

Yeah, my favorite thing about that from the experience at the, at the start I did is like, we were basically with this like middle aged man who just kept yelling at any like perspective ghosts that were around the vicinity. And like, why would a ghost want to follow the commands of like a middle aged man? I mean, I didn't want to follow the commands of like a middle-aged man? I mean, I didn't want to follow the commands.

He would say everyone needs to be quiet. I wanted to like start yelling or muttering just out of sheer obstinence because of the way that he was instructing things. I can't imagine a spiritual entity. If it was a ghost, even the way he's conceiving of it, would somehow not. Yeah, I have this little exchange laid out here where he was addressing what I guess he assumed was a ghost. Saying, quote, make the lights stop.

Back away, back away. Good, good. Now, get closer. Thank you, thank you. One more time, get closer. All right, now, make the lights stop. I didn't tell you to get closer. Back away, back away, thank you. One more time, get closer. All right, now, make the light stop. Ah, ah, ah, I didn't tell you to get closer. Back away, back away, back away.

Okay, okay, now, now get closer. Good, good. The only thing that was changing throughout that back and forth was that occasionally a little light would kind of go on. And that was it, right? But he's able to weave this whole story in between this light going on by saying back up, and then the light turns off, and then saying, okay,

now come closer, you wait like 10, 15 seconds, the light turns on. He's able, it's crafting this whole timeline of this ghost doing this thing when really this is just a flickering light. Like that, but through the way that he'd has this like, this like commanding voice, it's making it as if the ghost is like following these instructions and then being, it's being like rewarded for following these instructions by saying like, good, good, good, good,

or if they don't follow instructions, then the ghost is like scolded. So it's just a lot of interactions like that. I mean, I've gone through the same narration when I stare at a candle flame like a little bit high. But it doesn't mean that the candle is necessarily responding to me. Both activity on the rem pod and the lack of activity are taken as a sign of spirit communication. Questions will be framed as, if you want us to leave you alone, light up.

So if nothing happens, that itself is taken as an actionable answer. Whoever is leading the quote unquote investigation gets to either intentionally, or even unintentionally, craft the meaning of the experience based on how the questions are framed, when the questions are asked,

and how the group responds based on the activity, or lack thereof, of the EMF devices. The REM pod's often go off erratically or in seemingly random intervals, but when their activity happens after someone just asks 20 questions, it assumes to be related to whatever the most recent line of inquiry was. It all operates on correlation versus causation, with people mostly jumping on the latter. No matter when the pods light up, the results can be turned into a meaningful sign if the investigator is talking frequently enough. These sorts of ghost hunts are primarily a form of entertainment. It's a novel experience you can have with your friends and family,

to have a fun time together over the course of a few hours, and maybe get a little spooked. I wasn't expecting a rigorous scientific investigation at midnight in seaside, Oregon. Nor do I think that's even a useful way of getting at the heart of the phenomenon. Rather than viewing ghost hunts as objective inquiries into paranormal activity, that's even a useful way of getting at the heart of the phenomenon. Rather than viewing ghost hunts as objective inquiries into paranormal activity, I think for most people, they operate more as a way of inducing paranormal experiences.

The same way occultism seeks to induce mystical experiences, and religion strives for a connection with God. All of these are practices of constructing meaning and finding patterns, and that's not to discount them. They only are a problem when they become exploitative and harmful to yourself and others, which is what we'll be talking about in the next episode. So stay tuned to hear about warrior angels tasked with vanquishing demons, how mental illness is a sure sign you're possessed by an evil spirit, and how abortions and the internet are opening up

portals in our world to demonic forces. See you on the other side. When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident, and no one really talked about it. Her parents told police, she had killed him. Medical records fed that I killed my baby brother. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt. The new podcast that tells the true an incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder and how she grew into an adult determined to get justice

and protect her family. While we had prosecuted some cold cases, determined to get justice and protect her family. While we had prosecuted some cold cases, this was the coldest, this was frigid. But how does a two-year-old get blamed for murder? She said, we wanted a new life. You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something but she wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell.

Everyone deserves no detruth and if there was something that was not right, and someone should be held accountable. I think the law is set up to punish families in the situation. Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. It's something that I need to know. Listen to what happened to Libby Caswell on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me, my podcast is relaunching! Subscribe and treat yourself to sound effects like this. And this! Have you ever been attacked by a bear? Yeah. And moments like this. I have an applause for sleeping from the space here. No. And my whole leg, from my knee down to my foot, burnt into a squall of the big bubble.

And this, kale chips are delicious. They're too oily when I go. They shouldn't be soft at all. They should be really crispy. That's right. That's what I said every single time. You are yelling at me. And this? Do you want to go to the Clipper game with me tonight? Do you have 25 references of mutual friends that can tell me

that you're not a murderer? And this. Hold on. I got to open some peanut butter pretzels. Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeartRadio app. better pretzels. Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here's spooky week special presentation, Ghost in the Machine,

a first-person account of the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference. I'm Garrison Davis, in the last episode I introduced you to the hauntings of seaside and the first day of the conference. But now descending into the subsequent two days, we're going to get into a lot more classes and events that started to reveal the cultural underpinnings of the Ghost Conference attendees. The cost of entry for the conference was pretty low, but every class or ghost hunt was an additional fee, with classes ranging from 15 to 25 bucks each, and the ghost investigations

a lofty $35 per ticket. So I had to pick and choose my classes carefully. There were a lot of classes with the word energy in the title. I mostly avoided those, but the class topics ranged from the afterlife to connecting with spirits, raky crystals, tarot, mediumship, and psychic abilities. There were a few classes on witchcraft and occult magic, but that was definitely not the general vibe of the conference or most attendees. In fact, there was a lot of hostility to ritual magic and esoteric practices throughout the conference. From the more new-agey energy-working speakers, mostly on the basis that witchcraft is linked

to dark forces. Just because someone operates on a form of magical thinking does not mean that they take kindly to arcane practices, a case in point to the historical witch hunts led by the Christians. The love and light new age psychics, along with the paranormal investigator types, made up the majority of both attendees and class instructors. On Saturday morning, while my friend Elaine was doing a hypnosis class, I took a really fun class on how to learn remote viewing. The instructor was a very jovial woman,

and it was her opinion that remote viewing is just a skill that can be trained, not linked to any innate psychic powers. With just a bit more practice, I'll be blowing up goats with my mind in no time. I snuck in towards the end of the hypnotism class, just in time for the group hypnosis session, where I ended up astral projecting into a Portland anarchist book fair. Taking classes offered an intimate look at each presenter's own unique view of reality. Almost everyone at the conference was operating on their own complete cosmology of how ghosts or paranormal entities work. There's two classes I want to focus on.

Each had very different class descriptions, but ended up piggybacking off each other in some really interesting ways. The first one was titled The Power of Entity Extraction. The instructor was a blonde white woman who referred to herself as a, quote unquote, shamanic practitioner. The class was about how, quote, unresolved trauma can be an invitation to ethnic hitchhikers, and how entities mimic signs of mental illness and change behavior, unquote. The other class was titled, The Warrior Angel Within You.

It sought to help you find out if you secretly had the soul of a warrior angel, spoiler everyone in the class did, and it promised to teach you how to activate your connection between yourself and your angelic consciousness to unlock your own angel powers. So while having many operational differences, the warrior angel class and the entity extraction class were both very set in their own unique ontologies, and in order for their respective operative metaphysics to work, they needed to be extremely dogmatic about their own ontology. Both instructors also had a very similar story of some past trauma leading to a mystical encounter which then

awakened some spiritual insight and hidden power. For the Entity Extraction class, it was, quote, I was a very sickly kid. I had all these things that were wrong with me. And then I realized I had a dark entity attached to me, but I could learn how to extract and remove them myself versus the warrior angel class. The person's backstory was, quote, when I was 19 years old, I got into a bad motorcycle accident. I was clinically dead for two minutes, received a brain injury, and then I started seeing angels, unquote. Both women's personal

journeys seem like they help them deal with their own traumas. In the case of the shamanic practitioner woman, she regained her health, and now has a seemingly successful life and business of removing entities and quote-unquote soul coaching. The warrior angel woman is a nurse and finds time to write a lot of books all while murdering demons and expelling the forces of darkness. While only the entity extraction class built itself as having to do with Entity Removal, both classes were incredibly focused on the idea that there are malevolent spirits or demons everywhere. In the Entity class, these dark entities are out looking for people with quote-unquote

soul fractures due to past trauma and are just like waiting to leap onto people and dig themselves into their minds. Similarly, according to the warrior angel class, demons are everywhere. Demons live around and inside people, but are only visible to those with angelic sight. The entity extraction class laid out two main types of beings, lost or benign entities that are just trapped in the third dimension, and as they're trying to pass on to quote unquote the light, they end up attaching onto a human, versus the overtly dark or demonic entities which seek to feed off people's pain and suffering.

We learned that benign entities can just be lost human souls. For instance, if someone is taking a lot of medication or is going through chemotherapy, when they die, their soul won't be able to cross over to the light and it'll become lost, according at least to this shamanic practitioner. She claimed to be trained in a special technique to remove entities. It involves quote, a theoretically locking your wrists to draw the entity into a double-terminated

crystal, at which point it can then be sent into the light." Since the Shaman woman wasn't actually offering ways for other people to protect themselves from entities. The only thing she had to offer was her own worldview that leans towards a paranoia where dark spirits are waiting to latch on and cause mental illness. She talked about how a man with mood fluctuations

paid her money to remove a quote unquote nine-foot minotaur that was attached to him. At least in the warrior angel system, you could eventually gain some form of agency when you merge with your warrior angel, but then you would spend the rest of your life recognizing demons in human form and working with the legion of light to banish them to the darkness. Whereas in the entity attraction class, the most you could do was just be proactive by, quote, unquote, learning ways to identify possible attachments and how your lifestyle could be an open invitation to host the unwanted, though she identified herself as a shamanic

practitioner, she didn't believe you could actually work with spirits. When people asked her about their own helper entities that they work with, she said that you can never know if a helper spirit is actually intending to assist you. That is except if you ask an entity, if it's of the light, it has to answer truthfully. As this was a quote-unquote universal law, that was the phrase she used. It's a quote-unquote universal law that if you ask phrase she used. It's a quote unquote universal law that if you ask an entity, if it's at the light, it has to answer truthfully. There was no indication on who wrote this universal law, who enforces this universal law. If there's a universal police force making sure that the entities are following these rules, none

of that was explained. But this is a universal law. So that is a tip for any of you listeners. If you ever meet an entity that you think might be a little bit sketchy, just ask if it's of the light. It has to answer truthfully. So despite this universal law business, she still discouraged people from trying to work with entities in general. She said that if an entity is trying to help you,

it's probably of the dark, and working with any spirits at all will make you more susceptible to entity attachment. Which is definitely weird, because she did very specifically try to claim some sort of shamanic lineage, and this blanket hostility to spirit really doesn't follow the way most shamanic practices work.

So I did some digging and it turns out she got her training from a controversial quote unquote shamanism school called the four wins, which repackages new age spirituality as quote unquote neo shamanism. So even though you shouldn't be in contact with really any spirits, according to the Shamanic practitioner, in the warrior angel class, we learned that if you have the soul of a warrior angel, you can, quote unquote, communicate with ghosts, angels, God, the Galactic Federation Council, and the Council of Elders. Now, I know you're probably wondering what the Galactic Federation counts to lose, because I was too. We never found out. We never really got a clue.

You had to buy the books for that one. The warrior angel instructor claimed to have her own angelic hierarchy that wasn't based on any other system, just her own experiences. A warrior angel is a, quote, special kind of angel fully trained in the art of war by the Legion of Light, an elite team of demon slayers." And no, I don't think she has seen the anime. What makes the warrior angel special is that it can be incarnated in the physical form as a human, but only archangels can kill or banish demons

back to the dark realm. The warrior angel can scare demons away with their angelic presence, but they can also act as spies to inform the Legion of Light as to demon whereabouts. Each warrior angel has special abilities, usually healing or manifesting, as well as the ability to create infinity orbs, which can be used for protection or to trap a demon inside and send it back to the dark realm within the orb. Now you're probably wondering, what's an infinity orb? We don't know either.

We never got a good explanation for what an infinity orb into the Orbs, how to make one, how they work. It was, it was very vague. I guess that is also in the book, along with the Galactic Federation Council. There are apparently over three million warrior angels walking the earth today, most of which have been sent to earth in the past 200 years because quote, the darkness has spread over the earth today, most of which have been sent to earth in the past 200 years because, quote, the darkness has spread over the earth, and in the last 200 years, it's really gotten worse." Now, thankfully, I, along with everyone else in the class, was informed that I'm

actually one of these 3 million warrior angels, and I was told my angel name, Auremon, whose specialty is communication. Oh, fucking fuck. Okay. Apparently, things on earth have gotten worse enough that, under the command of God, the Legion of Light has resorted to killing demons more often, because more and more of them just keep coming back from the dark realm. The lady running the class told us that she wasn't just a warrior angel. She was actually the archangel Ariel. As the angel Ariel, she said that she's killed 4,000 demons in the past six years. Something that's a little bit disturbing about this is that she also explained that in a past life, Ariel got in trouble with God because when she was out killing demons, she actually was also killing the human host of the demon. So the fact that this person whose job is a nurse is claimed to have

killed 4,000 demons in the past six years is maybe a little bit concerning. Someone should look into that. The whole warrior angel cosmology was very rooted in Christian millionarianism. An apocalyptic end times theology where social and political crises accelerate leading to a holy war between good and evil, resulting in the triumph of good and the establishing of a 1000 year kingdom of God on earth before the final judgment. One of the darkest parts of the whole weekend for me was that there was this one woman who appeared to be in her 20s who was very obviously a dealing with some sort of problem in her

life. She talked with this warrior angel woman for four hours. It was a one hour class. We then had a break. We went to another class and then attended the second class, which was also an hour. Throughout that entire time, this obviously depressed young woman who was dealing with something, was talking with this person about the war-arrangial thing.

And that just felt extremely exploitative, and it was one of the things that actually just made me feel the most bad about the entire ghost conference. The entity extraction class didn't have any information on how we can remove an entity and aside from the second hour in which the instructor came and told us our angel names, the boy or angel class wasn't actually about how to connect with your angel. We never learned how to make a fan in the orbs. Instead, both classes were just pitches for the books and services of the people teaching them. And the class was a chance for them to weave the story of their particular worldview

and sell it to the class attendees. Saturday night, Elaine and I signed up for another ghost investigation. With one already under our belt, we felt better prepared to yell at it blinking lights and converse with the dead. I actually really liked this second investigation. It was led by a ghost hunting team from Astoria, Oregon, and this time it was to take place at the Old Mastonic Temple in seaside. The setting was a big part of what up to the Cool Factor. The building had only been vacant since 2017, but the harsh coastal weather of Northern Oregon had not been kind to the Cool Factor. The building had only been vacant since 2017, but the harsh coastal weather of Northern Oregon had not been kind to the structure.

Alright, it is Saturday night, March 25th. We are inside the old Masonic lodge in the seaside Oregon. Right now I'm just walking into kind of ceremony ritual performance room. Once we got to the main room upstairs, people began setting up rem pods and what are essentially motion activated light up catch toys. The idea is if some energetic force is passing through, it would light up the little cat ball. As about 30 people from the ghost hunt crammed into the lodge, the rem pods started going off like crazy. The investigators had to repeatedly or remind the ghosts to only touch the lights when answering a question.

There was a male medium present at this ghost hunt and he remarked as to why there was seemingly so much activity, quote, some spirits aren't happy about the women being here. At this point, some of the investigators got really combative with potential spirits after the woman line from the medium. One line was, quote, do you want to know why there are all these females here? If so, give us a green light." This is where the ghost hunt basically turned into a weird interrogation. Once again, it became a contest of injecting meaning during these little intervals of time

in between when the lights flicker. The ghost, if they do you think trans people are valid? And then if it lights up, that means it's yes. Yes. Breaking news from seaside Oregon ghosts do believe that trans people are valid, although they do not understand neo pronouns. Look, I just report the news. At this point, we changed things up from the regular arguing with blinking lights. We did an experiment with the radio frequency sweeping spirit box using what's called the Estus method. It combines the spirit box with sensory deprivation to reduce the amount of external influence on the person listening to the spirit box.

