Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secret Societies and American Democracy with Colin Dickey

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Sharon is joined today by cultural historian and author Colin Dickey, to discuss America’s fascination with conspiracies, and fear of secret societies. In his new book, Under the Eye of Power, Colin walks through the history of how paranoia is woven into the very fabric of The United States from its inception, and how conspiratorial thinking and even the most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream. From the Salem Witch Trials to Freemasonry to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, Colin breaks down this cycle in history and explains why people of all walks of life subscribe to conspiracy theories, and what can be done to break the cycle. Special thanks to our guest, Colin Dickey, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Colin Dickey Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Gosh, today's episode, so good. If you love things that are mysterious, my conversation with author Colin Dickey is going to be right up your alley. He's written a book called Under the Eye of Power, and this is a study of America's fear of secret societies. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting today with Colin Dickey. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thanks so much for having me on. Your book immediately intrigued me. I think most people are inherently interested in anything that is secret, right?

Like we're inherently like, tell me the secrets. I need to know them. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think that's like the thing that keeps connecting the books that I've been writing. You know, this one is on secret societies. The one before that was on UFOs and Bigfoot.

The one before that was on ghosts. So I'm always interested in these like things that are kind UFOs and Bigfoot, the one before that was on ghosts. So I'm always interested in these like, things that are kind of hidden at the margins, but are still kind of have an effect on culture or people believe they're, you know, influence us in various ways. So it was kind of a natural trajectory to move to secret societies from here. Totally. And so your book is called Under the Eye of Power, how Fear of Sacred Societies Shapes American Democracy. And I love how you started the book with talking about how paranoia is kind of in America's DNA. It's a little bit who we are. Yeah, I mean, it was sort of strange and interesting to

look back at the American Revolution and like the kind of founding of the country, and also the French Revolution and the effect it had on American politics. And to remember that from the very beginning, this whole question of democracy was so brand new, and everybody was very nervous about it. It seemed very vulnerable, this idea that they were doing something that people really hadn't done before. And there was this kind of open question, is this going to work? Maybe it's going to be undermined from saboteurs from foreign countries. And that nervousness and anxiety about the project of democracy led almost immediately to various paranoid theories that either that the American Revolution was itself the work of French saboteurs who are trying to distract and divide England, or after the French

Revolution, there was immediately a concern amongst American leaders that the French Revolution had been undone by secret saboteurs who are now going to come to America and undermine our democracy as well. So it runs through the early decades of the country's founding and origin in this really fascinating way. I know for sure that people who listen to this show are very interested in Freemasons. First of all, what are they? The history is so long and convoluted. I don't know how much you want to get into it, but like, you know, by the time Freemasonry comes to North America in the 18th century, for there's a United States, I mean, you have this organization that is secretive,

not really involved in stonemasonry anymore. They sort of ceased to be a labor union, but they're a kind of way for well-heeled progressive upper class and upper middle class men to get together and talk about things, atheism or democracy or whatever, without fear of, you know, the king or the church getting wind of it and stringing them all up for heresy or whatever. you know, the king or the church getting wind of it and stringing them all up for heresy or whatever. And so it becomes this kind of status symbol amongst the colonists and people like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, both of whom are kind of social climbers and are trying to figure out how to get ahead in this world, both see Freemasonry as a way to do that. And so that's why they become early and prominent Freemasons.

And Benjamin Franklin is sort of not invited in at first. So he's got this press. And so what he does instead is he says, this friend of mine died, and he was a Freemason, and he left behind their secret initiation rights, and I thought I would publish them. And that freaks out the Philadelphia Masons. So they decide to have him as a friend rather than an enemy. And that's how he gets inducted. But it's this way for them to sort of prove to themselves that they are kind of the first among equals, a citizenry that is setting the vanguard for what America is going to be. And I don't mean that entirely obnoxiously. Again, somebody like Ben Franklin, who is founding public libraries, founding volunteer fire departments, like it's not all snobbishness, but it is this sense that

he wants to help identify what it means to be the new citizenship that's going to define America. And Freemasonry becomes a way of kind of demonstrating that publicly and sort of showing that off. And that's why there's so many very prominent Freemasonry becomes a way of kind of demonstrating that publicly and sort of showing that off. And that's why there's so many very prominent Freemason symbols that date back from this era. Like it wasn't a hidden thing. It wasn't a secret. It was we want people to know that we're Freemasons and we built this building because we're nice guys. We're philanthropists.

