It Could Happen Here - The Burning Food Factory Myth

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

We sit down with a researcher to discuss the disinformation campaign around burning food factories.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah! Sophie, that's how we open the episode.

I didn't think anything could be more appalling than that other thing that you said that I won't repeat. Oh, when I was talking about Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas wrapped together so tightly that they can't tell who's where one person's skin begins and the other ends. You walked us right into this, Sophie. I did. It's my fault. I walked you right into it. I'm so sorry.

Just like Neil Gorsuch walked right into that and then decided, you know what? In for a pindy. In for a pound of ****. This is It Could Happen Here, the podcast about serious problems where we talk about them seriously. And sometimes about the Supreme Court having a threesome like that cruise ship where there was the threesome and then a giant 60-person fight. How's everybody doing today? I think the opening will work better if we just bleep out and... Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, always bleep out cum. Except for right there. So, I feel like today we should chat about one of the many things that's a problem, which is a specific piece of disinformation that is spreading, not quite like

wildfire, it's more spreading like in the background like monkey pox on the internet. This is not like the number one piece of like conspiratorial nonsense that's getting around, but it's getting around deeply, and I'm seeing it on the left and the right. You have, if you spend any time at all on social media, which statistically you do, if you spend any time at all on social media, which statistically you do, you've probably seen a bunch of stories and like freaked out posts about fires and arson at agricultural facilities and factories, food factories is often how it's phrased. I think the post I saw about it that was sort of most emblematic was someone being like, hey, you know, you're probably not aware that some huge number of chickens died in this fire recently and a

bunch of cows died in this field, but if you were, it's the only thing you'd be talking about. And the idea kind of that people are pushing when they, when they, uh, uh, catastrophize this is that there's this massive rash of attacks on American food infrastructure, um, at a year when we're already due for a food crisis because of the Ukraine. And, um, it's going to be this, this big, like looming disaster and some like shady group is trying to starve everybody. And we brought in a friend to talk about this because it is not at all what people who are kind of catastrophizing are saying. And I wanted to introduce Carl to the show.

Carl, how are you doing, buddy? You know, living life in a one-party state. Yeah. Yay. I don't know, man. there's a lot of parties these days like the one on that cruise ship uh so or the forward party our our favorite we this is a big yang gang podcast um now carl you and i have been buddies on the old twitter for a while. You were the origin of one of the terms that we use a lot on this show. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you

because this is a pretty potent piece of weaponized unreality. It is. And you have been tracking this for a while on kind of your own. Yeah, well, this is one of those ones that it sits in between a lot of the other conspiracies right so like you said it's it's kind of the background operating thing right now um

and you know so when we think of the big conspiracies right now they kind of revolve around what they always did right depopulation weird nwo like secret society stuff the q the q brand of that however we want to look at this is a little bit different because this is more overtly political right so this is this is looking to not just dig the hole of well everyone's out to get us. Bill Gates is buying all the farmland. You know, the crazy stuff we normally, I mean, you know, that's right in this, but it's not the center part. And, yeah, I've been looking at this for a few months now, since I first saw it.

And I first saw kind of traces of this right after the invasion of Ukraine started. So early March, things started to kind of shift and nothing, you know, posts here and there that are now missing, stuff like that. The kind of classic, well, let's test the waters. Let's see how people accept the idea that maybe something else, you know, in the in the conspiratorial way is going on. Just asking questions type. Yeah, exactly. It's the just asking questions. It's a just, well, maybe think about it kind of thing.

And those those pique my interest because those tend to be test balloons. And for this kind of thing, I had a weird, you know, they're weird feelings you kind of get when you watch some of this as much as we do. Yes. I know what you mean. Yeah. And you can kind of sense when the thing has enough ingredients to catch on. Exactly. And especially when there's super kind of inflammatory ingredients, right?

You know, the Bill Gates buying all the farmland is a good example. Not quite as inflammatory, but catches on because people, you know, it's the social paradelia thing. There's always like, there's always this, I mean, and this is something, again, that's a broader thing with conspiracies. There's always a germ of truth. The germ of truth with that is that Bill Gates has bought a lot of farmland. Now, if you compare it to the total quantity of farmland, he has bought very – it's like, yeah, it's a fraction.

0.03% or something. I mean it's an absolutely tiny amount of the total, right? Yeah, because this country is – I don't know if you've looked at a map recently. Pretty sizable country, the United States of America. Kind of a big place when you actually look. Yeah. And so the kernel of truth is there. There are fires, right?