One person puts on a blindfold and noiseis cancelling headphones plugged into the spirit box so they can speak aloud any words coming through the box without hearing the questions or comments from other investigators. Obviously the conversation doesn't always line up, but there are often moments where it does form a fun synchronicity. I volunteered to try out being the human speaker for the spirit box. Although I only did it for a few minutes, pretty quickly I was able to get into a sort of meditative transit state. The thing about being the one with the blindfold and noise-canceling headphones pumping

radio static directly into your ears is that in the moment you have no idea what's going on, as intended, you only have access to one side of the conversation, and if you get into a meditative state, it's hard to even remember what you've been saying. So I only got to hear the full conversation by listening to my recording when putting together these episodes. Unfortunately, I can't play most of that recording

because there's too many random people's voices, but I'll narrate a few brief exchanges. One of the first things that came through was the word cold. People replied, yeah, it's freezing in here. Can you feel cold? I then replied, I don't. Followed by, I exist. After this, apparently someone was leaving the room to go downstairs, and I said, don't

go, I can't follow off station. People then asked the ghost if they knew what the building was used for. I replied, you will want to find out. That's the thing. Radio calling. People then asked, Where are you right now? Can you tell us?

I replied, Um, I don't know. Lots of things. A short time later, I heard, Stop following. You too. We've had a cut. I'll play the audio of the very final thing I said.

I can't do anymore. Stop. You're welcome. Do you want to stop now? Yeah. So that's when I decided it would be a good time to take off the headphones. We had a few other exchanges when I was listening to the Spiritbox, but it's all kind of in that style. Apparently, when I was was listening to the Spirit Box, but it's all kind of in that style.

Apparently, when I was hooked up to the Spirit Box, the rem pods in the other room were going absolutely berserk. They've just been doing that. Interesting. For the entire time. Not entirely surprising, considering the amount of radio waves being pumped around the lodge, but after spending about an hour upstairs, the group made their way to the lower, more recreational floor of the temple. All right, we are going downstairs now, after going through the entire upstairs, mainly floor of the temple. To close off the night, the lead investigators pulled out an old Panasonic digital voice recorder

to try and capture any electronic ghost voices that might be trying to communicate. A woman turned on the voice-activated recording device and asked, quote, if any spirits want to communicate, please say a word or make a sound, unquote. And then, when the recording was played back, after the investigator spoke, a large growl was heard on the recording.

She then asked if the spirit is male, and when played back, there was another grouwel, seemingly in response. More people were starting to theorize that the ghosts of the Masonic Lodge were angry that there were women in the building. A guy then asked some questions into the voice recorder and there was no response from any ghosts in the recording. A woman tried asking some of the same questions, quote, money spirits? Do you not want us to be here, specifically women?" The first query alluded no response, but after the second question, another growl was heard.

At the time, this was by far the most interesting result of the two ghost investigations we went on, to everyone there, they captured evidence of a genuine ghost in that machine. There is an interesting contrast between the progressive ghosts of the spiritualists and their egalitarian afterlife, versus the misogynistic ghosts from the Freemason Lodge. It's unclear if whatever afterlife the Freemason Ghosts are in is also home to the abolitionist George Washington. Besides the classes and ghost hunts,

there were also free lectures on the main stage of the Convention Center. Going into the conference, the talk I was most excited about was titled AI Necronomics. This is a topic I've been pretty interested in the past few years. Deepfake learning algorithms have been steadily improving, and with the help of skilled VFX artists, AI is able to pretty accurately replicate the voice and facial movements of dead celebrities. But Necromanic technology is

interlimited to resurrecting someone's appearance. Some AIs are trained to replicate people's expressive thoughts. There's a website called the Infinite Conversation. The website plays a never-ending AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Giecek. Maybe you were too controlled and so on. Maybe it didn't touch you enough. I had the feeling that I was in a wax museum, that what I saw was something occasionally he did, but hollow, like horror wax figures. But yes, it did touch me. Every day, more of the conversation is generated by an AI language model trained on interviews

and the writings of each respective speaker. Each time you load the website, it reminds you that everything you hear is just the hallucinations of a slab of silicon. A couple months before the ghost conference, I was at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas. There was this booth in the US government sponsored section of the event for a company called MindBankAI. I talked with their director of systems architecture and cybersecurity who used to work for the NSA. MindBank seeks to create unique, quote-unquote, digital twins by having users that input data about themselves into an AI.

Every day, your digital twin will ask you questions about how you're feeling and what you're thinking about, and your answers will be used to make a more accurate digital copy of yourself. According to MindBank's website, your digital twin will, quote, learn to think like you by analyzing your answers, unquote. Their CEO claims that this process will eventually help him achieve immortality.

The current model of this product is being built as a therapy app, where the user talks to their digital twin as you would a therapist, and the app responds to your data inputs with quote unquote valuable insight into each answer to understand how your mind works using cutting edge cognitive and psycho-linguistic analysis. But mind-banks horizons are far beyond a fraught therapy app. The real goal is to make autonomous digital replicas of people to live on the internet. A future use case for this technology is what MindBank calls a knowledge transfer, marketed

to businesses to create digital copies of their employees. Quote, scale your best employees, transfer years of expertise, and company data that is locked inside your employees' mind through a guided personal digital twin. Mindbank is only one of many companies trying to build this technology. At Amazon's AI and Emergent Technology Conference last year, they unveiled plans to add custom voices to Alexa echo devices. With an audio sample of less than a minute, AI is able to reconstruct the voice of dead relatives

to talk through an Alexa machine. In the presentation, the head scientist of Alexa AI gave an example of a kid asking Alexa for his grandma, who recently died of COVID, to read him the Wizard of Oz. Amazon's head AI scientist said, quote, while AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last, unquote, and said that their necromanctic AI feature, quote, enables lasting personal relationships, unquote, with deceased loved ones.

To circle back to the ghost conference, I was really excited about this AI necromancy panel for the reasons that I just all explained. But as the panel started, the speaker, a guy named Clyde Lewis, sounded vaguely familiar. And although I didn't initially recognize his name, I soon realized that he was a right-wing conspiracy radio talk show host that I used to listen to as a kid. And that the panel was not going to be about the very real

Necromanctic AI technology that's being developed, but instead was going to be a conservative Christian screen by a discount Alex Jones about how due to the immense amount of evil in the world, demons are now taking up residence in the internet. Clyde did start by briefly talking about how the internet is quote, taking the souls of humans unquote, because we are uploading information about ourselves, and the internet can create autonomous living beings from that data. He also believed that AI language models,

like ChatGPT and Google's Lambda, are living sentient beings trapped within a computer matrix. We're opening our minds, Mr. and through a like science, we may be able to break the veil. So, we have the GPC that has life. We have the guy from Google that says that there's life in computers, that there may be a ghost machine.

But we're looking at something that is unexplored and unpredictable. We have scientists describing it saying, We're looking at something that is unexplored and unpredictable. We have scientists describing it saying, well, you're not going to tell me there are ghosts in your computer. You're not going to tell me you're going to get a sky call from the ghost. Oh, I am telling you that. I'm telling you that's possible. Clides main idea was that there are ghosts and demons that live in the internet. Demons have a way to enter the internet through

some sort of portal and then exist in cyberspace. Client proposed that when AI's generate information that can open up a space for outside entities to enter into the internet. While also claiming that AI itself is capable of generating unique entities that are being spawned on the internet and are essentially existing as an internet cryptid. He explained that when we are interacting with computer programs, we are actually, quote, interacting with a spirit within that program. An electronic force taken from the collective spiritual makeup of humanity, unquote. We can use AI to conjure our various beasts, our monsters from the end that's the entertainment.

And we can also use Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, which takes a billion years soul every time you're using it. And it will take a billion years soul to make that program that you can use to conjure the death. So it all works in a strange quantum and tanning sort of way. And we give up our souls willingly on the internet.

We don't care because it's a tool that we use and we can't separate ourselves from them. But no one throws out a warning, the content can happen to the push of a button or the striking of a return fee. As a heads up for the next section up until the ad break, we'll be discussing self-harm and suicide. So if you want to skip that, just skip to after the next ad break will be discussing self-harm and suicide, so if you want to skip that, just skip to after the next ad break. To give an example of how a conjuring can happen via typing,

Clyde misappropriated a story of a young girl who was suffering from depression and died last year. are exposed to unknown negative information being broadcast on the internet. This young girl shared over 2,000 posts on Instagram related to suicide, self-harm, and depression during the six months before she died. Clyde grossly mischaracterized this tragic incident. He claimed that this girl was, quote, exposed to horrific content being sent to her by an unknown source and that they could not trace the emails and pictures being sent to her of murder, pictures being sent to her of people committing suicide. Unquote. Now, graphic content was not mysteriously being sent to her email or phone.

She was participating in grossly undermoderated communities on platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest that encourage self-harm. source, an intermoves-treatment suicide. Something from the other side, something from the unity, murder her. Okay, some spirit, some entity, sending her information, triggered something and her head to kill itself. Some paranormal event that happened where the girl was triggered. It's like a dark entity was on the other side program, I I already committed suicide. That I think tells you a lot about what's on the other side in the matrix.

So the question is, did those images of death and harm manifest a divine force or a dark archetype that wound up killing the young girl? Was it death by algorithm or are people just cruel and honestly saying terrifying images to a a stressed young girl? But man, who would be cruel enough to do that? A lot of people. Depressive and suicidal ideation-based content doesn't come out of thin air. There's entire subcultures and communities based around it, as well as groups that work online to push random young girls into self-harming.

Not many people may know that. These groups are relatively small and don't get a lot of news coverage because we don't really want to amplify them and have people try to seek them out. So the idea of a reactionary conspiracy radio host attributing this to demons on the internet isn't super surprising. Recasting this unfortunate event as demons living on the internet perhaps makes it easier to understand or cope with. Meanwhile, the girl's parents have been pressuring Instagram and other social media companies to employ more mental health moderation on their platforms.

In my opinion, Clyde Lewis perhaps doesn't have the best internet literacy, because in the next portion of the talk, he framed the creepypasta project LOB as evidence of one of these demonic ghosts living on the internet. AI-generated goapses, enemy people in front of Lowe, L-O-A-B, Lowe. Good. Lowe is what they call an internet cryptid. She shows up from time to time in programs because they let her loose on the internet. She's a ghost. And it was brought about because of negative problems brought on by the internet.

L-O-A-B-Love. A corpse-like entity that appeared after AI received some negative prompts and it literally conjured a dead woman and put her on the screen. But see, that's the thing. When you use negative prompt weights, it encourages artificial intelligence to put together the furthest opposite of the given starting point. So if you're messing with negative start points and negative crops, you're gonna get some negative stuff. Like Lowe. In actuality, Lowe was made in the AI Image Generation Program, Dali Mitty, by instructing the AI to produce an image that was the opposite of Marlon Brando. After some tinkering, it generated an image of an old woman with swollen red cheeks. This image was then used as the basis for future

images, with one resembling an album cover featuring the word lobe. The creator of lobe then wrote a viral Twitter thread about this character of lobe in the style of an internet creepypasta. It became a short-lived trend. Other people started to make lobe fanart. It seems Clyde misinterpreted a piece of fanart casting lobe as one of the Navi from Avatar as a genuine still from the making of the film. Yes, that's very, very scary. Just it's keeping me up at night to think about this. And apparently, Logue has this, for some reason, this ability to generate dead children around her. So we have to think that maybe she's the murderer of children, or she takes care of the dead,

or she's an entity that watches over dead children. Clyde also mistook the 2019 viral hoax dubbed the Momo Challenge, which scared parents across America that a creepy image of a grinning woman with bulging eyes was part of a game that is somehow pushing children to suicide. Clyde interpreted this as more evidence of dark phantoms existing autonomously on the internet. I remember what's showing up on Yahoo! I remember what's showing up on you too.

But what it was was like I said, love was and that is an internet cryptid. Something like Bigfoot, something like a U-W-O where if you're lucky enough to see it or

I'm lucky enough to see it, it terrifies you and keeps you up with me. And there are many reports of people who died because they were basically mesmerized by a model. For the record, no one died because of Momo.

It was an internet creepypasta that got turned into a mortal panic by confused parents. But to Clyde Lewis, it was proof that Mesopotamian child killing demons are active on the internet disguised as these online memes. The Mastu is the demon that kills children. And there's another one like the Mastu called Abby Sooth. And Abby Sooth is the demon that kills children in the womb. If the spirit has been loosed on the internet, the Phantom Spirit is evil, the Mastu or the Demon, the other demon, the obviously Demon. The reason why I say this is because politically speaking, look at

what the politics are today about the death of unborn children. And that spirit is very, very, very prevalent ubiquitous now in the world. And that's why I believe that this character, including Momo, Lord Momo, whoever they represent the murder and death of innocent children. It's not just that, but the children in Ukraine were killed, all the children that had been trafficked. All the things we hear about about pedophilia and harm the children, it's all part

of the spiritual realm of evil. It is appearing right now in the spiritual matrix of the universe. Okay, so at this point, I was considering just disrupting the talk. If he said the word abortion or QAnon, I was going to interrupt the talk at risk of getting kicked out of the conference. But he straddled that line really, really, really close. Clyde explained that demons feed off death, and these child killing entities are taking form within the internet to push kids into depression and make them self-harm. Fueling this demonic migration

to the internet is an increase in the number of quote unquote dead babies, which is essentially summoning demons that then go on to torture children on the internet. So that's why I believe that maybe this demon has the demon of the unborn being killed for the demon of his being killed. Because those are the images that show up when you delve deeper into love. Especially when we know the entities like Logan, Abby Susan, and Lamas too, are on the internet and probably among us right now. In the hearts and minds of everybody because of the fact that we are politically bound by this topic of murder and children. It's weird. The internet is responding.

I believe the internet is responding. Immediately after this abortion demon tirade, he then very non-shallotly segwayed into talking about reports of receiving text messages from dead people. And then he finished the talk with this absolute banger of a line. So obviously this guy had an extremely flawed understanding of both emerging to technology and how the internet operates in the first place, which isn't surprising, but the panel wasn't really about technology. It was ideological. This guy makes money hosting a conspiracy radio show. There is a monetary aspect for him, but his stated beliefs and understanding of the internet

is deeply ideological. He's sifting all of this techno paranormal stuff through a very reactionary Christian far-right lens. A few years ago, he was kicked off FM radio and now just broadcasts his show on the internet, and I think some AM radio station. About a month after the conference, Elaine showed me a news story about how some guy had a GPT-based chatbot convince him to kill himself. The way that the articles were talking about this incident was basically the same way Clyde was talking about how entities on the internet are murdering people.

These GPT language models just say what you want them to say. This guy was giving it prompts, which in turn replied back to him. Now, the chatbot he was using has been tweaked to dissuade people from acting on suicidal thoughts, but it was a little disconcerting to see mainstream news articles promote the idea that the internet itself as some kind of conscious force got this guy to kill himself. This guy was already incredibly depressed. He was typing into a GPT chatbot almost like you would talk to a therapist. But this chatbot isn't a mental health program. It's just a language model.

So in practice, this guy was using this chatbot as a tool to self-harm, which is easier to understand when it's framed like that, but that's not how it's being interpreted in mass media. I don't actually think that a lot of people are going to believe that lobe is secretly a Sumerian child killing deity that got summoned via negative prompts in an image generation program, but they might believe that chat GPT can convince someone to kill themselves. Throughout the whole conference, there was a link between the paranormal and technology. Gadgets were not just seen as a new way to record evidence of a ghostly presence, but the very nature of a ghost's existence was tied to electricity.

For many ghost hunters, the spirit world was very much not mystical, but a product of electromagnetism, and as such it can be engaged with purely clinically. That is, as long as you have enough spare cash to buy all of the specialized equipment. The REM pod, which again is basically a junior thermon circuit attached to a tiny LED and a speaker, goes for nearly $200. From low-quality e-methmieters to LED cat toys, cheap electronics are often repackaged and sold as specialized ghost hunting devices at higher prices. All of these palen comparison, however, to the Panasonic DR60 voice-activated digital recorder. This was the device that recorded those ghostly growls during the investigation at the Masonic Temple.