That kind of vibe. Yeah. I mean, and they still put their name on things. People, I think, equate Freemasonry with the Illuminati. No, Freemasons are like, they will put their sign on the door. They'll put their name on a charity. They'll show up at a parade. It's not a secret that they exist.

But what they do in the meetings, you have to be a member to be able to access. Is that part of what made them scary? I say that in air quotes, scary to people? What about the Freemasons was off-putting to somebody who couldn't be a member? I think by the time Benjamin Franklin is a Mason, they're not that scary. They're a little bit, maybe, wacky, but they're not an organization that people are afraid of. It's not really until the 19th century and the 18-teens and 18-twenties that the shift happens. And I was totally fascinated to learn this, and it was fun to write about this in the book. But basically, what happens is as their membership grows and more and more middle class and working class people are part of the Freemasons,

that cement that kept them together in the beginning, being the upper crust, the sort of aristocratic elite, no longer applies. And they need something else to keep them together. And increasingly, it is the secrecy itself and these weird, mystic, bizarre rites that they develop. That's the way that they keep themselves together. So it goes from being something like, I don't know, like a kind of Aspen, Ted talky vibe, where the next generation leaders are meeting together to more of a fraternity hazing vibe, where the thing that binds these people together, the fact that they do wacky, bizarre nonsense behind closed doors, the more

likely the members are going to be to bind themselves together. And so that is ultimately kind of what shifts the public perception. And it all boils to a head in the story I tell in the book about this guy, William Morgan, who was living in upstate New York near Buffalo, was a Freemason, got tired of the organization, wanted to leave, threatened to publish their secret initiation rights in a book. And the local Masons of Batavia, New York, in this little town near Buffalo, decided that that wasn't going to cut it. And so they worked themselves up in this kind of paranoid frenzy and ultimately ended up trying to harass him, getting him to cease and desist.

When that didn't work, they burned down the printing press. They threw him in jail on fake charges a bunch of times. It sort of only made him more resolved. And finally, they throw him in jail in 1826 for a fake debt. And then some guy shows up at the jail to pay his bond. And William Morgan is momentarily elated to be freed. And then he realizes he doesn't know this guy. And as he's being whisked into a waiting carriage in the middle of the street, he starts shouting,

you know, murder, murder, murder. And that's the last anytime anybody saw William Morgan. So that's in terms of all the conspiracy theories about the Freemasons, all the crazy stuff out there, this is the one act of malevolence which they are most clearly and definitively associated with, the disappearance and most likely murder. His body never turned up, but everybody sort of assumes that he was murdered in 1826. And it sort of determined the legacy of how people thought of the Freemasons still to this day, 200 years later. You know, I was really interested to read this in the book too. I guess I had not thought of it this way, but reading the chapter on it, I was like, it makes complete sense

that abolitionists, slavery abolitionists, and the Underground Railroad were organizations that were secret societies by and large. And people were, especially were secret societies, by and large. And people were, especially in the South, terrified of exactly what they were going to do. Right, exactly. And again, when I set out to write this book, I knew I was going to write about Freemasons and the Illuminati and the satanic panic of the 1980s. But I started to think, okay, what is the unifying feature? panic of the 1980s. But I started to think, okay, what is the unifying future? And so I had this working definition of a secret society being a thing either real or imagined, you know, real,

like the Freemasons imagined, like the Illuminati, that is coordinating behind the scenes in some way, shape, or form to overturn American democracy or violate American laws in some way. And right, as you mentioned, almost immediately, the Underground Railroad fits that definition. They were a group of people working in secret to violate the future slave law. Obviously, for the record, that was great. That's an excellent use of illegality for a noble purpose. But I had to sort of accept the fact that, okay, this not only fits that definition, but sure enough, kind of as you hint, this created all sorts of crazy paranoia in the South who were convinced in the same way that in the 50s, the John Birch Society was convinced that there were communists hiding in every mailbox. In the 1840s and 50s in the South, white slave owners were convinced that abolitionists were