There are industrial accidents. There are weird stuff happens in big industrial situations. We have a large industrial farming situation in this country. So you see it. And I think part of what makes the kind of the idea that, oh, this is suddenly happening and it's suddenly like a massive problem easier to sell to people is that most Americans know next to nothing about the food supply and how it works. Like if you have – because I grew up in and around farms. It's been a lot of my life in agricultural areas. Yep.

Farms and things related to farms catch on fire fucking constantly. Oh. You may not be, yeah. There are, I think they said there are 5,000 annual fires. 5,000 annually, about 15 a day. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's. It's giant fields of dried grain.

It's fields of dried grain and it's shit like silos full of like flour and stuff, which is like. There's nothing like. Silos burn. Yeah. Silos explode. Like, like the, like a, a silo full of grain is slightly less explosive than like a military like missile or some shit. Like they detonate if you catch them at the right way. Well, exactly.

And like, I know here in Minnesota a few years ago and there's video of the floating around, you know, there was a, you know, a corn, a corn silo split. Yeah. And the dust goes out and something, you know, a car engine, West Texas. It's in North Texas. It's in between Dallas and Waco, which is in between Dallas and Austin because no, Waco is not a destination. And they had this big, God, it was some sort of, what was the, I'm going to Google what the facility was. of what was the i'm gonna google what the facility was uh but it was it was this like um yeah it was a fertilizer factory and it caught on fire there's a terrifying video of this guy with his daughter watching it and it goes off like like a fucking fuel air bomb massive explosion it killed the entire town's uh fire department like all of them dead in a second. Oh, yeah. I mean, ANFO, right?

Like, that's literally what that is. It was basically fucking ANFO. And because it happens, this is like 2013, I think, it never, it's just this big tragedy. If it had happened a couple of years later, there would have been, like, a conspiracy attached to it, right? Oh, I'd be talking about it right now. Yeah. It was just slightly too early.

Yeah. But, like, this shit happened i mean the point i'm making is that and that we're making here is that like this shit happens all the time and to the the numbers we were quoting earlier there's no evidence whatsoever that there are a higher number of of these events this year than there ever are um basically one of the things that we've seen is as of like the spring of this year, a list has been compiled, mainly on places like Gateway Pundit and Zero Hedge, where they've got like a hundred different events. And it looks very compelling when you just see this list of, and there's this fire, and this many chickens died here, and this many cows died, and there

was this explosion. But again, if you actually look at the number of events that are expected in a year there's nothing abnormal about this no in fact it's pretty middle of the road for any year and like the bird the bird calls right like that's a great example of this being just absolutely out of the park conspiracy land i mean there's a massive avian flu epidemic going on right now that's killed more birds you know than the last 10 years yeah and so when you start talking about you know 300 you know 300 million birds worldwide being called whatever massive numbers that funny how avian flu does that and that's a response but when you get into the zero hedge who is really pushing this right now yeah world that's one of the top ones on the list and it

also makes you know they have their little maps up right now with all the drop tabs that show right right they love doing and there's a you see this in other conspiracies i think one of the big ones that that kind of was a little i don don't know, on the edge of getting mainstream recently was like the conspiracy about people disappearing at national parks where it's like mapped. 411, yes. Yeah, exactly. One of my favorite conspiracy theories. David T. Yeah.

Going for it. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, man, people, there's 350 million people in the United States. And also people go missing while hiking and one of the like a bunch of stuff isn't on that list like the number of those people who are found again and whatnot exactly a lot of people just like slip and fall and never a seat again because they fall down a cliff yes national parks are kind of dangerous funny enough once you're off yeah that's why they're fun. Yeah, exactly. There was a whole 411 documentary made a few years ago about this person who went missing.

They're like, were they dropped into a secret underground government bunker? Were they abducted? And like a year later, they found his body at the bottom of a cliff. Yeah. And like it doesn't, you know, that doesn't talk about the horrible stuff done with like, especially in Canada with all of the missing indigenous women. Exactly. That is actually, it is actually a big problem.

Yes. But I mean, back to the fact, back to like the farming thing, I think what all of these, you know, stories show is just the innate horror of industrial farming is actually the problem here. Yeah. Yeah.

It is absolutely scary. But it's also It is scary. Yeah. Yeah. It is absolutely scary. But it's also like normal scary. Like the thing that's scary is that the system of industrial farming is incredibly dangerous and like if you actually want to be properly horrified about something relating to food production, look at how

many people die because they get sucked into bogs of pig shit. Exactly. Or drowning grain silos we're drowning grain silo we're drowning grain silos i mean people legit lots of people die whole families yeah i know one person will fall in the grain silo and they'll try to get him out the whole family's dead i know i i know people who have yeah who have died that way because i grew up in a very agricultural area yeah yeah a lot of this is just like people don't know the country. But Shireen, yes.