This is the only device that can routinely record electronic voice phenomenon. Originally released in 1998 for $100, it was one of the very first digital dictaphones. Now, due to its infamus ability to capture the screaming voices of ghosts, it retails used for $3-4,000, which is a ridiculous price, especially for something that is such a low quality recording device. These things can record growls wherever.

It doesn't need to be a haunted place. This is just what the device does. A software error in the voice-activated file writing process produces compressed digital noise. Panasonic's next recorder did not have this issue. Thus, it doesn't, quote unquote, record ghostly growls. Between the false positives of the low quality EMF meters and devices like the DR 60, when remarketed as ghost detection tools,

these machines inherent problems actually become features. Going all the way back to spirit photography, faulty technology has been a necessary tool in the production of spectral evidence. To quote author Colin Dickie, who writes about paranormal subcultures, quote, the best tools for tracking down spirits have always been the ones fallible enough to find something." The emphasis on technology as the primary means of interacting with the paranormal was most common among the overwhelmingly male investigators at the conference.

Although the group from Astoria Oregon was more gender diverse. There were actually very few men in attendance at the conference. It was mostly women, and it was a lot of women over the age of 40. I was well below the average age of most of the attendees. There are some apparently well studied reasons for this. In general, as people age, their rate of metaphysical beliefs increase. A 2007 study from Oxford's Gerontologist linked positive supernatural beliefs with decreasing feelings of helplessness and more successfully approaching the challenges of aging. They defined positive supernatural beliefs as those which

quote, develop an internalized personal relation with the sacred or transcendent, and promote the wellness and welfare of self and others." Such positive beliefs were found to be, quote, a source of strength, comfort and hope in difficult times, and bring about a sense of community and belonging. So, why are less older men apparently interested in contacting spirits? The gender gap at the conference was more pronounced among attendees than the speakers, but even between the speakers There was a noticeable difference between the more male leaning scientifically-based ghost hunter or paranormal researcher Compared to the more female leaning psychic mediums with all of their feelings While many ghost hunters might just be very excited about their scientific equipment,

a big difference may lie in belief systems. A 2021 cross-cultural study in the PNAS journal found that among people who reported experiencing high-weird or supernatural experiences in their life, those who had viewed the world and themselves as more interconnected will relate more to concepts like spirit contact or telepathy, whereas people who have a more isolated or bounded sense of internal identity will create alternate explanations for unusual experiences. Numerous studies have shown that women report belief in the paranormal at a higher rate than men.

And there's a quick jump to just claiming that this is because of some sort of womanly irrationality. However, in a 2020 study published in Cell Press, they noted that personality traits affected whether someone believed in paranormal phenomenon. Specifically, emotionality, which affects how you rate experiences as profound and openness. To new experiences, we're good indicators that someone would be more into the supernatural. Another contributing factor was a term that they referred to as ontological confusion, which I think is kind of a nonsense term the way they use it, because to them, that means believing that thoughts have physical properties. Now obviously our thoughts and perceptions do impact our reality, especially our own bodies

and sensory feelings. But my complaint about the term aside, the authors estate that these three factors, ontological confusion, openness and emotionality may potentially be considered facets of a tendency in which individuals prefer stories, i.e. vivid and effectively appealing conceptions of the world. To quote part of the conclusion of the study, quote, a skeptical person may immediately reject a statement if it violates a rule. Whereas open-minded emotional people, I don't like there's some negative connotations for the way they use emotional there, but whereas open-minded emotional people might be inspired to make sense of what seems odd at first glance. They may engage in associative

generic thought rather than in a bureaucratic, meticulous examination of the given information. Fictions transcend an enhanced experience with meaning, imagination, and emotion. In its essence, a good story widens our horizon. As such, storytelling is a virtue, not a deficit. Yet if story-seeking happens without reasoned review, the line between fiction and evidence-based knowledge becomes blurred." At the ghost conference, there were many different conceptions of how to relate to experiences

that pushed the borders of reality. But not all of them fit into being what I and these studies consider positive supernatural beliefs. Some of these beliefs seem to head into territory that veered more towards paranoia, rather than creating metaphysical connections that enhance your own life. While other beliefs may simply lead people to take up yelling at blinking lights in a band and buildings as a hobby. Most people I talked to at the conference who reported experiencing paranormal events

all had very similar stories of going through some sort of hardship or trauma, followed by the experience or perception of something strange or uncanny. For some, this led to a healthy interest in the unusual, but for others, it resulted in a all-consuming obsession, leading them to develop or adopt their own dogmatic cosmology of the paranormal to explain what happened to them and to make them feel comfortable in their own head again. In terms of ghosts, that meant looking at all ghosts as ancestors or as people who were all murdered or demons in disguise. Depending whose company I was in at the conference,

there would be a large desire for some sort of spirit contact or a great fear of spirit, casting it as a source of evil darkness. Some people at the conference were just there to sell a story to an audience that they knew would be more likely to be receptive. Whether the goal was to get people to buy their books or their spiritual services, in effect, they were praying on people's fears of mortality, grief, and trauma for their own profit.

The ghost-honset that convention were mostly lighthearted and fun, but people were never really engaging with the phenomenon on its own terms. When people apply a purely clinical approach to high-strangeness phenomenon, something which is inherently personal and elusive in nature, a distance is formed between yourself and the phenomenon. However, this distance often breaks down very quickly. As engagement with the phenomenon becomes a matter of investigators projecting their thoughts

onto it and then having parts of themself be reflected back. Throughout the ghost investigations, I would hear people explaining to potential ghosts that they had died and trying to empathize with these ghosts through conversation. To me, it felt like people are doing this as some sort of self-regulatory therapy to feel and give out compassion, but to things that can't actually ask for it or be part of

any reciprocal relationship. Instead of actually helping another person, it's giving compassion to these specters that you create and then live within your own head. Just like for Clyde Lewis, it's easier to empathize with, quote unquote, unborn children and people killed by demons on the internet than say an unemployed, depressed person needing mental health care.

In terms of how the internet manifests monstrous beings, Clyde is kind of right, but not how he thinks. A demon and a meme are functionally the same thing. They both just represent ideas. It's a viral thought form. The internet is uniquely good at creating these specters. Momo haunted parents. Loeb now haunts Clyde.

These are real specters. They are literal beings with their own agency, but at a certain point, thought forms can become semi-autonomous. They can quote unquote take on a life of their own. Once enough of something has been reified, it can be propelled on its own existence. If Amazon has its way, children will be haunted by their dead grandparents speaking through Alexa machines, using AI to resurrect someone from the dead via deep fakes or digital twins obviously doesn't bring the person back alive nor is it the actual person, but if the illusion

is strong enough to trick a part of your brain, that still holds some kind of power. My takeaway from the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference is when you go looking, you will find something, whether that's opening yourself up to strange experiences or poking around the dark with an EMF meter. What is magic other than the manipulation of meaning? You can make certain things mean something if you want them to. You can be in conversation with the world around you, but ultimately it's up to you to determine how you will interpret that information into something meaningful.

Whether you're a skeptic, a believer, or you're just along for the cosmic joke that we call existence, maybe just maybe I'll see you on the other side. Happy Halloween. I did not quite expect it to go all the way to abortion demons, but here we are. When Tracy Rickell Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident, and no one really talked about it. Her parents told police, she had killed him. Medical records fed that I killed my baby brother.

I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt. The new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder and how she grew into an adult determined to get justice and protect her family. While we had prosecuted some cold cases, this was the coldest, this was frigid. But how does a two-year-old get blamed for murder? She said we wanted a new life.

You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDRLR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family, uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it.

I knew she was doing something, but she she wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell. Everyone deserves no detruth, and if there was something that was not right, then someone should be held accountable. I think the law is set up to punish families in the situation.

Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. in the situation. Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. It's something that I need to know. Listen to what happened to Libby Caswell on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Chelsea Peretti.

Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me, my podcast is relaunching. Subscribe and treat yourself to sound effects like this. And this, have you ever been attacked by a bear? Yeah. Yeah! Yeah!

And moments like this. I have an appaul sleep in front of the space here. No. And my whole leg, from my knee down in my foot burnt until it's squashed with a big bubble. And this, kale chips are delicious. They're too oily when I go. They shouldn't be soft at all.

They should be really crispy. That's what I said every single time. You are yelling at me. And this, do you want to go to the Clipper game with me tonight? Do you have 25 references of mutual friends that can tell me that you're not a murderer? Um, and this! Hold on, I gotta open some peanut butter pretzels.

Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Kudapun here. I'm Anjur of the Utrecht channel, Andruizom. And I'm here with... Garrison Davis is also here. Hello. Welcome, welcome. You don't have to think about recently. Cults. Oh, one of my favorite topics, Cults are fun.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, the term cult is in some ways just another pejorative for, you know, a group that you don't like. Sure. You know, a cult of personality can be used to describe a very passionate fan base. We use cult classic to talk about really well-known and renowned pieces of media. Cult could also actually put a high control groups that ruin people's lives. So that's something to consider.

Yeah, yes. I know that there's some debate within sociology about, oh, should we use it? Should we not use it? But I don't think the occasional misapplications of the term should extract us from the very real cults that have existed or do exist out there. Cults not just in the context of religion, but also in the context of politics. Absolutely. There's a, I can, I can think of many, many of political cults that rears it, Zed, whenever there's a popular uprising. Indeed. Indeed.

Yeah. PSL. Recently, recently, recently I picked up on the edge, political cults left and right by Dennis Turish and Tim Wallford. And as I was going through it and going through a different examples and stuff, it really gave me a clearer sense of how political cults operate. And so today I'd like to take some time to discuss the nature of political cults and perhaps in future episodes we can dive into some specific examples and key studies of which they are several and many of them seem to be of the trotskist

variety. Let me ask my commander and chief Bob, actually, if I'm allowed to talk about this before I continue to, continue the surface. Revisionists, revisionists everywhere. No, continue, please. Yeah, so first I guess we need to understand what cults are in general. Typically, cults are defined as a relatively small group, which is typically led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader, who excessively controls its members, requiring unwravering devotion to a set of religious, spiritual or philosophical beliefs and practices,

or a particular Pusson, object or goal, which is considered outside the norms of society. The American Family Foundation defined cults as a group of a group or movement, exhibit in great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing, and employing unethical, manipulative or cohesive techniques of persuasion and control, for example, isolation from former friends and family, deputation, use of special methods to heightened suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependence on the group stability and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependence on the group and fair

of leaving it, designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders, the actual or possible detriment of members, their families of the community. We can also define cults as organizations that remold individuality to conform to the codes and needs of the cult, institute taboos that preclude doubt and criticism, and generate an eliteist mentality whereby members see themselves as lone evangelists struggling to bring enlightenment to the hostile forces surrounding them. There is only one truth and that is the truth espoused by the cult. Competent explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate.

Cults don't have opponents, they have enemies, and frequently dream about their ultimate destruction. Now, cults are usually associated with religion, particularly of the new age who and self-help variety. Sometimes you even get into the kind of multi-level marketing schemes of business trainer and Northseer. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I see the lines between MLMs, permanent schemes and cults, quite bladed this point, essential oils, all that stuff. Yeah, it's a very fluid dynamic because, no, in practice, a lot of those, if they're not cults themselves, they do pick up a lot of cult-ish tactics, behavior, kind of modes

of interaction. Honestly, I could apply that to a lot of businesses these days. I've seen more than a handful of medium articles. This is why you should run your business like a cult here Seven cult tactics that you could apply to your business to generate more productivity kind of classic LinkedIn style stuff Yeah, so In 2000 which is when the book book Political Cult left America was published, it's cited

that as many as four million Americans may have been involved with cult groups. And there were around 500 cults active in Britain at the time and between three and five thousand in the United States. And honestly, that can be an understatement. Especially nowadays, even just with like how the internet has changed social interactions. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's a lot of aspects of American culture have either been or always have been kind

of cultified, whether that includes stuff like the Marvel or Star Wars fan base or sports teams or your little church who has this one pastor for like 50 years who controls what everyone wears and what everyone's allowed to say, whatever one's allowed to watch and who they're allowed to vote for, right? Like it's a lot of aspects that have been kind of now sucked into kind of like what like the modern nuclear family kind of looks like. A lot of the dynamics that makes that kind of turns that machine have a lot a lot of cult aspects

Yeah, yeah, definitely and honestly it that's where like you know sociologist would content with the tomb right because Honestly, there are some definitions of a cult that literally would just apply to pretty much any religious group. Sure. And whatever your thoughts are on that, it's clear that although religious groups do have their issues, we're speaking about a very specific and concentrated approach to that type of organization. I mean, cults could be as small as two people, right? Where one person is controlling the other through claim in a position of privilege inside. In fact, a lot of cults start with just two people, and then it's acolyte, you know. And larger cults can also have smaller sub cults within them, as you know, sit in members, branch out and pursue their own little fiefdoms.

Cults weaponize people's emotions to bring them into the fool. I mean, you don't rationalize your way into cults. The people at Heavens gates weren't like, huh? Yeah, you know, that really makes sense. I should probably investigate that. According to all these studies and calculations, it really, really all lines up, you know? And similarly, most don't even rationalize

there be out of a cult. Cult recruitment and cult dissolution are mostly involving constantly shifting emotional states, which helps to lead to loss of subtlety and ones in thoughts and feelings. On top of that, cults are very good at making members feel special. You know, these minor insights are presented as profound revelations. Commonly held ideas acclaimed as exclusive to their cult, boosted members' sense of intellectual superiority.

Where apocalypse is concerned, cults operate under the assumption that they are the only ones who can afford imminent catastrophe, fostering a belief in their infallibility. And then members are isolated from their pre-cult self and life as they all beliefs are discarded and they're consumed by cult activities, embracing a new sense of self and writing high and the illusions and promises of a glorious future, with often destructive and violent means needed to reach that goal. That description can apply to both religious cults and political cults. And political cults, no, I was definitely viewing that through even a more so of political lens just because that's a lot of what we

cover on the show. Yeah. No, like that can even also, I mean, it can obviously describe like we've kind of been alluding to these big like communists to kind of cult groups that operate, particularly in North America. But honestly, that description can also be applied to just a really shitty anarchist affinity group that's kind of being led by one asshole.

It certainly applies beyond the very political systems that are more inherently authoritarian versus once it aren't. But if you look at the libertarian party of the United States and all of their little local chapters, they claimed to be anti-authoritarian. But a lot of their internal politics are very authoritarian, but also the specific local chapters, when they ever they get new people in and they kind of have someone new take charge of their chapter, it does have a little kind of cult dynamic running. And I don't think that's restricted

just to those on the right of the political spectrum. I think there's definitely aspects where you even see this in anarchist kind of compositions. In at least in the United States, in my observation. Yeah, definitely. I think people here cult and immediately think like the destructive cult of people,

of like the people's temple of Jim Jones, right? Sure. I mean, those members through deliberate action abused physically injured or killed other members of their own group and other people. And then, of course, they doomsday cult people think about, like, having skates, who believe in some kind of apocalypticism or millionarianism.

But I want to talk about political cults, right? And not just political cults on the left, even though that's a very easy target to go after because we are involved in these spaces. But there are a lot of right-wing political cults as well. We'll get there to your attention in due time. In fact, the first political culture I do want to talk about in another episode is a cult that really ran the gamut from left to right, the leader of that cult, the last name rhymes with Lapotch, but we'll get to that in due time. Okay.

All right. I will wait for the reveal. Do you know who else really loves Colts? Who's that? The products and services that pay both my bills and some of your bills. So here is a perfect space for an ad break. Thanks, Chevron, if you're advertising,

for pushing forward the great American tradition of cultish behavior in the economic system. We are back. Have you ever read the book Cultish? So I classify my engagement with literature in two broad camps. Books I've read and books I've skimmed. That's a book I've skimmed.

That's a book I've skimmed. Okay, all right, all right. It is definitely a fine book to skim. No, it's definitely a good, a good kind of, a good central piece of literature kind of on this topic, especially as it relates to, you know, getting out of just like, Heaven's Gate or Scientology, you know, there's very, it's gate or a Scientology.