hiding everywhere. Any fire, any calamity was presumed to be the work of abolitionist saboteurs. And that just became an article of faith in the South. You also talk about anti-Catholic conspiracy theories and how prevalent they were. And it is a very interesting thing to study in part because of this anti-Catholic rhetoric, how important it becomes to the KKK during the turn of the 20th century. Anti-Catholic rhetoric also touches into the satanic panic. There are a variety of ways that anti-Catholic conspiracy theories have sort of reared their head in the United States over the years. And I wondered if you could sort of touch on some

of the highlights of that. Yeah. Again, I was not expecting to find this when I started doing the research, but you're right. I mean, the strain of anti-Catholicism that runs through most of this country's history, if you really take a look at it, you see almost a kind of template for any number of other conspiracy theories and moral panics that we've dealt with sense. And so the first kind of iteration of sort of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States was motivated around this idea that Catholics were fundamentally beholden to their priests and the Pope in Rome, and thus could not be trusted to participate in democracy as full fledged, independent minded citizens, that they would take their marching orders from the Pope, and thus they couldn't be full Americans. That was the accusation. And, you know, as I was reading this stuff and this, you know, stuff from 1830 about this attitude, it sort of immediately was like, oh, this is now how a lot of people in America who are Islamophobic talk about Sharia law,

right? The idea that Sharia law prohibits Muslim Americans from following American laws or participating in democracy because they're somehow beholden to this extra kind of non-American legal system that will trump their sense of being law-abiding citizens, which is nonsense, of course. But that same thing was happening with early anti-Catholic rhetoric. And so that was one of the strands. Another one, as you mentioned, is the anti-Catholic rhetoric is where we get the first version of this cabal of secret sexual abusers who are abducting people and subjecting them to terrible rituals. The prevalent belief was that priests were able to use the confessional as kind of half mind control, half blackmail to get young

women to submit to various sort of sexual depravities and sexual abuse. And that, what I write about in the book is this fascinating story, which has been mostly wiped off the history books in 1834, when a convent outside of Boston in Somerville, Massachusetts was burned to the ground by a mob who had been convinced that it was this sort of den of iniquity where horrible sexual abuse was happening. Of course, nothing of the sort was happening. But again, there's a sort of direct parallel from that to a guy walking into a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. in 2017, convinced that in a basement, children are being held against their will and firing an AR-15 into the ceiling. kind of main laboratories, I think you could say, for Americans testing out new conspiracy theories that then would eventually kind of escape their bounds and run rampant. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast

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before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I also found your discussion of the Federal Reserve fascinating. I wonder if you could tell people who maybe don't know about the conspiracy theories and beliefs about surrounding the secret society that they believe is around the Federal Reserve. So prior to 1917, the American banking system was a mess. Like we've lived through in the past 20 years, a couple of pretty severe recessions. And in the 19th century,

those kind of recessions and depressions happened two, three times a decade. Yeah, just because there was very little monetary control. There was very little attempt by the federal government to ameliorate these problems. And in the 19th century, they just did not. There was no central bank. Recessions, depressions would happen all the time. If there was a crop failure, it would ripple through the entire American economy. If there was a shortage, if there was a bank run, it would not just affect Wall Street, it would put people out of work in Los Angeles, et cetera. And so we had this real problem. And a lot of American politicians and also bankers on Wall Street finally got to the point in the 19-teens

where they realized the federal government had to step in and do something. But the problem that they had was that if these bankers from Wall Street showed up and told the nation, look, we figured out a solution on how to build this federal reserve, and it's going to prevent these depressions and recessions, and it's going to be a lot healthier for everybody. I mean, who would believe that everybody hated bankers, right? And so they made this calculation where they they worked this out in secret, there was a group of senators and bankers and a few other guys, economists who took this secret trip down to this resort in Georgia called Jekyll Island,

and they spent a week meeting in secret. They told everybody they were going on a hunting trip, and they worked out the details of what would become the Federal Reserve, which was subsequently passed into law not too much later. The fact that they did it in secrecy both was necessary because nobody would have signed on if they knew that bankers were behind it. But it also meant that it immediately engendered all manner of conspiracy theories. And I think the overall lesson here is that we as Americans have this system by which private bankers and financiers are involved in the public good of the American economy in ways that are mildly to deeply upsetting and uncomfortable for a lot of us, because it seems like the game is rigged,