So industrial. I mean, yeah, for me, for me, someone that hasn't grown up in any agricultural area at all. This is. Yeah. Grain is like quicksand. It sucks you in. It takes you to that bottom. If you don't spread out immediately you're

going down and there's really no way to oh my god somebody it's stay stay the fuck away from grain silos yeah do not play around grain silos do not fuck around with the grain silo don't it is it is it has killed entire families because people try to save each other then they get sucked down and it's pretty fucked up. Yeah, it's bad. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to no tales from the shadows as part of my culture podcast network available on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you have livestock, livestock poop, and sometimes that poop is super useful. Chicken shit's one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make chicken shit very, very useful. Pig shit is like nasty. It's toxic. It is very hard to do anything it's a

bioweapon once it's in the ground long enough it's a bioweapon theoretically if you were to like really care about it you could you could make a use of it given enough time but there's so many pigs because our hunger for bacon is insatiable that you wind up with this this massive tox of massive toxic sludge so there's the chunk of the country in which most of the pigs come from. There are these huge pig shit bogs that are like, there are countries smaller than bogs of pig shit that we have in the United States.

And people die in them all the time. They get sucked down into the pig shit. Yep. Or you suffocate because you get one of them bursts. I mean, there's so many weird things because they're methane and hydrogen sulfide sinks. So it's just like bad things around farms all the time, and that's just farming. And what we're – ultimately what we are seeing here, if you want to like actually analyze the thing that is happening with all of these conspiracies, it's what's called the frequency illusion.

Yeah. it's it's what's called the frequency illusion yeah which is the idea that like if you've ever i don't know if someone when somebody like teaches like you learn a new word right or you like you hear about a historic event and then you keep seeing it everywhere yeah exactly there they are exactly yeah this is something that's an author that garrison and i quite like robert anton wilson played with a lot um it's why like 23s one thing you'll notice in like hollywood movies and tv shows if you look out for 23s they're fucking everywhere because a whole bunch of people who got into hollywood are fans of this same guy and there's this conspiracy with the number 23 people stick it it's all over the fucking wire it's in a bunch of shit um and it's it's yeah at the base of things

like right humans are peridelium machines right so we're looking for patterns and static that's what we do it's part like in my mind it's part of our like ancestral uh you know deep in the past protection mechanism right that's how we construct meaning yeah right well it's that and it's how you look for monsters in the woods you know it's like when we're looking for eyes in the dark that's part of it and so you know we tend to find meaning in points and then try and connect them because that's how we work and so this is a great example of this because it hasn't gone full q level yet where it's just absurd to be absurd the shield itself like you can see where people are trying to pick together points that normally are just industrial accidents.

Yeah. And you know, some of the stuff I saw early on before, like the cow death posts and the stuff related to climate change, what you really were seeing was people trying to make order out of what is just chaotic accidents. Yeah. And now,

now with exactly what i was yeah yeah go ahead sorry no it's it's it's something you rarely actually see in the cascade of a you know conspiracy theory like this so overtly and it's been really interesting for me watching that because you know as someone who's far too into watching people melt their brains um this this kind of lays out some of the ways that this works for all of us um and i think it also offers a roadmap in certain ways to like see past it and be able to correct it for yourself so you don't get into the same oh there are a thousand points of light here. Let's follow all of them. Yeah. It's one of the things that's interesting. So like we just called it the

recency bias or the frequency illusion. There's also the recency illusion, which is like the belief that things that you have like noticed only recently are recent phenomena rather than things that go back a long time. These are kind of interrelated. But this sort of phenomena that we're seeing is often called the Bader-Meinhof phenomena. Absolutely. Yep. And that's so the Bader, I'm pretty, yeah, Bader, the Bader-Meinhof group was a, it's also called the German Red Army. It was a, yeah, it was a West German terrorist organization from like 70 fucking years ago. Like this is not a recent thing, but there was an article about them in like a Minnesota

St. Paul newspaper in 1994 that happened to be one of the first newspapers with an online comment page. We do this very well up here. Oh no. Oh no. no so this is like you'll always hear it referred to as the bottom line of phenomena it has nothing to do with this terrorist group other than the fact that one commenter on there saw an article about them um within a couple of hours of someone else in their life telling them about the group and so they named it in the comment section the bottom line of phenomena because yeah like it, which is an example of the phenomenon. Yeah. But it's a thing that people do for, again, good reason.