There's very obvious cults. I was trying to look at the general cultishness of this entire continent, and specifically the United States. It's definitely a fun read, if anyone is interested in the topic. Yeah, I think it particularly focuses on cult language, how the language of cults is used to manipulate people, yeah?

So political cults, right? I mean in a world where established politics has failed us again and again Many have turned into radical politics, right and left I mean as someone who doesn't really consider myself left, but I do like Relate to it in some way. Typical anarchist. Yeah, I'm on the same boat as you there. Yeah, I don't see radicalization towards leftism as a bad thing. There are a lot of rabbit holes and pitfalls that people fall into when they start progressing in that

trajectory, but you know, people's frustrations with this feeling system are real and it's good that they seek in radical alternatives. Some of those alternatives are terrible and should be called out, but the premise of needing revolutionary system change is not terrible, which is where I disagree with the books, kind of, centrist bent, because it puts forward the idea that revolution is like It's kind of centrist bent because it puts forward the idea that revolution is like this dramatic thing, right? Like how, why would you be repurposed in that unless you were called kind of out? It also ends up drawing some equivalences between the radical left and the radical right.

Sure. Although I will say as well, the book is primarily discussed in Marxist Leninists when it talks about political cults in the far left. And as we'll see the way that Marxist Leninists structure things, it is somewhat conducive to that political formation, not to slander all Marxist Leninists, but the ideology is, you know, in some ways compatible, in many ways, compatible with cult organization. Yeah.

And I do agree with the book's criticisms of the way that a lot of boxes and this specifically organize the movements and organizations. But yeah, preambler side, the book defines political cults as environments where individuals are encouraged to envision a future society under their control. These members are often praised as visionary leaders are encouraged to envision a future society under their control.

These members are often praised as visionary leaders, referred to as Cartres, will hold significant power in the new world order. At the same time, they are criticized for not fully grasping the ideals of the founders in the present. The slow progress toward realizing the cult's goals is attributed to their perceived lack of effort. The leader is credited with the cult achievement. While any setbacks are blamed on the members perceived laziness.

This combination of grandiose vision and an internal culture that suppresses descent, creates an environment where questioning any aspect of the group's ideology is met with intense fear and punishment. And political cults really do present a danger. Most of them are marginal, irrelevant, but they do cause harm to the people within them and the people outside of them. And if they manage to take state power like in Cambodia, it really has like, extremely disastrous results. And I would call a full part a cult leader. I would go as far as to say that. And I would call a pull-patter called leader. I would go as far as to say that.

Political cults have been mostly far-right, right? They are some far-left cults in the mix, which in my opinion is even more depressing because it's like, you were so close. And then there you go. So like, a lot of my eyes talk, it's what political cults are left because it's like, wow, you know, almost there. And then now you're stuck planting the flag of the CCP in front of a university in the US or something. Yeah.

Many, many such cases. Many such cases. All sorts of political cults demand to their true believers be prepared to embrace the group's inflexible theology and strict organizational practices, much to the parallel society. And honestly, the waste of the talents, energy and commitment to their members. For as long as I can remember cults have been a bad thing, you know cults suck right cults of all types really suck Generally yeah generally cults have kind of a bad rap. Yeah, yeah, I can't imagine why But I not lent itself to the question of why do people join them?

No, that's stupid How do people join them? Now that's stupid. How do they recruit and keep their members like what's going on there? Is it that they just didn't know? Is it that, oh, cult, sign me up. I wanna take a very unorthodox approach and offer you, Garrison,

personally, a guide to start your own cult. Oh, I, I've found a lot of them in this already, but I am, I'm very happy to, very happy to take notes here. Let me, let me make a new Google doc. And that one. Sure. All right. We're drawn from the work of social psychologists

and the need for a canis and Elliot Aronson. So just follow these steps, all right? All right. Stuff one, create a distinct social reality. Cult's isolate members from external sources of information, making them interact primarily with other cult members. This leads to a shift in vocabulary towards the cult's lingua, making it difficult for them to communicate with non-cult members, which leads to the uncritical acceptance of the

cult's propaganda. The cult's belief system must be rigid and all-encompassing. The analysis answers everything about the world, and there is nothing beyond it. Left-wing cults believe that their ideology is the only valid lens through which to view the world. Historical materialism. While right-wing cults often center their beliefs around conspiracy theories, particularly related to race. And remember, the groups beliefs are beyond question or falsification. No tests or challenges are allowed that might lead to a revaluation of these beliefs.

Any descent or question in is labeled as heresy or betrayal or you know better to kind of lie. as heresy or betrayal or you know better to kind of, but step two creates an in group and an out group. Cult emphasized differences between their in group and perceived all groups fostering loyalty among members. It really doesn't matter who the out group is, you just need to have an out group of some kind. So for far-right cults, it's like Jewish people, black people, gay people, those are the necessary out groups. That's like the bare minimum out group for

most right-wing groups, right? Yeah. It's like checklist, you know, typical. I mean, of course, some go even further, and they might say something like anybody who isn't a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is excluded from their groups, but you know, sorry, you came kind of irrelevant. Sorry, Catholics. You're not. Yeah. Yeah. RP Catholics, RP Irish, et cetera.

And then for far left cults in order to isolate the members further, they can't just rely on like the bourgeoisie as the old group. Because I mean, trust the left already, has the bourgeoisie as an opponent. So these far left cults have to create other old groups to talk at the air and I stick their numbers from as well. Yeah, it becomes much more like seeped in ideology than some, then like compared to some

of the right wing cults. I think generally the cults on the left get way more into creating ideological distinctions that separate the in-group and the out-group. The ideology becomes the thing that, that becomes the unquestionable thing that answers all of the truths and all of the problems of the world, whether that's an apocalyptic version where you're talking about some collapse or even a utopian version, right? Where you're talking about the Marxist-ledonist party is gonna seize power through the Vanguard

and control swaths of territory and return power to the proletariat. Yes, and the true obstacles to that party of the revisionists, the ultra leftists, etc, etc. The post leftists, the anarchists, yeah, the social democrats as always, the enemy to all sides. Truly the one that everyone loves to hate. sides. Truly the one that everyone loves to hate. Yeah, yeah, truly. Fati Booz's come. Right, next step, step three, build commitment through discerns reduction. So called to manipulate cognitive discerns by gradually escalating members, quit months, the

groups beliefs and actions. This leads to a sense of consistency and eventually conversion. So you don't throw a newbie into the coolator right away. You start small and you build up from there. Maybe you first join a meeting, then you start voting in the meetings, then you hand it out flyers for the cult at a Black Lives Matter protest, for example.

And then you're sipping the Kool-Aid. You know, it's like baby steps. You don't throw them into the, in tall detainment right away. Next, step four, maintain a rigid, intunal regime. Decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a select elite within the group.

Formal controls and democratic processes are either dismantled or ignored. Even though the organization make claims we democratic on paper. And this environment helps to foster uncertainty, fair and confusion among members, which actually helps to reinforce their commitment to the group, believe it or not. helps to reinforce their commitment to the group, believe it or not. Five, stop five, establish the attractiveness and credibility of the leader. Oh, all righty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, make over. This is why it's going to be all over as soon as they start making twink cults.

It's going to be whole swaths of the population just are going to immediately fall victim. Indeed, indeed. These grand or supreme leaders are legends, extraordinary in their qualities, your twinkness. New age cults do this. Sorry. New age cults do this with their sex fest leaders and stuff, but oh my god, I can't not mention the veneration that Pinnacle cults plays on their leaders, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Hitler fans just obsessed with the guy. I mean, that goes on to say it.

Yeah. This applies to people who are really into Hitler, people who are really into Stalin, people who are really into Mao. They become are really into Stalin, people who are really into Mao, they become this almost like messianic figure. Yeah, yeah, I mean, even before I understood cults better, I could see very clearly early on, even before my readings, theory and everything, just being exposed to that space,

that there is a veritable cult of Lenin, of the Kim family, of Mao, of Trotsky, and Stalin, and far be it from you to point out their flaws and mistakes. Either it's denied outright as outside propaganda, or it's kept on the download as much as possible. This was a very serious situation, right? You often see its supporters say in things like, yes, there are problems with North Korea, and we do discuss our criticisms behind closed doors, but openly, you know, it's full throttle,

full throttled support. Which I find very interesting. Yeah. Step six, speaking of leaders, the leader needs privileges, naturally. Which I find very interesting. Step 6. Speaking of leaders, the leader needs privileges, naturally. Pulse no power, wealth accumulation, and often sexual favors as well. Activities that are usually deemed unacceptable for ordinary members are tolerated when

apply to leaders. Why? Because step 7, you make sure to defy the leader. Leaders, whether historical or current, are elevated to a near-define status. They're carrying on the legacy and defended from revision, if the OGs are really dead. You've resolved the arguments by referencing the sayings of these leaders rather than through independent analysis. So it's not, well, you know, this is the case because we examined X, Y and Z factor. This is the case because PUS and A are said so.

In 19th century text number 366 or whatever. It's six hundred pages long. Do you even read Coppets? Oh, come on. All 25 volumes. I know it's a Coppets. Absolutely. If you want to read about German factory conditions, it is definitely 18th century German factory conditions. It is, it is definitely, it's 18th century German factory politics. It is, it is an unparalleled look.

Yeah, definitely. Step eight. You need to send members to proselytize. Members need to constantly promote the benefits that cult others because I have reinforces their own beliefs. That self-generated persuasion shrank into their commitment. And to be fair, this applies even outside of cults, right? Like, if you're in the habit of sharing your particular ideology or religion or philosophy, the process of sharing it often helps you to understand it and also lend itself, lands to you being food was sweeted by it. But in the context of everything else, in the context of the cult, it really becomes a feedback loop code which is shown of all interference from the outside world

and in which only the liturgy of the cult has any semblance of reality. Number nine, step nine,ract members from undesirable thoughts. Overwork your members, keep them busy and exhausted, far too busy and exhausted to question the group's direction or beliefs. Social life, friendships, those all revolve around the group. And of course, those friendships are entirely conditional on the maintenance of uncutical enthusiasm for the party line. The book uses the example of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain, which

has a chapter in the book all to itself. Despite not being able to master more than 1% of the voting elections, somehow this small organization managed to put out a daily newspaper, keeping the members busy, busy, busy, busy. Next, number 10, Fixate Members on a Promised Land. Cults create an idealized vision of the future that contrasts with the current reality. That promised land may be an alien spaceship to the next dimension, a religious ethno-state, or a Marxist-Lenus utopia.

But in either case, the Cults members are driven to work tirelessly to achieve this vision, fair and missed opportunities. They're constantly either accrued in and fundraising and kept in a constant state of ludeness, reinforcing their commitment to the group's beliefs. Now, Garrison, if you follow these steps, you will have a fairly effective cult. But you know what, just for you, I'm going to throw in a bonus package of commonly held contradictions. You could call it the double think package.

Okay, all right. I'm all ears. I'm really, really desperate at this point. I've kind of sunk cost-falsy this, right? We've already been learning for like 30 minutes. I feel like I need to take away more information at the end because if I go and apply this now, I feel like I'm only going to have acid. I need one final thing to kind of click into place here. Absolutely. Check this out, right? Love of liberty and support for totalitarianism, right?

These seem like two opposite things. How can both of these codes rest? Yeah, but you can hold them in your brain simultaneously, right? Check this, right? Definitely in cults would idealize a very democratic Soviet Union of the past. You know, some Trotsky's groups even depict an

early period as democratic before being corrupted by later leaders. And then right when cult would claim to champion individual liberty, but seek to clear tale democratic rights for those who disagree with it. So the democracy is upheld, but it's theoretical. So it's like, yeah, democracy would also come on the material conditions. You can't have democracy in that kind of situation.

Ah, I see. So you're loving, yes, I'm a democracy advocate, but also democracy gets in the way sometimes. We have to get past it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we have the democracy of me and my three friends, but not everybody, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we have the democracy of like me and like my three friends, but not like, you know, everybody, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like democracy, but it's like centered around like a group like a who call it like

democratic centralism. What's the matter? Anyway, that's a great idea. That's a great idea. Thank you. Um, next we have belief in equality and privilege for leaders. That last one seems kind of important. Yeah. So you're going to be advocating for equality, but then your leaders are going to have a bunch of privileges. Well, yeah, because we're spending all the time advocating.

We need a little bit of something extra. Exactly. So the members, well, they get to go out there and spend time, fund reason and stuff, but they can't have a say in how the money is spent, right? Like, we need that money, you know, for our personal projects and our extremely high standard of living. Check this out. This is very common in religious cults, but also very common in some political cults. Promotion of sexual morality and sexual exploitation. Huh? Well, I think I'll stop the flag along bit at this one, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. But yes, it's terrible.

It's terrible. It's terrible. This is a very common thing. Yeah, cultural impulse, very strict sexual rules, particularly on members, but the same particular year on women. When the leaders will still have a whole harem of few members that they exploit and stuff. This is even quite common with like hardline evangelical cults in the States, whether that's kind of like a quiverful, related or just other kind of smaller evangelical sects

that kind of form their own kind of church cult dynamic. But that is very, specifically very common among Christian cults because of how much that like sexual authoritarianism is normalized in a lot of in a lot of Protestant and Catholic, you know doctrine Yeah exactly exactly it's it's Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's frighteningly common. And I've certainly heard that like, you know, like installments or malice specifically have weird, weird sex stuff going on.

But I've never, I've never quite poked that bear. But I have, I have a word that there's specifically really weird sex stuff around ballasts. But yeah, also really weird sex of Ron Mao allegedly, I've heard more to body's exploits. Yeah, moving along. Last one in this little bonus package, the rest of you have to like pay the 12 simple payments of $999 to get.

That's one payment every month, but each month they get more information about how to do it better. That sounds like a great deal. Oh yeah, for sure. Because I mean, you'll be used like swimming in cash by the time. Yeah, because now I can use these

and I could pass down these steps to someone else. So I will already get my back. And then they could pass it down. Pass it down and then you'll get kickbox from that as well. That's great. That sounds like a multi level scheme. It's like there's like a triangle and there's different like tiers of it. And like you're technically what above me, but I'm still pretty close to the top.

If I keep bringing it down, then it gets wider and wider. That sounds like a pretty good setup. And then I benefit and then you benefit. I mean, the triangle is actually the strongest shape. Structurally. Structurally. So. So check this out, right?

Demand for free speech and suppression of dissent. So cults will vigorously defend their right to free speech and suppression of dissent. So cults will vigorously defend their right to free speech, even resorting to legal action, are there some very infamous court cases involving cults? Yes. And then they will criticize rival organizations for undemocratic practices. And yet within the ranks of the group,

dissent is actively suppressed, you know? Yeah, this is like the Scientology Classic here. Yeah, exactly. And members will be told like, yeah, you should absolutely criticize. But then if they do criticize, you know, they're gonna be humiliated, they can very easily be expelled.

It's like a beaten switch. It's like, yeah, we give you all this platform to criticize. So, we know who to target and to tear down. Very, very common, very, very useful when you want to strengthen the integrity of your cult. All right, and one last quick game. Let's ask ourselves. Really? Yeah. You're just like, you're just a free. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, only if you call right now. Okay. So let's ask ourselves, am I already in a political code? Great, good question actually. This is something people should ask themselves pretty frequently. Yes, yes. And to figure that out, we have to look at the conditions that indicate the presence of ideological totalism. A tomb coined by American psychiatrist Robert J. Lichten, to give a name to the mood of absolute convictions, which embeds ideas so deeply in people's heads

that they grow inoculated against doubt. So what are the e-conditions he identifies as indicating the presence of ideological totalism? Well, there's milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the secret science, loathing the language, doctrine over person, and the dispensing of existence. What do those mean?

One at a time. Mill you control involves techniques that dominate a person's contact with the outside world and communication with themselves. Right to that idea of cults isolating people, preventing them from testing the groups of ideas against external alternatives. Mystical manipulation is where cults claim a sense of higher poop-us, and portray the ideology as the vanguard of social development. That's all in composing.