and in many ways it is. But it also means that we can't have a kind of like rational or normal discussion about economic policy without conspiracy theories creeping in, because it seems like the game is rigged and thus these people can't be trusted. And there's both some truth in that, but also a point at which it goes from being a critique of capitalism to a paranoid conspiracy theory about who's pulling the strings behind the scenes. And it's almost the belief of who's pulling the strings, it almost always relates back to anti-Semitic beliefs. Of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And, you know, anti-Semitism, it's a thing I talk about a lot in the book. It's a weird and strange paradox because you think of like the two kind of classic

stereotypes associated with anti-Semitism. One is that Jews are rapacious, hyper-capitalist bankers that all they care about is money. But simultaneously, there's this other slur that all Jews are Bolshevik, communist anarchists set about bringing down the American way of life. It took me a while to understand. I mean, these things are completely paradoxical. How can you maintain one without the other? And I think the thing about anti-Semitism is the whole point is that it's a paradox that it doesn't make any sense, that there's no consistent accusation being leveled against the Jewish community by anti-Semites. The guy who coins the phrase

conspiracy theory, Karl Popper, says the conspiracy theory view of society is what happens when you get rid of God and ask what's in its place. And to say that nothing happens due to coincidence, everything happens because the Illuminati are pulling the strings, even if you don't understand their ultimate plan or why these things are, you have now a causal explanation for the world in which everything is part of a narrative. And that's a theological proposition as much as it is a conspiracy theory and a delusion. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, scientists who study people who are deeply engaged in conspiratorial belief systems, one of the commonalities they find is that believing in a conspiracy theory helps them make sense of the world.

The world is confusing. The world has a lot of unexplained, to them, unexplained things. And this is the simplest route. This is the most simple explanation. In many ways, we are now looking for an earthly explanation for, and the explanations, Colin, are hard to come by. And it is easier to blame it on the Catholics or the Jews or the Freemasons or the Illuminati or the lizard people or the deep state or whatever it is. It feels better if you can blame your misfortune on someone else. Right. And a study that I'm really fond of,

which I think is really fascinating, that was published, oh, probably like 12 or 15 years ago now, but I think it still really holds. These researchers basically took two groups of people and they showed them an image. And the image is just a bunch of squiggly lines and just kind of visual noise. That's one image. The second image has these squiggly lines, just kind of visual noise. That's one image. The second image has these squiggly lines, but sort of embedded behind them is a drawing of a car or a hat or something very simple. So they show these two images to people and they say, you know, what do you see? Most people would look at the one with a car and they'd say, I see a car. And then you show them the one where there's no hidden image, there's just the visual noise. And people would say, well, I don't see anything. I just see a bunch of lines. But some people would look at

that second image and say, no, I see something. I see a cloud or I see a face or whatever. And when they looked at the people, the sort of psychological profiles, they found the people who were most likely to see an image where there wasn't one there were people who were anxious in other aspects of their life, who were concerned, uncertain, maybe were going through something sort of psychologically stressful. And the conclusion is, is that when you feel out of control in some areas of your life, you will look for patterns in other areas of your life, because it will give you a sense of control. It will give you a measure of control over things when you feel particularly powerless. And so I think that a lot

of what drives people to conspiracy theories is, again, this idea that they, for whatever reason, feel powerless or out of control. And they're looking for a narrative. They're looking for a signal in amongst the noise that will provide a shape and a narrative, even if it's totally fictitious, even if it's not really there, it gives them some kind of comfort and reassurance. I want to get to the satanic panic, which if anybody is a child of the 80s, you probably remember how people were finding demons and Satans and devils and whatever, like under every stone. Oh, it's a child's toy?

It's actually secretly programmed to be a demonic influence in your home. Smurfs actually mean something really, really evil in German. The number of things that ended up being completely ludicrous, but yet were wildly openly embraced by many segments of society. Gosh, how did this even start? Who started the satanic panic? Southern California at this place called the McMartin Daycare Center, where a single mother becomes convinced that her child is being sexually abused at this daycare, which in and of itself is a cause for concern. I mean, you know, these things happen, these things are important, and I don't mean to denigrate any of this. But this woman in particular began accusing the