Like you've said, if you're a fucking hunter-gatherer and you notice that, oh, after a rainstorm is when the big cats come out and hunt. when the big cats come out and hunt. And like if somebody, if one of your friends gets eaten by like a tiger, it's probably after a rainstorm. You associate after the rainstorm with danger, which is like good, right? Like if you want to not get eaten by tigers. The more we live inside urban environments,

usually less this becomes useful as relating to more of our like instinctual practices. Yes. Learning to recognize this like first step of delusion is really important yeah um i don't think decisions in the future right but i think it's much more similar than we realize to like how people think of religion because even religion people are trying that's literally what i was just about to say yeah like what you're saying is like there's so much chaos people can't make sense

of the world and just like religion you're trying to make order out of disorder exactly for signs you look for patterns it's like an element of magical thinking where yes yes you look for reasons that this has meaning yes yeah so i understand where they're coming from oh absolutely and so the problem again the problem is not with your brain because this is not like a bad thing your brain is doing. It's just a thing your brain is doing. The problem is that this is one of the easiest ways that bad faith actors can take advantage of you and other people. And so in terms of protecting yourself and others from it, and again, one of the problems with this and one of the things that makes it so much more difficult, 20 years ago, the Bader Meinhardt – obviously, the Bader Meinhardt phenomenon was as much of a thing as that dude in the fucking comments page that Minnesota Paper proves. But there was less shit coming at you. and the like, oh, is there something weird going on with this German terrorist group?

You kind of had the space in your head and the space in your media diet to like actually parse that out and calm down. But today it all comes with you with a flood. There's like three new fucked up Supreme Court decisions. Oh, and now all of the food factories are on fire and all of the chickens are dead. And this war in Ukraine is actually elevating the food prices.

And it all compounds on itself. When you start seeing something new like this come into your media diet that seems scary, one of the first things you should do is just try to get a handle on the raw numbers. Exactly. Is this outside? Well, this is a complexity issue. Is this abnormal? Yeah. You know, this is a complexity issue yeah you know you know this is a complexity

issue that's how i like to look at it and that's exactly one of the great ways to to kind of get disrupt the complex nature of this and the amount of it you're taking in is just to start breaking it down numbers are great right like if you can look and see there are 18 000 instances of industrial accidents leading to x y or z or Z and 5,000 fires, you start to really get yourself into a better position to understand what's being thrown at you. Yeah. But I don't think most people can actually understand what those numbers mean. They're large numbers, but I don't think people understand that means a lot of that stuff is happening

versus just one or two things you hear about. And you don't realize probability wise that it's like insignificant because i don't think those numbers make sense i mean even to me sometimes i can't i can't picture so many things so i think it's i don't know maybe it's just like a deficit in how our brains work you may not be able to understand why the numbers exist but you can try to compare them to previous years, right? Exactly. You can expand what you're relating to, right? If you're looking from here's everything from March of 2022 to June of 2022, you're like, whoa, this is a lot of stuff just in these few months. But if you compare that to every preceding year for the past five years, you're like, oh, this actually isn't a regular.

This is still fucked up, but it's actually kind of normalized um and it's not it's not an abnormal phenomenon right now and so even if you can't like understand what the numbers are you can still compare them to previous things but but yeah i mean that does require more work than just like looking at a meme right and the reason why this stuff works is because people know how to exploit this part of our brains really well not not not not not that not this part of this brain is is useless right it has uses um you you can play with it but it also is exploitable and and that's the thing that you want to be aware of is trying to be cognizant of if the information you're taking in is exploiting this pathway and then choosing how how you want to maybe circumvent some of those mental effects exactly well and we have such i

mean as humans we have a real issue with this kind of brain hacking and it's something we're just all kind of getting up to right now and understanding and we still don't fully understand some of this but you know i um a lot of the stuff i i kind of initially worked off of for the concept of weaponized unreality kind of talks about social engineering in the way that like freaking was done and hacking back in the day was done and this is so similar to that in certain ways that it's kind of shocking right like it's a conspiracy but it's also a management tool and it's a it's a of shocking, right? Like it's a conspiracy, but it's also a management tool. And it's a memory management and ultimately a reality management tool. And giving it numbers, looking at context like that does take time.

But some of these are going to be hard and fast rules probably going forward to interact with the digital world because this is going to be how it is for a long while welcome i'm daniel thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new black effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a book that is kind of considered to be like the foundational text, or at least strategic document of the Islamic State called The Management of Savagery. And the title gives away what you're doing, right? You're carrying out, you're engaging in acts of savagery, terrorist attacks that kill innocent people that exist to disrupt the state that you're in, in order to, and you're attempting to like, you're attempting to build kind of a milieu of savagery, which then provides you the opportunity to take and exert power. And what we're seeing here is like the management of cognitive biases, right? Exactly. The management of like these weird little evolutionary holdovers in your brain that don't quite work in the modern world.