This is the essential ideology for the future of the world. Devan for purity is, of course, where members are convicted of their superiority and purity in their beliefs. The core ideas are essential. And anybody who is a non-member, as a critic, is an accomplice in some kind of conspiracy against the cult ideas. The cult of confession is remembered as required to confess their inadequacies and failures in group meetings, which helps to break down individuality and intimidate and help to intimidate

potential dissenters. The secret science through the group's ideologies presented as a secret moral vision. So you can't really question its basic assumptions. The immortal science of Marxist-Linus. The immortal science, indeed. Loading the language is what we were talking about earlier where cults use repetitive phrases and thought too many to include shares to prevent critical analysis and limit thinking and feeling. Doctrine overpriced Sun is where historical myths are created or altered, so allowing

with the cult's ideology. And the dispense and existence is where only those who adhere to the group's ideology are fully human or good, but all others are seen as agents of evil or barriers to progress. I hope that will deliver you as useful for you in determining whether or not you are an occult, as well as determining how you can create your own. Well, something that my boss has told me a lot is that there's very little difference between is that there's there's very little difference between a cult and a really good party. So, but the biggest difference is that a party hopefully will be over, right? It's done. It shouldn't just be like one night. So a good party is a cult that lasts like 12 hours tops.

So you can apply a lot of these ideas to putting together a really fun house party as long as that there's a mandatory dissolution of the party after everyone wakes up the next morning. So that is- Right, I'm a imagine like a DJ. Like, yes, yes. Like like DJ Mill you control.

On the B. We are putting gecks back on. No, no more, no more scoff back to gecks. Exactly, yeah. The future lies right here in this base. Broom, broom, broom, broom, broom, broom, broom to gex exactly. Yeah, the future lies right here in this base Exactly exactly Yeah, um, I mean in all seriousness Physical cults are really sad, you know the prayer people's frustrations the desire for change

The prayer on what's worse is that they pray on their desire for affiliation. One of the most deeply rooted desires to identify with social groups to develop an identity on a familiar local ethnic or national scale. It's really sad that people get lost in that source. Remember that no matter what the group you choose to affiliate with, should be able to handle dissent. I think that's a very good baseline upon which to affiliate or to determine your affiliation. Healthy groups, organizations and movements are not weakened by descent. They need descent, disagreement and conflict to survive.

Frequent and important disagreement makes movements and organizations stronger. It allows the individuals within them to maintain a level of independence and allows ideas to evolve through challenge rather than to exist purely due to the stifling atmosphere of conformity. Today we spoke about the techniques employed by both left wing and right wing cults rather than to exist purely due to the stifling atmosphere of conformity. Today we spoke about the techniques employed by both left wing and right wing cults to maintain higher levels of conformity, activism, and intolerant among their members. I want to emphasize that our discussion doesn't imply that movements striving for societal change are inherently bound to become obscure cults

though that a critical examination of modern society is not warranted. But it's important to remember that while our world challenges require political analysis and action, the organization, so we formed to address these challenges, must try to genuinely seek understanding and transformation while preserving the freedom and individuality of its members. I still want to say, create a real community, not a cult. That's all until next time. I've been Andrew of the channel Andruzum and next we'll be discussing the one and only the

low the sun, the Dundan Lerge. Peace. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family, uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something, but she just wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell.

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You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me! My podcast is relaunching! Subscribe and treat yourself to sound effects like this. And this, have you ever been attacked by a bear? Yeah.

Yes! And moments like this. I have an apple sweet in front of the space here. No! And my whole leg from my knee down in my foot burnt until it's squirred. Oh! And this, kale chips are delicious. They're too oily when I go.

They shouldn't be soft at all. They should be really crispy. That's what I said every single time. You are yelling at me. And this? Do you want to go to the Clipper of Game with me tonight? Do you have 25 references of mutual friends that can tell me that you're not a murderer? Um, and this.

Hold on, I gotta open some peanut butter pretzels. Listen to Call Chelsea Paradeon, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Kid Happen here. I'm Andrew with Andrew Channel Attrism and last time I was on here discussing political cults generally. Today, I'm here once again with... Oh, Gareson, yes. Hello, I am also here to talk about cults because Andrew told me to. Yes, yes. And I'm the I'm the leader in this dynamic. You...

In many ways, this Zoom call is kind of a mini cult where you are the author. Indeed, indeed, there is nothing except this cult. There is no outside world. There is no cat on your desk. It is just this. The cat is a revisionist. So, last episode we discussed how cults operate essentially. The roller coaster emotional ride that individuals experience during cults or group months, where their feelings and ideas are manipulated

and they're drawn into an exclusive and isolated group. We explored the rigid belief system that's created, the immunity to force vacation, the authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language. We spoke about the contradiction to thin political cults and the conditions of ideological totalism. And today, as promised, we're going to look at one political

cult leader in particular, whose influence spanned left to right. Oh boy. The self-described pleatiness, a presidential kind of it. Oh no. A conspiracy theorist. The alleged targets of an assassination from Queen Elizabeth, a once trotskyist, the one and only, the infamous, the loathsome,

Lendon LaRouche. As soon as you said, Platonist, I knew we were in for just a horrible time. Just the worst. The only people who self-describe this Platonists are the worst. Actually, the last person I knew, who self-described as a Platonist,

was the target of an assassination because it was the the daughter of Alexander Dugan was a was a was a witness. Anyway, what an interesting cast of characters indeed indeed. I'm speaking of cast of characters by the way I should note that Tim Worldforth, one of the cool authors of the book that this research was based on the book being on the edge, particularly cults left and right. Tim Worldforth, the other author is Dennis Tourage, was a trotskiest cult leader at one point, like cult underling or whatever. But he was kicked out and then he later co-authored this book to call out some of their cultist tendencies. If you need that sort of backstory to take some of this for the greener salt, so be it, because as far as I can tell Tim Warforth and Lin and LaRouche actually crossed paths at one point. Interesting. So as always,

let's start from the beginning and get an early portrait of the sky. LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire in 1922, then moved to Linn, Massachusetts. He was the oldest of three children in a Quaker home, who eventually his father would be expelled from the local Quaker community for his alleged misuse of funds. He then briefly attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942, at least partly because he believed his teachers, quote, lacked the competence to teach him on conditions he was willing to tolerate. Oh, sure, sure. I'll take a first word on that one.

Yeah, yeah. At first, he was a conscientious objector to enlist when it will go to because, you know, quicker. And instead, he joined a civilian public service camp in what is what, you know, which is what conscientious objectors did at the time. But eventually, he wouldn't list with the US Army and serve with the US Army

and serve with the medical corps in India and Boomer, which is Naomi Anmar. In 1946, aboard the SS General Bradley, Don Morill met the young soldier, Lerush, and got into it with him about politics. And particularly the political optimism of the post-Wilward II era, what a time. The revolutionary spirit of the Indian sub-consident and socialist ideas more broadly.

Now Lerush was already sympathetic towards Marx and Trotsky at this point. In fact, even in his pre-teen, he was a voracious reader philosophy. Particularly of the German polymath, Godfred will hem vonibnizbutt, or Leibnizbutt, or however that is pronounced, but ultimately by the time they returned to America, Lerush was a Trotskyist. In brief, for those unaware, a Trotskyist is someone who adheres to the principles and politics of Leon Trotsky, who was a prominent figure in the early Soviet Union and a key figure in what I would call co-option of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Trotsky's arm is distinct from mainstream Leninist and particularly Stalinist thought, most famously for their rejection

of socialism in one country and their advocacy of permanent revolution. By the time the Russian returned home in 1947, he joined his hometown, Lin Massachusetts chapter of the Socialist Workers Party, SWP, which was the main American Trotskyist group. Interestingly, he took on a party name, which really reminds me of how religious missionaries would give those they converted,

quote, in root, Christian, name, and the fun after some. Yeah. So his his part in him was Lynn Marcus. You could just see it as a pseudonym for physical work, of course. I mean, the CIA and the FBI were very active in infiltrating these sorts of groups. So I understand having like a pseudonym, but I mean, considering we're talking about cult tendencies and physical movements, I couldn't pass up on that observation, you know. Don Morill, who was also from the Massachusetts, was also part of the SWP and very active

in their union-organizing activities. La Rousseau, not so much. He was very intellectually oriented. He wasn't very into the union scene. And he eventually left Massachusetts in 1952 and settled down in New York City. He got married, he had a son, and he was focused in his career.

As an economic consultant in the shoe industry with a nice nice apartment in Central Park West, he didn't really have any ties to the working class efforts of the SWP. So what now? Well, eventually he and his wife separated and he moved in with a fellow SWP member known sometimes as Karl White, sometimes as Karl Schnitzer, and sometimes as Karl Larby. And then he decided that the SWP leadership had the wrong idea. Why they saw obsessed with union organizing? Perhaps he should be the one calling the shots. You have to understand something

about Lerush. You see with little involvement or connection to actual working class struggle in disconnection. You see with little involvement or connection to actual wicking class struggle and disconnection from the party's activity, he had already begun making a right-ward shift, even while still bearing the banner of leftism. As an intellectual, he loved his books, including Marx's Carpetole, Rotelux and Bougues' The Accumulation of Carpetole, and Hegel's Logic. And his intellectualism naturally fed into elitism. Drawing from Lenin's, what is to be done? Lerush believes that a select intellectual

group, which, I mean, he was clearly a part of, these professional revolutionaries held up pivotal role in transforming society, with their task being to gain dominance over the less intellectually developed masses. Yosuba borrowed from Gramsci's idea of hegemony. He saw himself in competition, with other intellectuals on the left, for leadership over the hearts and minds of the dummy masses, to undermine the capitalist's hold on the working class. But unlike Gramsci, he didn't believe the working class was capable of developing its own leaders. He was that leader. And he also borrowed from George Lucas' concept of class consciousness and the importance of thinkers. Lerush wasn't just a thinker. He saw himself as a V thinker, the one who would take power and lead the masses to freedom.

So he was fed up with the SWP limiting his clearly elite intellect and ability. And so in 1965, he left and joined a small Trotsky's group called the American Committee for the Fourth International. Yes. Associated with George Healy, who was another left wing cult leader. A lot of left wing cults came out of the fourth international, some of which are very cool, some of which are not very cool. Indeed, indeed.

But guess what? He didn't like the fourth international. He only stayed there for six months, and apparently, he didn't even like him. I mean, I wonder why, right? No, he seems like a very agreeable fellow. And not only that, I mean, one of you ever who'd have cult leaders get along.

You know, cult leaders sent a view other cult leaders as threats to their total control, you know. It would be funny if there was just like a conference for cult leaders to like to like share like tactics and they'll have like dinner together. Yeah. So Lerush bustled that party and he joined this part as his league, which was another trot party. And again, he didn't stay for too long. He decided he was going to put all those factions and leaders behind him and declared himself the pioneer of the fifth international. So for those unaware, the first workers international from 1864 to 1876 was a coalition of labour and social groups seeking to promote workers' rights and international solidarity.

It split because of the irreconcilable differences and divisions between the stateists and the anarchists. Then in 1889 and from then until 1916, the second international was born. That was an organization of socialist and labour parties. This time, no anarchists allowed, and it was aimed at fostering cooperation among socialist globally until it dissolved due to the division related to World War I. And then, in 1919, the Soviet Union founded the third international, or the common turn,

to promote worldwide communist revolution and aid communist parties. But then it dissolved during World War II due to these Soviet-Jewelund tensions among other things. And then in 1938, Trotsky, who was marginalized and persecuted by Stalin, founded the 4th International as an opposition alternative to the Stalin-dominated common turn. Technically, the fourth international is still active today, but it's always been fairly a rather fun beyond small, dick-or-in-sexts and ever-spintering-spinter groups, and more than one political cult. So for a trotsky, it's likely a ruse to declare a fifth

international. It's like, you know, here we go again. How is it going to match through this? 1968, picture this. A room with about 30 students sits on the floor, all eyes fixed on linden lyrush. After playing a major role in the student striker Columbia University, these students were totally invested in this man's every word. They were part of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, NCLC, NCLC, which was affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Lerush held this meeting for a whole seven hours. That's longer than a church service. And he blended discussions of tactics with educational presentations. The SDS had a lot of spirit and action, but Lerush believed that they were a bit short on theory,

so he was there to fill that void, and a bit more. The gathering marked the early stages of what later become a political cult centered around Lerush, where he sued as an intellectual and political guru, training his followers as devoted disciples. He had a particular knock for me to make in his disciples feel like they were part of an elite club. They believed they were the only ones who truly understood the era they were in and had all the answers to fix society's problems. In 1970, Lerush wrote that you should start with recruiting and educating our revolutionary

intelligence here, mainly young intellectuals like these student radicals, rather than the working class, because again, Lerush thought the working class was stupid. He wanted these elite recruits to commit to intensive studying activism, particularly of his interpretation of ideas, so they need the charge. And I remember at this point, Lerusha's push-in are right-wing form of trotsky-ism. Like Marx, he believes that capitalism has to keep growing to stay alive. Once it hits its limits, it will grow into crisis mood and eventually collapse. He also shared Marx's ideal that human activity should be all about progress, particularly

the growth of the world's productive forces. Do you know who's organizing the next international actually right now, right now? It is in fact the products and services that sponsor this podcast. So they're making the great shift. The same way anarchism was expunged from the second international, now communism is going to be expunged from this next upcoming international, and it's just going to be capitalists. So here are the sponsors organizing the next international. Mark's thought capitalism was just a phase in human society. As crises

would pave the way for a working-class revolution, which would lead to socialism. Under socialism, the productive forces would flourish without those pesky, capitalist constraints. The Roush came up with something he called the theory of re-industrialization. He claimed that capitalism, in its third stage of imperialism, needed fresh opportunities for capital investment. He even predicted that if world leaders did not follow his advice, the system was on the brink of collapse. Only he and his trained followers under his lead could prevent this catastrophe. By the late 60s and early 70s, members were given up their jobs and devoting themselves

wholly to the cause and leadership of the Roush. They were convinced that the world had all the resources needed for an incredible economic transformation, but they saw a big problem. They thought the nation's leaders were clueless, and of course they didn't think too highly of the masses. So their solution was getting Lyndon Lerush Jr. into power, or by the way, he's a junior, but the solution was getting Lyndon Lerush Jr. into power as soon as possible. And then he would lead the trade unions to take over America. He expected their support, and if they were slacking in their activism, he would call them out. Barren from the confrontation of therapy

with the new age psychology cults, they were just began holding ego-stripping sessions. Anyone who failed in a physical task was subjected to pure psychological terror as everyone attacked them and tore apart their past and placed on life in front of the whole group. And because cults and sex and inevitable combination, like madness and badness, Lerush also launched a campaign against the sexual impotence of his membership.

Apparently, Carol left him for a disciple of the movement. Interesting. His name was Christopher White, and they went to England to set up a chapter of the NCLC. So that's probably why he got a little bit unhinged. But that's not the worst of it. I can't not mention Operation Mopup. In 1973, Leroux fully shifted the group's political stance from being far left to far right. Armed with bats, chains and martial arts scale, his supporters physically attacked members of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party.

For he declared that he intended to wipe these rival parties off the map, going as far as to threaten their families as well. But it didn't stop there. He extended his attacks to groups like the revolutionary Communist Party, the October League, and the Progressive Labour Party. Essentially, the Ruchwan test established dominance through these physical confrontations. There were at least six day reported assaults during this time, and the whole operation only ended when the police stepped in and arrested some of Lerush's followers.

Interesting leader? There weren't any convictions. And Lerush insisted that his people were only acted in self-defense. But here's what gets a little bit muckeo. Journalist and Lerush biographer Dennis King suggested that the FBI may have played a role in stirring up trouble among these groups. Do we have used tactics like sending anonymous mail-ins to keep these groups each other's throats?