McMartins of more and more sort of elaborate, strange forms of ritual and bloodletting and sort of mystical rites and things that were increasingly strange. And this began to happen all over the country that daycares or individual families would be accused of not just sexual abuse of minors, but of these elaborate satanic rituals involving human sacrifice, involving kidnapping. And the primary witnesses in these cases were young children, young children who were very suggestible, who were being separated from their parents, who were being threatened by these investigators that if they didn't say the right thing, they would be punished, which of course you can imagine what that does to a four-year-old, right? And so these kids were telling these adults basically whatever they wanted to hear, even

if it was factually impossible. There was a major case in Bakersfield where one kid was naming off all these adults who were participating in this demonic sexual abuse, human sacrifice ritual. And several of the adults that he named were already dead, had died of old age years before. And the investigators, rather than doubting this four-year-old's testimony, said, oh, well, the Satanists must have planted those names to throw us off the trail. You know, this kind of completely out of control paranoia where the word, the coaxed and suggested words of children were taken to be more inviolable than physical evidence. And so this spreads throughout the country.

A lot of people get convicted of terrible crimes based on nothing but the testimony of these children. No physical evidence. People go to jail, go to prison for decades in some cases. The McMartin daycare case ended in a hung jury, but it was the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. It went on for years because people were convinced that this was happening, even in the absolute absence of any kind of evidence whatsoever. Yeah. And you don't want any child to be harmed.

So of course, your default position is going to be like, I have got to protect these kids. I get the parents and the investigators inclination to be like, even if it seems implausible, we have to believe the victims. We have to make sure that they are being protected. But yes, the way that the satanic panic manifested itself around the country trickled down in so many ways into just like many people's everyday life. Well, right. And one of the FBI profilers who wrote a really good analysis after this was all over, like one of the things he pointed out was actual literal child abusers may be going free

because they're not being prosecuted for regular child abuse. They're being prosecuted for these bizarre rituals, which are not provable. And in fact, some of the jury members on the McMartin daycare trial, when they explained why they couldn't convict, were basically like, we thought something was going on, but we were being asked to decide whether or not satanic ritual abuse was happening, and it wasn't. So in some cases, in a lot of cases, I think innocent people went to prison, and in some cases, I think guilty people were let off because the moral panic was so hysterical that it wasn't enough to simply say, you know, I think this person abused a child. It was, you know, this person is in league with this cabal of international Satanists

who do magical things behind closed doors. You know, it's absurd, but had real impact in our life. I want to very quickly talk about perhaps one of the most modern conspiracy theories, which is QAnon. And QAnon has become such an umbrella term. It's like anybody who believes a conspiracy theory today is probably QAnon. You know what I mean? It just covers so many things, everything from reptiles to JFK Jr. is still alive, and so is Tupac and Elvis and secret tunnels with cabals of children being cannibalistically

sacrificed. First of all, not everybody believes all of the things that are kind of under this umbrella. But the research that I've read indicates that a very high percentage of Americans believe at least some portion of what is actually a very broad conspiracy theory. They may not even realize it, but they do. Right. Yeah. And so when QAnon, which I assume some of your listeners are familiar with, but if not, it starts on this website 4chan, which is this kind of anonymous posting board for primarily dumb jokes, incredibly hardcore pornography, and virulent racism. And suddenly this person starts posting claiming that he is a well-placed intelligence operative who is privy to not only the deep state conspiracy against Donald Trump,

but also privy to Donald Trump's counterattack and counterplan to destroy the deep state conspiracy against Donald Trump, but also privy to Donald Trump's counterattack and counter plan to destroy the deep state that will be implemented momentarily. And he starts posting these things which become known as Q drops. And the thing about them is they're incredibly cryptic. If you've ever read Nostradamus prophecies, they are purposefully vague. The language is Byzantine and bizarre, and everything is a reference to a reference to a reference. It's all coded. And what that allows the believers to do is basically read whatever they want into it. In the same way, people will read any Nostradamus prophecy. An eagle flies over France and skies turn red and think, oh, well, this is clearly a reference to Adolf Hitler or whatever, you know, like the Q drops feature

the same pattern. And so it allows for that widespread approach that you're talking about, where anything can be seen as part of the whole grand QAnon conspiracy, because the QAnon conspiracy is itself so nebulous and vague and amorphous that it's meant to encapsulate any and everything that you could possibly want to throw into it. And when I tell people that the conspiracy theory actually began on a message board meant for illegal Japanese pornography, that is jaw-dropping to many people. That's the genesis of QAnon is illegal Japanese pornography, that is jaw-dropping to many people. That's the genesis of QAnon, is illegal Japanese pornography message boards. Yeah. One of the things I talk about in the book