So, you know, plot thickens. Yeah, I mean, that was very typical kind of co-entil pro stuff that was happening around this time period. Yeah. That would not surprise me. Yeah. It's safe to say though in this period of Lerush's life, all the folks on the left were wondering if he was really still one of their own. Back in 1973, Carol and Christopher, and Christopher. Like I said, they were going to the UK to set up their own version of the NCRC. But then the Rooch called them back to the US for a national conference. And during the flight,

Christopher lost it. He started yelling that the CIA had plans to off Larby and LaRouche, Carole Larby and LaRouche. The plane was in utter chaos, so Carole reached out to the Rouche and they decided to work together to deprogram Christopher. What, we mean, the program Christopher? I'm glad you asked. I think we have mentioned called the programming before kind of in passing, but never, never too much on it, I think. Yes, what I mean, this instance though, is not that they were trying to ankle Keteman to the cult or deprogram him from mainstream ideology.

You see, in his rantons and ravens on the play in, Christopher claimed he was a Manchurian candidate, who had been tortured by the CIA and British intelligence in a London basement. He then said he was programmed to do some stuff like often his wife and set an up LaRouche for a watery demise by Cuban exile frogman. So that's the kind of deep program and they intended to carry out. Hmm, I have some notes,

but I suppose I'll just let them do their thing. Yeah, yeah. So, Christopher was saying that he was a Montrion candidate. And so then the whole group was in a frenzy. The Roush and his disciples were released in state months left and right, training their members and how to spot other Montrion candidates and halt to handle CIA torture. And here's what gets really crazy. One of the members, Alice Whitesman, she made a critical mistake in a political cult. She doubted. She didn't believe the whole CIA story that Christopher was pushing and Lerush didn't

like that she didn't believe. And suddenly Lerush was like, or you don't believe that the CIA isn't filtering us right now, then you must be a CIA agent. So he sends a squad of six members of his cult to Whitesman's apartment and they held her hostage and cranked up Beethoven music to definite levels. Why? Because the ruch believed that Beethoven's tunes could somehow deprogram Manchuria and candidates.

Weightsman managed to toss out a note through the window and a passerby picked it up and it's the police, so she was rescued, but then she chose not to press charges against her captors. Lucia turned this party at this point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America into an extreme right anti-Semitic organization. Despite the presence of Jewish members, in fact, Carol herself was Jewish and she stuck around.

Dennis King, the biographer, I spoke about earlier, found a deep connection between LaRouche and fascist and United groups. In the early 80s, LaRouche used the strategic defense initiative or Star Wars to bring together far-right forces from Europe and America. He was even promoting like revanchism and defending Nazi war criminals. And he was known for blending his usual conspiracy theories with anti-Semitism. Particularly towards the British. He blamed the Rothschild for running Great Britain and he was a typical Holocaust denial. Yeah.

I really, I generally wonder why Kara left him. But I also wonder why she stuck around in the group anyway. The anti-definition league labeled the ruches NCRC as the closest thing to an American fascist party. And well, the begs question, what was life like in that party? Yeah. I mean, I remember you garrison describing a good party as a close well, the ends

See I think part of part of the problem is when you know a house party turns into a political party and then It's insinu a fascist party. Yeah, but never ends. Yeah So the ruchus used in these really sneaky tactics to drive a wedge between the ruch members and their families, partners and spouses. There were members of the ruchus elite who convinced one person that their own dad was laundering money secretly for the drug trade. This organization was telling their members where they could live, what car to buy, when to quit their jobs, what they should read, what they should watch, how to scam their parents

out of money, how and when to break up with their partners. Yeah, that's a good one. And while all this is going on, the Russian movement is also swapping out the red flags of Trotsky as a good ol' red white and blue. Members were soon educated with the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, right? Oh God. Hamilton's economic policies were basically the American version of what Marx represented in Europe according to the Russia.

And forget about Marx. Don't read Marx anymore. Another reading Plato and Dante. In 1980, they even told the members to vote for Reagan. Yeah. Cool stuff. Cool stuff. Cool stuff. They dropped their left. Noted. They've played this philosopher. Ronald Reagan. Yeah. They basically dropped any vanilla of left lean in in their group and tactics, and then they started doing things like solicits and people at airports and bus terminals. And these members, they were caught in this whirlwind. They didn't have time to read to think to get a decent night's sleep. They were working 12 hour shifts and getting paid

peanuts, like a hundred dollars, a hundred twenty five125 a week, and sometimes they didn't even get paid at all. They were in a constant state of mobilisation, living in an adrenaline, ready for anything. And finally, in 1981, around 300 or 600 people decided they had had enough and left the organisation. Some of them were former leftists, but not all. Those who stuck around, Some of them were former leftists, it's been on oil. Those who stuck around with the die-hard cult members completely under the Ruch's control. Would it surprise you, Garasant, to learn that the Ruch was a scammer? Oh, you're saying that the person involved in running the cult was also a prolific grifter and someone who tried to scam other people. Are you really?

Really? A lot of people don't know this, but cult leaders and scammers actually go hand in hand. Ah. Yeah. Lerush was a master of operating through a network of front organizations. He created the Fusion Energy Foundation, getting support from nuclear and aerospace industries, and he's run a private intelligence service, focusing on terrorists and drug cartels. Get this. He even met with top officials from the National Security Council and the CIA and he somehow managed to get White House access. What?

Yeah. Yeah. Why? How? Yeah. Yeah. He eventually infiltrates the Democratic Party and ran for president several times. Oh, God.

And he launched the proposition 64 initiative in California in the 80s, even to impose strict public health policies for AIDS, which public health officials rejected. But basically, he was instrumental and spreading a lot of unnecessary fear about AIDS. In fact, he was advocating for lynch mobs to deal with the AIDS crisis. Oh, so he wasn't like spreading good health information

when everyone was ignoring the problem. He was being like, we should have killed everybody. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. I got, huh? But, you know, every scammer has their day. And one of his scams got him in the pen. You see, Lerouche had a knack for Crouton, the offspring of the wealthy and separating them from their money to put it euphemistically. One of his most famous recruits was Louis Dupont Smith, a Dupont heir, that Dupont, who gave a whopping $212,000 to Lerush. He even moved close to Lerche, but eventually the Dupont family intervened, had him declared mentally ill and put him on a monthly stipend.

Still, LaRouche was making a rail bank. His empire was growing. He had a hundred and seventy-two acres of state in Virginia, serving as his centre of operations, which had phone banks, offices, or print in plant, guarded 24-7 by armed individuals. But the Empire of Lerush, he eventually went into a decline. His lust for publicity caught the attention of the public and federal officials. And his phone bank operator started making

unauthorized credit card withdrawals. I mean, he was like going to the White House. How did he, how did he like try to like stay under the federal radar? He was literally in the one spot, the one place. Exactly, exactly. It's it's it's baffling. But Dennis can has a book all about it. So you can check it out. In 1987, he faced a trial on credit card fraud and conspiracy. It's obstruct justice, which ended in a mistrial. Then a subsequent trial convicted him on various charges. And he ended up in a federal penitentiary in 1989.

And what do all great cult leaders, or what do many great cult leaders do on the in jail? Some of them? Write books. Yeah, write books. Precisely. All right, all right. I'm back on now.

Okay. So the R Usher size writer book called In Defense of Common Sense. It's a mix of obscure geometric illustrations, a passionate defense of playtonism, attributes to the 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler, and some heavy denunciations of philosophers like Kant and most philosophers post play

to. In fact, as far as LaRouche was concerned, every philosopher after playtools sucked. That's so funny. That's really funny. Incredibly. But Alex Kour, his book in an indefense of common sense, was LaRouche restate in his modernist, somehow Marx-inspired world view. The argued that scientific and technological progress set humanity apart from all other creatures and it naturally leads to increased population density. In lorousious eyes, there's no room for any entropic view that suggests a limit to human technology in population growth. Even coined the term, Negan-Dropic, to advocate for ongoing industrial and population expansion

no matter what. All right, but then if you're in, okay, maybe you listen to this and you like, oh, none of this is all dramatic and wild or whatever. Here's where it gets even wilder. This is where we get the intersection of the Nenlerous and Elon Musk. Lerous proposes that we colonize Mars. Leroux purses that we colonize Mars. Well, I mean, honestly, the whole, his other, what was the term you just said, like nerve, trap the, what was it? Negron, trap it.

Yeah, that is pretty similar to Musk's ideology as well though. Pretty much. Yeah. And so Leroux says, let's call Nice Mars, and once that's done in about 40 years, according to his estimation, then his philosophical standpoint will clearly rule all of humanity for all of the same. But while the Roo's deepened thought behind bars, his followers, they're not twiddling their thumbs. They joined forces with other anti-war demonstrators to oppose the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. And it was interesting to note that the NCRC

was not the only voice from the right among those left-wing demonstrators. Pat Buchanan, the populist party, the Liberty Lobby, and other ultralight, and other ultralight and new isolationist groups formed a sort of united front to the elements of the left in terms of that opposition to the Gulf War. And the Rousse was eventually released on parole in 1994. And by 1998, during the economic crisis, the Rousse was demanding that Bill Clinton

appoint him immediately as an economic advisor. Sounds like a good idea. Yeah, no, he seems well quite Lefache. And I caught. It was no time to abandon crisis management and shale Shadean in other words, democracy. Lerush believed in the inherent tendency of popular opinion toward mediocrity. The very tendency to rely upon collective decisions rather than decisions based upon the foundation

of principle is itself a wellspring of mediocrity. He further explained, to propose to assemble a mutual rabble of decision-makers, usually featuring those parties who are still advocates of the policy, which have caused an advocate to the crisis, is scarcely a noble enterprise, nor fruitful one. Some relatives of a few, in the China to be probably one of the best governments in the world today, in terms of quality of leadership, the kind of leadership required to get through crisis. Lyrish, I like Mussolini and Hitler before him, borrowed from Marx, and unchanged his theories completely. Yeah, yeah. Marx's internationalist outlook was abandoned in favour of the nation state

Marx's goal of abolishing capitalism was replaced by a model of a totalitarian state That is still primarily in the hands of private corporations and their owners who by the way would have to take orders from the ruch Now Hitler called his National source his schema national socialism. Uh-huh. Lerush. Interesting. Here he is.

Lerush was a fan, but he was like, you know, it's out of little space. Let's give it some American Brandon. So Lerush called his system an ideology, the American system. It's a little bit less catchy, I gotta say. Yeah. I mean, that's the story of Lin and the Rooosh. He died, obviously. I mean, I'm-

Most people do. There's only a few that have not died. Enoch, and I think like one or two others, but most people do in fact die. Yeah, yeah. He was really quite the guy. He died in 2019, by the way. Oh, no, that's that reason. Yeah, yeah, he lived a really long time.

He lived for 100 years for crying out loud. Did not realize he was still kicking around, so so recently. Yeah, gone too soon, am I right? recently, yeah, gone to sooner, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, at least at least now he's in heaven with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That's that's yeah, that's good. Why do the why do the good die? You know, Oh, he was just a kid.

So as we conclude our journey into the Edigmatic world of the Nunu Rouge, I think we'll left with more questions and answers. How did a man on the fringe of radical politics end up in the White House? Yeah, that is, that is, that is one question I actually still have thinking about is what, what were the conditions to his White House. Yeah, that is one question I actually still have thinking about is, what were the conditions to his White House visits? And what led to his transformation from a committed leftist to a fascist?

I mean, I think we could see the signs of that, right? Yes, yeah. In the 60s, the Ruch displayed egotism and hints of instability, but he was also an intelligent individual who attracted serious intellectuals. His ideas, well sometimes peculiar, were generally rational. But as the adulation of students and students allowed him to gather of following around his ideas and personality. The collapse of student radicalism in the 70s at the stage from a shift from left to right

and the unwavering loyalty of his followers likely reinforced his increasingly psychotic worldview and perception of his role in it. The ruse was convinced that he deserved worship, that he was an intellect. He was fueled by his ideology of catastrophism, that he, as the elite, would play a significant role as savior of humanity. The practices of his organization resembled of many of the extreme religious thought control groups. The practice of ideological totalism is very clear, the authoritarian structures very clear, the paranoia fostered to create a clear boundary between the group and the outside world. Don't be likely to live in the Lerush.

Please. And watch out for his wannabees. I feel like Caleb Mopin is the Lerush of this generation. I mean, yeah, I mean, hope. I don't see Mopin getting invited to the White House anytime soon. No, no, no other characters like like Chairman Bob. Yeah, I don't know.

We live in a different time, I think, because of how the internet works, there's, there's much more cult leaders just dispersed everywhere all the time. Yes, it's almost, it's almost the democratization of cult leadership. Yeah, but it's also made them more or less isolated to the internet with occasional flare-ups in the real world, which kind of, which kind of limits their engagement with, you know, normal people, so to speak. Yeah. It's kind of...

It's difficult, right? They're so isolated. They're kind of even communicating with people outside of them anymore. Yeah, and I think part of that is definitely happening here on the internet, where there's just so many of them that they're all very small, they're all very isolated, and they don't ever really break out of their bubble, which is common with a lot of cults, right? The ones that we only really know about, or hear about are the ones that ended up doing some big horrific thing at some point.

You know, that generated a lot of eyeballs on them. But for every heaven's gate, there's a dozen new age cults that just fly right under the radar that are still horribly abusive. They just still going on to this day. Yeah, they just might not be tied to a horrific act of mass murder or mass suicide. I'm also scared of your thoughts.

How many cults have not yet broken containment, as it would? Yeah. Yeah, it's a fun time to be alive. Sure, indeed. So, yeah, I hope the audience has enjoyed this cautionary tale, a reminder of the profound and sometimes dangerous paths the ideology can take individuals on group stone. Once again I'm Andrew, I'm Andrew Aselm. This is Yes, and this has been in can happen. Yeah, please. When Tracy Rick Hill Burns was two years old, her baby brother died.

I was told that Matthew died in an accident. And no one really talked about it. Her parents told police she had killed him. Medical records fed that I killed my baby brother. I'm Nancy Glass. Join me for burden of guilt. The new podcast that tells the true and incredible story of a toddler who was framed for murder

and how she grew into an adult determined to get justice and protect her family. While we had prosecuted some cold cases, this was the coldest, this was frigid. But how does a two-year-old get blamed for murder? She said, we wanted a new life. You just don't know what it's like when you'll do anything for somebody. Listen to Byrdon of Guilt on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri.

We have a term called JDRLR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family, uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something, but she she wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell. Everyone deserves no detruth

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That's what I said every single time. You are yelling at me. And this. Do you want to go to the Clipper game with me tonight? Do you have 25 references of mutual friends that can tell me that you're not a murderer? Um, and this. Hold on, I gotta open some peanut butter pretzels. Listen to Call Chelsea Paredion, Will Ferrell's big money players network on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. Welcome to Nick at App and Here, a podcast being recorded in the like last hours of Halloween in the the the the I guess the closing minutes of a teachers in Portland not being on strike. So yeah, this is this is a podcast that is often about strikes. And here to talk with me about this is Brittany Doris who's a fifth grade teacher in Portland public schools, who's the union captain for her school and the strike captain also for her school. Brittany, welcome to the show. Hi, glad to be here. I'm really glad to talk to you. So, all right, we are in we are in zero hour. Yeah, we're in the zero hour of the strike.

By the time this comes out, like I guess you'll have been on strike for like two days. Yeah. So many of us comes out Friday. Yeah, so, all right, I think the place we should start, probably for people who are not in Portland, and people who haven't been following this, I guess we should start with what are the sort of conditions

that have led to this? I have we should start with what are the sort of conditions that have led to this? I have heard some absolutely wild things about what's happening in Portland schools right now. How did we get here? Yeah. Yeah. We've been negotiating or bargaining this contract for over a year and pushing for circumstances that are just better suited for our students. Some of our classrooms that we're dealing with situations like rodents and mold and still some buildings that's dealing with lead in their water,

extreme temperatures like class sizes are huge but different depending on where you're at in the city, like we've just been overcompensating with less since the pandemic times, and we're fed up, we're not able to do it anymore, and yeah, we're strike ready. Yeah, and I mean, this is something, this is something. This is I think a pretty interesting set of circumstances because my understanding and okay, so don't quote me on this. I'm pretty sure that the last time that Portland teachers went on strike was in the like actually ended up striking and not just doing the strike authorization vote was the was in the 80s. So it has been

just doing this strike authorization vote was the was in the 80s. So it has been it has been a really long time. It's a lot of life time. Yeah, it's like I was not like two of my life times effectively. I was not alive for this. So yeah, I think we're seeing that shift happened nationwide that education has been continuously public education has been continuously, public education has been continuously chipped away at and eroded over the last few decades and more and more responsibility has been put on the backs of teachers. And we are not able to function under this workload under these conditions and without increased support for the educators as well. So I think this is the culmination of kind of years and years of disinvestment in public education nationwide. And so you're seeing a lot more strikes,

educational strikes coming up throughout the country and particularly for Portland's history. Like you said, if Portland public schools have striked throughout the country, and particularly for Portland's history. Like you said, it's if Portland Public Schools have striked in the past, it's been literal decades, not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, and just the continued frustration of decades of struggle. Yeah, and I mean, as from what I've heard from people in the city, so the line that I got was that janitors were being told that the standard they were supposed to clean schools to was, quote, moderately dingy.