is like, you ask yourself, if you were a high-ranking intelligence officer who had these secrets, why wouldn't you go to the New York Times? Why wouldn't you go to Fox News or CNN? But as I write, I mean, that's only an interesting question if you think there's a remote shred of truth in any of this. But the point is, the whole thing is ludicrous. And I think we know pretty definitively now that whoever was behind it was one of three men who were the various owners and site administrators of 4chan through the years. But I think it tapped into a need that Donald Trump supporters wanted, which again, was this sense of they put their faith in this guy. He's this all-powerful, strong man.

He's this guy who's going to fix America and fix Washington. And when things aren't going his way and he gets blocked by the courts or counter protesters mobilize, then they need some sort of narrative that explains it. And the idea of the deep state is a very comforting narrative because it allows them to make sense of the chaos of the world as though there's a secret narrative behind it all. All right, here's my last question, which is where did the lizard people even come from?

Whose idea was this? The best that I could trace this in the book is in the early 80s, there was this show that I remember as a kid, and I was like so young, and it really scarred me. It was called V, and the V stood for visitors, and it was this sci-fi like miniseries about aliens arrive in these gleaming silver spaceships. And they're in these blue jumpsuits. And they're blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan-looking dudes. They come in peace. But then all of a sudden or gradually what becomes revealed is that the blue-eyed, blonde-haired faces are masks.

And behind us is these reptilian humanoid monsters. And they're actually here to drink our blood and whatever, yada, yada, yada. And so it was an allegory for fascism. The visitors had these uniforms that looked very explicitly like Nazi uniforms. And the whole thing was like, this is how fascism arrives. That's the first kind of widespread pop cultural moment in which we have these humanoid lizards who are working in secret from another planet to destroy us. And then within, I don't know, 10 years or so, mainly by this guy, David Icke, who is this British conspiracy theorist. Now, suddenly it's gone from being a fiction to being a conspiracy theory that's supposedly true. Now, people believe, yes, there are alien lizard people who are infiltrating American government and politics and are controlling us or seeking to control us and do us harm. And these guys are

often tying this sort of lizard people philosophy in with overt anti-Semitism. David Icke is also an overt antisemite. And so the tragedy of it is that what started as an allegory against fascism and against antisemitism within 15 years was being reappropriated by antisemites and sort of passed off as a true fact. And I think that it's a sobering lesson for people who work in fiction and who actually want to try and find ways to fight back against this stuff of how easily these narratives can be repurposed by malevolent actors. All right. Last question. We could keep talking about the myriad of belief systems and how they came to be.

But last question is, what do you hope that the reader takes away when they close under the eye of power? What do you hope they carry with them? I mean, my main hope is that when we think about moral panics and kind of exuberant irrationality and paranoia, we think of Salem, Salem, which draws us 1692. And we think of the McCarthy red scare of of the 1950s as these two moments that we get taught in school of here are two times when paranoia and ignorance got out of hand and people's lives were ruined. But it was just those two times. The rest of the time, it's been fine. And the book is an attempt to push back against that narrative and say, no, in fact, these things happen regularly, almost every generation, almost like clockwork. The anti-Catholic paranoia of the 1830s becomes the rise of the second clan of the 1920s,

becomes the satanic panic of the 1980s, becomes QAnon of the 20-teens. And so I think in ways we've been talking about how a lot of this stuff seems ludicrous and bonkers in the beginning, and then almost overnight becomes a source of great tragedy and terror, I think that I want people to understand that these things are going to happen again, and that they're going to come from seemingly unlikely or unserious actors, and that we have more of a responsibility to get out in front of these things than to sort of wake up one morning and think, well, I thought this never happened anymore. So that's one thing I hope. And the other thing I hope is that people will come away with some strategies of, as we've been

talking about, people in their lives who have maybe fallen down these rabbit holes. Maybe they'll come away with some strategies as to what they can say or how they can approach those people and maybe bring them back from the precipice. Colin, thank you. I loved this. I loved chatting with you today. Oh, thank you so much for having me on. This was so much fun. You can buy Colin Dickey's book Under the Eye of Power wherever you get your books. And if you order from bookshop.org, you will be supporting independent bookstores. Thanks for being here today. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon.

Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.