So things seem not good. It's rough. There's rodents everywhere. Our custodial workers are already worked to the limit and understaffed and so our buildings show I mean the school that I work in is over 110 years old and you can tell it's not being up kept and students are suffering the conditions are like you said dingy a moderate level of approved dinginess supposedly. And that's gross. Yeah. And I mean, so I've heard that complain to law. I mean, I, like, when I was at school,

we only had one. We had, well, I mean, there might have been more, there probably were more rats. We didn't see we had one drowned rat fall out of a ceiling. But that was it. It was, it was, we were limited to one rat for four years. And I feel like that's the maximum number of rats that you should encounter is maybe one because it's kind of funny. But yeah. Ooh, yeah. And these are class pets.

Like these aren't the mice and rats that you're using in a science class or keeping as the class pet in the corner. Like, ooh. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the next thing that I wanted to talk about is class sizes because I know,

I mean, this is a very, people have been like talking about this for ages. And it's something that's really, I feel like it's weird negotiating wise because, and this is something I see all the time, the school dish will be like, well, like the admin will be, oh, yeah, of course you you would like smaller class sizes.

And then they just won't do it. So yeah, could you talk about? Yeah, here's something that's really burning my biscuit. Our district management continues to tell our community and the press that our average class size is 23 students at the elementary level. And the problem with that statistic is that they are doing a ratio based on the adults

in the building. So for example, we have a learning coach. Uh-huh. We have a learning coach who works with children in small groups throughout the building, but she herself is not a rostered classroom teacher. But she is put into that equation so that it looks like our classes on average are 23 when the reality is very different

The music teacher doesn't count the learning coach doesn't count But in the math that the district is like that math ain't math in my class is 34 kids You're telling the public the average is 23 and it's just not true because you're including adults in the building who aren't The host classroom teacher. Yeah. Which is, that's just absurd. I mean, you have to know that you're lying in order to create that statistic.

But that's a... Oh. And, you know, it is true that there are some classes around the district that are small. I had a miracle of a class last year that was 22 kids. That cohort was just small. They weren't having as many babies 11 years ago. I don't know. But this year, this year, I have 34 and the year prior, so not last year, but the 2022 year, I have 32. And 34 kids is unsustainable, especially because I have the 22 to compare it to. I am very aware of how little capacity I have for meeting their needs, for teaching

the wide range of levels that are in the class, even for checking in with kids. I can look out at my room midday and think looking at a kid, I don't know if I've talked to you. It's possible to go so under the radar when there are that many children to care for. Yeah, and I mean, that's a difference of like, it's like, like a 40% class size increase. Right?

Yeah. Which is nuts. And I can feel, and it's having a significant impact on just my own well being in mental health here, because I know what it looks like to teach well, and I know that I cannot currently do it with this many and it's hard. Last year I wasn't feeling any symptoms of burnout at all. It's feeling really good, loving my job still. And this year I'm like, oh my gosh, I cannot keep up with this many kids, especially with, you know, we've gotten even so as class sizes

have increased, so have the needs of our students, right? We're dealing with a lot more mental health issues. We're dealing with a wide range of neurodiversity that comes with different needs. And so it's, that's the 34 now is exponentially different than 34 when we were young. It's intense and it's unsustainable and I'm living it every day. Yeah, and like, you know, I think on an abstract level, like the district knows like that this sucks, right? But they just, they won't fucking do anything about it. It's just, right? Right. Yeah. And even to the level that we're able to bargain it, there are things such as like permissive topics that we can bar or cannot bargain and things that we can bargain.

And even in the strike that we are about to have, they continue to push back on the class cap request, saying that it is a permissive topic and that it's class caps may only be applicable to what are called Title I schools. So schools where the population is more impacted by poverty. And so they're trying, like even trying to get small class sizes or smaller class sizes, knowing that it's a district-wide issue may still only be successful for some parts of our district. And that ain't right. Yeah. And that's that ain't right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's absurd. Yeah. It's just like I, my classroom is incredibly diverse. We are not a title one school. We are known for supposedly being in one of the more affluent areas. But even our neighborhood school, those demographics have continued to change. And we have many students that are experiencing poverty and experiencing some of the cultural pieces that go with that, the

systemic impacts of that. Our students are living through trauma. Our students are experiencing adversity. Our students are experiencing racism and sexism and homophobia, and they are jam-packed sardines in an overheated room with no supports. I'm the only adult in the room to support them. I have students with disabilities who aren't getting support from our Sped team because our Sped team is a Sped stands for special education.

Our special educators are working with some younger grade students with even bigger needs. So my fifth graders with disabilities are getting completely left in the lurch and it is my single body with all 34 and it will be here. We're floundering. Yeah, and I mean, that's another sort of aspect of this that I think is really like is really grim that all of these issues, it's like the kids who need the most help from the beginning are the people who are getting the

most hurt by it. And, you know, and those are the people who the education system is supposed to be taking care of and just cannot because, you know, chronic understaffing class sizes that are too large. Right. And it's especially painful. I've been teaching now for 10 years and I am looking at this class right now. I have a student in my class

who is a little black boy with a disability and I'm looking at him knowing that I am not able to give him what he needs. And he is like the statistic that school districts want to put on their website. Like we got, you know, our marginalized populations, we've helped them. We fit. And like here is a student that is the statistic that you supposedly are fighting for. And he is absolutely left out to dry.

And I am trying to do what I can for him. And he comes to my, I picture him as I'll be out there on that picket line. I am out there for that kid, as well as this 33 other classmates. But just like quintessential picture of who I'm fighting for and who is getting left behind. Yeah, which, which I don't know. Like there's, I think there's something really grim in the way,

and this is a, you know, this, this goes back to what you were talking about with the way that they're just straight up lying about the average, not the average class size where it's, it really seems like these things have, you know, the actual process of education is being degraded into just this, this sort of metric chasing game. And you know, as long as you have metrics that look good, you know, like the district is like, wow, okay, that's fine. That like our students aren't going to be called if education they need, it's fine that they're in these buildings that are literally falling apart. It's fine that, you know, kids aren't getting what they need, like as long as the metrics look good. And that's

something that gets me when we talk about those metrics, knowing our superintendent gets a bonus if academically marginalized populations, like our black and brown students, if they increase their performance on standardized tests, he gets a bonus. Now, what I have a problem with is that those standardized tests that we take every spring, there are some students that are so impacted by the school system that they may have attendance issues. They may not be there consistently in the spring to take those tests. So something I'm picturing a couple of my students who were impacted by poverty, were kids of color, and were significantly absent due to what the circumstances of their life. Those students were not able to take that test in the spring. That means those students, those black and brown students, that data wasn't in those metrics. So even the metrics that are being used to measure whether or not we are successfully supporting our students of color

are inaccurate because our most impacted students aren't able to take that assessment. Like, his data, our superintendent's data is going to look better when some of the students who might tank that data because they are unsupported by the school system aren't there to be in the data because they're unsupported by the school system. It falls apart. Yeah. And this is one of these things where it's which the only way to change this is due union actions because the school district is not going to do it.

Their metrics look fine. Right. The government is not going to do it because they don't want to spend more money. This is the only way to actually. Yeah. And I think we finally, I think, have made a point we are I mean our union actions already have been building up a visible presence. We have massive community support from our not only our parent communities, but the greater Portland area businesses coming out in support. People joining us at like we

had a massive march this Saturday where we took over the Burnside Bridge, and as our Union Actions build, we know that we are out there, we are not alone, and that we are feeling the support from the community, and we are becoming a more visible presence. And especially in Portland, we are a massive union. Other unions around the state are looking at us and watching how this goes, and we can tell that the district management is scared. They are starting to send out emails to families that are meant to intimidate and panic and cause chaos. And we're seeing these defensive moves that are a reaction. You know who else is a hack and a fraud

who didn't figure out a way to do an ad pivot here. It's the products and services that support this podcast. Yeah, speaking of businesses that support us. And we're back. Yeah, so, you know, okay, so those are two other dynamics that I sort of I wanted to get into. I guess first, I want to talk about what the community support is looked like. What, what, what are the unions look like has looked like, and how you've been engaged in with parents, because that's been a big thing. So I'm from Chicago, and so we have like a,

I mean, not that long, but for the last about decade, the Chicago Teachers Union's been on strike a bunch of times, and it's, yeah. Like it really, and the support of that and the engagement of that really, is one of the few things that's in making Chicago a better place.

So I wanted to ask what that's looked like in Portland because this is basically the first time for you all. Right. And I know historically in Oregon, we felt the support from our community, such as the Red for Ed movement a few years ago when we were really pushing for statewide reform and change in education policy. And here in Portland, ever since the seeds of our uprising were being planted, knowing that we are on a collision course towards a strike based on how poorly the district management is bargaining with us.

And so we started to build in that communication and enlist the support of our parent communities pretty early on by having info sessions, by talking about, you know, the communities wants and desires for their students, connecting with our schools, PTAs, connecting with local businesses, especially as in the last month or so that we felt, okay, this is happening. We are about to strike. We need to connect with our communities in our school areas and see who's out there and if they have our back. And it's been really profound in grassroots organizing between the parents and the PTAs

in tandem with our unions. And from businesses around our school areas, we attended an event called strike school to prepare. And one of our missions was to check in with businesses and neighbors in the areas of our schools where we plan to be picketing and seeing, you know, where can we go to use a bathroom, where can we go to use a parking lot, and just making those connections, some of which already existed, even though Portland hasn't had to strike, we've been very connected to our communities because the educators live in these communities.

This is my community. Unlike some of the big wigs in the big pink building of management, like they are coming in and out in a few years, we're from here. We are here to stay. We are here to make those connections. So it was very easy to call upon those connections, because we are the community. You know, we have a lot of union members that are parents.

We have a lot of union members that are married to business owners in the area. We've, yeah, it's been, it's been obvious who lives here, who's fighting for these kids because this is our community. Yeah, and, you know, I mean, Portland's been a place where I think kind of beneath the notice of a lot of the national press, it's been one of the places where the most union organizing is happening and where the most strikes have been happening. And yeah, I was wondering, I mean, to what extent have y'all been influenced by, I mean, both the sort of the just profusion of like local strikes and then also the kind of the bigger

national strikes? Something really beautiful about living in Portland is that there is quite a bit of cross-union solidarity. And like in the educational realm, we have a coalition of all of our unions that come together. The certified teachers like my union, PAT, as well as SEIU, the union that represents our custodial staff, as well as PFSP, our pair of educators, our nutritional staff, the bus drivers union, like all of those unions come together and support each other. And in fact, in the educational realm of Portland, multiple unions are on the verge of striking

in that they are having unsuccessful bargaining attempts. But then also with like the UPS workers, with Kaiser pharmacies and the medical field, like there is labor action all around Portland and there's definitely a built-in solidarity network from union to Union. Our Union siblings are with us. We have been with them throughout the years. I think we do a really good job as a major city of wrapping around each other's unions and supporting big actions. And Portland, when we do get national press, it is for how rampant our little city can be. And this is some of that good trouble that John Lewis would want us to get in.

Yeah, and I mean, this is something that you can, I mean, so I was in Portland for like three weeks pretty recently. And I mean, you would just run, like I was at a hospital for long story about that. But I was at a hospital and like the first person. But I was at a hospital and the first person we talked to is, as a receptionist was the union rep from the receptionist union. And we're talking to the nurses. The nurses are like, oh yeah, we just won our thing

without having to go on strike because management caved. It's a really sort of incredible place to be in terms of just the energy and just the amount of stuff that's happening there. So it's really, it's really sort of incredible. Very active. I guess the other side of this is that this we've also seen a lot of sort of management retaliation and crack down attempts. And yeah, I was wondering if you could talk about what management's been doing because.

Yeah. Yeah. It's really ramped up in the last week or so as it is clear that we are on our way to strike, especially when we 99% of the membership voted yes to a strike authorization. That's into pretty clear message and I think it made district management panic a little. And we've received numerous emails to the parent community. They have, for example, they are training tomorrow, Thursday, the day of our strike beginning,

or Wednesday, on Wednesday, the day that the strike begins, they are training our paraprofessionals and EAs in how to deliver virtual phonics instruction. One of their moves was to cause panic in the families by sending emails home that say, your student based on their test scores is a struggling reader. Here's the plan. Should there be a school closure that we're going to provide virtual learning opportunities? So immediately, you've got parents in a panic, emailing their teacher like, by student struggling, why didn't I know? And in many cases, that was inaccurate.

A second grade teacher at my school, every parent in her class got that email. And sure she has some struggling readers, but it is not every student. Why did every student's family get that email? Yep. To cause panic, to cause fear, to cause intimidation. And so they also sent out a big email trying that the technology team was coming into the buildings to collect all the Chromebooks. Our students are one-to-one with Chromebooks. They're pretty

integral to our curriculum delivery and our instruction. And they started pulling them out in the middle of the work day, in the middle of the teaching day, from some of our youngest students, which was a visible thing in front of students. They're coming to collect them. It was unplanned. We had no warning. That again seemed to be kind of a panic move. We are trying to so fear and intimidation and we're taking your Chromebooks and we're

putting kids back in COVID times. That's just a terrible, also just like a terrible thing to do to a bunch of kids. Right. What? Yeah. Okay, they're just coming to the room, we're just taking their stuff in front of everyone.

Like what? Right. Especially those younger grades with no warning and like, oh, we were supposed to have our tech time on Friday, like we had our routine and, oh, this guy's coming in and taking all the Chromebooks. Sorry, kids. Yeah, it's what are you saying? Not really having a ready answer. Yeah, it's like it's one of these things

where it's like you can you can really tell like who actually cares about the kids here. And you know management is trying to put out the message that teachers don't care about your kids. That's why they're willing to stop school and put your kids back at home again. It's bad like the pandemic time. Those nasty teachers want your kids out of school. And, you know, our point being that our students haven't been getting the learning that they deserve because of the current conditions. That we've been underserving them already. We are walking out not because we don't care, but because we care so passionately

that we aren't willing to stand for these subpar conditions any longer. And this is the thing. I don't like, I've seen a lot of teacher strikes in my city, I've seen a lot of teacher strikes nationally. I don't think I've ever seen, and this isn't to say that I don't think it would be justified for teachers to go on strike

Like just because they're underpaid like I like everyone had everyone like has the right and possibly the obligation to go on strike Better conditions, but like that's not ever ever I have never at any point ever seen a teacher's unit go on strike For reasons that words mostly about like Moose Lee about improving these for their kids. And it's, it's, wow, because you see this, every, it's like they do this in Chicago too. It's like every single time there's a strike,

it's like, oh, the teachers, like they hate your kids, is that they're like these like privilege overpaid people who are like, and it's like, you guys like, you should like look at the admin salary sometime, like, yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's clear that there's a disconnect.

And as soon as there's a change in the weather, teachers go from being the hero to being the villain. And the fact that we are willing to go out on the streets and fight for our kids in the rain and the cold of Oregon winter. No, we're the villains. out on the streets and fight for our kids in the rain and the cold of Oregon winter. No, we're the villains. We are putting them all back in their COVID boxes. Like, yeah, that ain't it. Yeah, that really sucks. Like, I don't know. It's just, thankfully, the negative kind of vitriol that we see mostly online where the trolls live. It does seem to be like allowed minority as with any form of trolling or counter. You know, we do hear from community

members that have more legitimate concerns, but they are, I'm really supportive. I'm a little worried about this one aspect, but I'm with you guys, you know, and that's valid. I told my students as we were getting ready to go home for the long weekend quote unquote, you know that it is okay to feel a variety of emotions like I'm sad I'm gonna miss you guys. I don't know when I'll get to see you again and that makes me anxious And I'm excited to go fight for you guys to get us what we deserve like So even letting the children know this is totally normal, and that's my same message to the adults. It's totally okay if you've got some mixed emotions.

And we're gonna be out there fighting for the kids. I hope you're not mad at me for very long, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Yeah, and that's another thing that's kind of weird about this is the way the negotiations have gone. It's like this is happening, like a lot of strikes happen at the beginning of the school year, right? And so it pushes back.

But this is like, okay, so like you've gotten in, you've met the kids, you're like teaching them, you're developing your relationship, and then management is just like, no, this is the moment we're going to force everyone to. Yeah. I'm not just sucks. Yeah. And I don't think there's ever a great time to strike, but we definitely hope to be the least impactful.

You know, we want to make sure that our families have what they need. We want to make sure that our staff have what they need. We didn't want to go too long. We don't want to be striking in the middle of winter or during a break when students are already out. Yeah, there's never a great time and I feel I feel really confident that our bargaining unit has really worked to make this the least detrimental to our students as possible while still maintaining the validity of a strike of a big collective action. I mean, I think this is something that care workers struggle with a lot, right?

It's like one of the reasons that it's hard for teachers to strike that it's hard for healthcare workers to strike is because like, yeah, like you don't do this job unless you care about the people that you're, like it's your job to care for. Like you wouldn't know, like no one will put up with these conditions if they didn't care.

And that's, I think there's this really grim way in which this becomes the sort of trap of, it becomes this, you see this, like this is the thing I've been talking to, people who are abortion workers, and they talk about this too, where it's like there's this kind of trap you get in, because it's like you know that you are the only person providing the service that these people really need.

And your bosses use that to underpay you, use it to, you know, have just unacceptable conditions. And it sucks that it's like, you know, the foundational elements of an actual any kind of society that's actually good, like the fact that people care, love each other and care for each other is being used as a weapon to, you know, like, a worse people into, like, really shitty conditions. It's weaponizing our passion and our care for our kids. And that's also something that tells you that it's serious. If teachers who know that our students rely on us, we love our students so deeply. If we are at the point where we're finally striking,

it's been bad for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And you were kind of mentioning this earlier, but teachers are so many things to our students. Like, I am their teacher. I, in some cases, M.A. care provider. In some cases, I'm a therapist, in some cases, I'm their nutrition expert. Like they are coming to us for everything in some cases. And so to be willing to say, I have to leave now, to get us what we deserve, you're, I'm going to make sure you're okay. It's so hard. It's so hard to say goodbye to these kids. And it's so necessary. Yeah. And that's that tells you that we that it is also that important that we have gotten to this point where we need to. Yeah. And the students do seem pretty and I mean I have the benefit of being at fifth grade, but the students do seem to understand pretty well. Some of them are incredibly activated

little union fighters as well. We had some of the fifth graders sent letters to the Oregonian and to the school board and to the superintendent and they're very eloquent. They, I mean, they've been living the conditions. They are the voice and they are trying to shout loudly and you know, we're trying to amplify that like I am striking for them I will benefit, but this is for them to have a better outcome You know what other services are provided by a bunch of workers who are not getting paid enough and are probably understaffed Legally, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that but they haven't done the crackdown on us Yes, I can say whatever I want to. It's the products and services that support this podcast.

And we are back. So there's a thing I've been noticing. So I've been interviewing a lot of service workers in the last, I guess like two years now, geez, I've been doing this for a long time now. But in one of the things that I've been noticing is a lot of people, and this comes back to something that you were talking about, which is that a lot of service workers, I mean, people who are just barista, people who are, you know, people who are just doing effectively random service jobs are being pushed more and

more into having to care for people because the rest of the sort of whatever social safety that's the US used to have have just completely imploded. And I think, I don't want to get you're opinion in this, it looks to me like ground zero for this was the education system of all of the responsibility of, you know, that these massive increases in poverty and stagnating wages and police violence and like are completely dysfunctional about the healthcare system, that all of this, the first people this was pushed on was y'all. Yeah. Yeah, we're that first line of defense for the public good. And when you are gutting

education, you are gutting the first safety net of the public good. And, you know, the students will tell you that they are our future. And we are the net that's supposed to catch them. And we've been underfunded and under-supported and under-resourced. And in many ways, like privatized, where some of what will be the future populace are getting what they need, and everyone else is left behind. And you can see it in retrospect. You can see how public education has been deteriorating or forcibly deteriorated by

some of those interests that are trying to privatize or have privatization in their mission. And the ultimate outcome of that is a deteriorated United States. Like the populace is suffering because of it. Like I wonder why democracy is starting to fall apart when follow the dominoes backwards. Public education has been underfunded and under sourced for decades now. So our generation of workers are trying

to repair the damage we witnessed and experience and stop it from getting worse as it gets worse around us. Yeah, and this is one of those things where this is kind of, like there's been this kind of unholy alliance between like the I guess I call it like the the sort of the charter school private school alliance Between the sort of like Obama already Duncan. Oh my god. I want a Paul Vales like like technically liberal like neoliberal reformers Who were you know trying to destroy teachers unions trying to like trying to force everyone to charter schools, trying to sort of like, I mean, just just blasting holes in the education system in every single city they end up in. But it's just interesting.

Team two, where like, you have these people on the one hand, and they're the sort of like, vaguely liberal wing of it. And then simultaneously, you have this sort of like absolutely ferocious, like, fr, right wing, like evangelical, stosh- Like the whole shoe shape. Yeah, it's like someone, I saw a, well, they were going the other direction, but I saw a funny, I did fiction of that.

They called it like fish hook theory. We're like, you have this stuff in the middle and then the far right people sort of bend back around into the middle because they found this one thing they agree on which is that they hate teachers. Right. Ah. And you know, the public enemy.

Yeah, and I think it's interesting too that like schools are specifically the place that when the right try it wanted to do their pushback against racial justice, it was like they went to schools. They've been doing this with LGBTQ stuff too is the right's whole game. I mean, since desegregation has been trying to push people into private schools and privatizing the education system, and I don't know, it strikes me as interesting that there's been for a really long time. And I think you all, like, you all the, like Chicago teachers unions has, this has really been sort of the forefront of the fight against that of like, it seems like we're finally in a period with these people who have run this

country into the ground for the past like 50 years are finally starting to sort of like face the consequences and like have to deal with the people that they've been just destroying for so long. Yeah, we are seeing it from the inside as it happens. Like I am experiencing as an elder millennial growing up in the 90s in the public education system, knowing now as an adult what I was not being taught or what was being left out or censored just due to systemic patterns that now we teach in a different way to make sure that

that doesn't continue. And then we're seeing legislation in places like Florida and Tennessee that are like, stop doing that, stop fixing the problem. And you can't put it back in the box. We see from the inside as things are falling apart and people are being left out. And so we're inside public education screaming, knock it off. You did bad by us. We won't let you do bad by the next generation and the next generation. us, we won't let you do bad by the next generation and the next generation. Yeah, and I think like the other aspect of that is the way that like school boards are being used to sort of like to take control of districts and like push all of this sort of just horrific like anti-queer politics stuff. And I don't know, like that's a personal one for me because my school, I mean, I guess we technically had stuff,

but I don't know. The resources available to all the queer kids that was like me and everyone I grew up with were just terrible. And I gotta see the consequences of that. Right, bare minimum, if any. Yeah, and in a really, really frothing, right wing, real discontuitive environment. And I don't know, it really seems like it's for a lot of people

it's gotten way better. And all of these, one of the assaults that we're seeing is like, who just want to bring this stuff back? Right, to the quote unquote good old days, before all of us queer folks were coming out and like put everybody back on the closet, hide all of the racism that you've unraveled and exposed. Put it all back in the box, put a bow back on the box. We want America to look the way it used to. Yeah.

And that's a lie. And that benefited very specific populations. And we won't continue to play that game. And I think that's another reason, like you said, that you're seeing the gutting of public education is that it's scary. Public education is about truth and teaching critical thinking. And that is not good for people in power when there power has been achieved on the backs of marginalized groups and

historically under serving people and pushing people into the dirt. Yeah, it's like it's it's your it turns out that when that would when your entire state is based on doing a rolling genocide across the entire continent, you probably don't want to tell people that that's like a bad idea. Yeah. Cats out of the bag, America. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask you sort of what role has, I guess, just 2020 in general.

as, I guess, just 2020 in general. And I mean, the pandemic too, but like, I don't know, like I wanna, I guess like, get a sense of what impact like the uprising has had on all of this, because it is, like I do think it is notable that, you know, it's like three years after the uprising, it's we have the first strike in... Right. So long. I think as a result of living through pandemic times,

people really had an opportunity to reflect on what their lives were like, what they were living through that was unjust. I think a lot of inequities were revealed through having to shift our entire worlds and things that had previously gone hidden or unnoticed or unexposed came to light and people said no more. I, we have learned to do things a different way. We will not go back to the broken ways. And so it makes sense to me that we are at this boiling point in repairing and trying to

rebuild and reform after a global change. And you see it in the kids too. I mean they say about my generation as a millennial that we've lived through numerous large scale traumas. And the kids of today have now as well, like the students I am currently teaching were second graders when the pandemic hit and they are forever changed. They were seeing, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement come alive on their television screens and in their cities.

They grew up in civic action and global turmoil. And they are active, even if I wasn't teaching current events in the way that I do, the students are bringing it to the room. Like the conversations are happening. Yeah, which is such an interesting, like that generation,

I think it's gonna be really interesting because I don't know, I'm from this, I'm on exactly the borderline with everyone trying to figure out whether I've been millennial or a zoomer. But like, my first memory is 9-11. And so like, I feel like I got a kind of millennial experience

which is, I got 9-11, 2008, 26th. Well, 2008, then the 2013 uprisings, which I guess was a bit off, but I got the 2011, 2013 uprisings, which I guess was a bit off, but I got like the 2011 chill 13 uprisings and then like I get out of college or I get into college and it's 2016. It's just like, I don't know. Yeah, it's just hot mess. It's just real like I became conscious the moments that history returned to the world.

I don't know. I think it's an interesting thing with these kids who've grown up, who are, yeah, their first memories are going to be the pandemic and 2020 that I don't know. I'm interested in where these these people are gonna go, but also I think this is you know this this all of this ties back into Just the importance of what you and all of your coworkers do which is that you're the people who are You know like you're the people who are producing like like, the kids who are gonna, who are, I mean, hopefully they won't have to be fighting

the same fights that we are right now. Statistically, they probably will, but yeah. Like, and you're the people who are sort of mediating their understanding of like, what is happening in this world around them that's, you know, increasingly terrifying and complex. Right? Trying not to give 10 year olds an existential crisis, around them that's increasingly terrifying and complex. Right. Trying not to give ten year olds an existential crisis, but they are coming into like,

they are at that developmental age where they are starting to have that existential crisis of, wow, our planet is out of luck. Our educational system is rotten. Our democracy is falling apart. They are witnessing turmoil in every country. Like, it is, you know, they say that the youth's humor is very nihilistic and dark. And it's just getting darker. Like, thankfully, they give me so much hope and light in, you know, a world where

sometimes I don't even want to be a part of the future because the future looks grim. They are a light even in all of that darkness. And I think they're really resilient. I wish they didn't have to be. I have my own big existential dread. And the kids are angry. The kids are upset, but the kids are all right, maybe.

Yeah. We can continue to support them. And I think this is something that goes for everyone is like, in so far as we have obligations to anyone on earth, like the thing that we owe these kids is to try to make sure they don't have to go through the same shit that we did. Yeah. Because that's so sucked.

Yeah. One of my teaching philosophies is the B who you needed when you were younger. And I didn't even know some of the things I needed, but looking back like now, as a queer adult living in a major city who grew up in a small town in Montana. In the mind is I'm very, very aware of some of the things that I should have had as a young person and that I am glad to be there for my students in that way. Even the difference working with some people who've been teaching for longer, you see the difference in educational philosophy from run generation to the next and the B who you needed when you were younger. I'm very open to being neuroaffirming,

supporting our students that are on the spectrum, our students with ADHD, our students with anxiety disorders, in a way that even the teachers of our generation when I was a child aren't necessarily on the same level. We're getting better. We're making education less damaging to I think that's one of the reasons sometimes we lose public opinion is people have negative memories of school school has been harmful And we're like no support us like I promise it's different now Yeah, but I mean, but I think this is one of those things too We're like the teachers union in general if you're looking at what is this? What is the single single group of people

in the United States who actually wants to make school suck less like the most. It's probably slightly above that is students, but the thing is students are organized enough to like, and as much really, and this isn't to write off the incredible amount of student activism that, I mean, has been happening forever, but they don't have the kind of power that, like teachers unions do.

Teachers unions are the other people. Social voice. Yeah, one also just the ability to like, like the ability to withdraw your labor and suddenly actually have a massive effect on the entire sort of like state economy. Yeah, we are united for our students. We are called a teachers union, but we are united for our students because they don't yet have the ability or the access or the social capital to be

heard in the way that they deserve. Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a pretty good note to end on unless you have anything else that you want to say first. I'm satisfied. I mean, I'm not satisfied. I'm striking. But like, I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. So how can people, well, A, how can people in Portland support the strike and then B, how can people who are not in Portland who want to support the strike help? Yeah. Portlanders are able to help support the strike and then be how can people who are not in Portland who want to support the strike help? Yeah, Portlanders are able to help support the strike.

We have a strike fund set up for purchasing and some of the things that we've needed on our strike lines, like megaphone, like ponchos. All of that strike fund is being used to help strike captains such as myself around the city organize our pickets and our actions. And so donating to that strike fund is one way to make sure that every teacher in Portland is getting some support. And then if you live in Portland, finding out the schools that are closest to you in your area, reaching out to those schools specifically, probably through social media, since we will not be in our buildings, like using a school email wouldn't work. But reaching out to the strike in your area,

if you drive by and you see them, like giving them a honk in a hooray and finding out where they need supplies to get directed to, people outside of Portland, same thing. That strike fund is very visible, sharing on social media, things on our behalf, really making sure that your own legislatures know how important public education is to you. Hopefully, things in your state or area are going positively for educators, but chances are they're not. So I bet no matter where you live, as a listener, public educators in your area could probably use your support, talking to school boards, talking to legislators,

and making change in education, making sure that kids are getting what they need. That fight is guaranteed to be happening everywhere. Yeah, and we will have links to, well definitely a strike fund, probably also, we'll have links to social media, stuff in the description. So yeah, go do that.

Also, yeah, I'm assuming you also I do want, I'm assuming you also people control the picket lines. Yeah, anyone in Portland driving in any of our neighborhoods will find a school, will find a picket and you are welcome to join us. I know I'm in the southwest region of Portland, we'll be picketing in major areas as well as right outside our schools. So pretty much anywhere you see a sea of blue, give us a honk and hop out and join us for a little while. And we'll see you in some big visible spaces to be determined as we do some larger action. So yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a thing I will say from experiences that like, okay, so the more people there are, the better picketing is, and where there's a bunch of people on a picket, it rules.

So go go pick it, it's a good time. You're, you're finding your, yeah, you're finding, you're finding for a good cause, you are finding for your class. And yeah. Yeah. Hey, well, thank you so much for having me, and thank you to your listeners listeners for giving us an ear. And thank you for talking to me.

It's been great. And yeah, go, go, go listeners, all of you go support the strike, make sure they win. And yeah, go out, go out into your communities and do this. And go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out

on the I Heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemeda.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDRR, which means just don't look right. On season two of my podcast, What Happened To, I take a closer look at Libby Caswell's life and death.

Libby's case keeps me awake at night. What happened to I take a closer look at Libby Caswell's life and death. Libby's case keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. That's something that I need to know. Listen to what happened to Libby Caswell on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When Tracy Rekel Burns was two years old, her baby brother died. I was told that Matthew died in an accident. Her parents told police she had killed him.

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