But if you understand what ha what's happening, you can take advantage of them and you can, you can trick people into thinking things are happening that aren't. It's the same, you know, you can see this, the right does this very effectively in a lot of the anti-trans stuff they've been doing.

Absolutely. Yeah. Obviously with gay, you know, if you look at the population of trans and of gay people, some number of people in that community are going to do things that are bad, right? Because it's a population of human beings. And because the country's large enough, if you get people hyper-focused on, here's a story,

here's another story, here's two, here's three stories. Now, is that, does that mean that there's any kind of actual systemic problem? No. That community is no more likely to do things that are bad than any other community. But if you get people focused on each of those stories in their head, they feel like there's an epidemic. And like, well, we have to get a handle. It's the same thing that gets done with like Islamic terrorism, right? Where it's like, yes, since 9-11, actually not that many acts of Islamic terrorism in the United States. Extremely fucking uncommon. Much less common than right-wing terrorism, like homegrown terrorism. But the media doesn't really cover one of those kinds of terrorism and loves to cover the other.

So you get people periodically tricked into thinking that they're under direct threat from the Islamic State or whatever the fuck. Right. Well, and I think it's, you know, I think going to that point, right? Like it's almost a, I mean, it's a reality filter, right? So like it's a way to selectively filter out things that would counter the narrative that you're trying to overall push. a filter being set up that only allows people into one lane of this thought. And we've seen what the end result of that is with radicalization and things that come along with these kind of conspiracies. But it's really, it's been very wild to watch since the 19th, 20th of April till now, where we're seeing it, you know, Sernovich is doing it ever any one of the guys you can think of crowder was doing it yep exactly tucker ran a couple things on this and kind of interspersed it with his you know white male virility shit it's we're we're in a weird place where these are

starting to be able to be played with and on each other and that kind of filtering starts to get people onboarded from a conspiracy into what we're seeing now is kind of the white nationalist, Christian nationalist movement that's become that thing. this idea of weaponizing on reality seeing what happened in russia when that happened and seeing this kind of thing which is so similar to that filtering and that narrative shift and building that goes on in that world it's it's been and you know staring into a void feels bad sometimes this is just one where it's like oh this is terrible and it's just the beginning of it. Every once in a while, the void stares back and you're like, Oh boy. Oh yeah, no.

And that, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, uh, that's the problem is sometimes it just stares you right in the eyes and tells you,

yeah, I'm here. And that's a bad feeling. Yeah. Well, I think that's more or less what we needed to talk about. That would be like, no,

like one of the, one of the ways to come combat this, if you can, is honestly creating your own memetic graphs is really useful, because these things spread so fast when they're in images. Images of dates and instances spread like wildfire.

So if you can make your own, which compares it to previous years, say, hey, this actually isn't a new pattern, this is just what happens in industrial farming. I think spreading it via memetic images is one of the – if there is a way to combat it, that's probably one of the core ways to go about it. Yes. Just because of how fast those things spread. Absolutely.

Again, you can see – I've seen some useful – people have been trying to push back against, you know, this idea that there's been this like massive crime surge in San Francisco and stuff. And it uses the same tactics, right? Yeah, absolutely. You have like a couple of videos of people shoplifting or something and then you make it. And is there is that kind of crime actually up? Well, no, it really isn't. But like, it doesn't matter because or is it any higher there than it is in some place like Duluth where no videos are coming out like no it's not but um it's uh if you have to be

aware the first thing you have to be aware of is the phenomena is like the way in which they're taking advantage of you and yeah then you have to you have to kind of deter and you have to use the tactics they're using against them and one of the things that is effective is these graphs with kind of like numbers and dates and shit on them. People love to feel like they're looking at research. Yes. Yeah. But, yeah, at the same time, though, not to be like, I don't know, negative about this at all. I don't know, negative about this at all.

But in my mind, this is like a modern day version of someone starting a religion and making the sheep of this following and then having them turn into whatever it is, whether it's Christian nationalism or whatever. But just like in religion, if people are presented with science, they don't fucking care. You know what I mean?

You present them with like, I don't know. There's some people that I think are beyond saving. It's not science. It's about everyone wants to have access to special secret information. Secret knowledge, yeah. Right? Everyone wants to have esoteric knowledge that no one else has. Yep. So these

graphs are so compelling in the first place because they're like, oh, no one else knows all of these things. No one else has laid it out in this manner. So if you can present your information in that same style, say, hey, no one knows that this is actually part of this overall thing that's been going on for years. And it's about industrial farming. Then you hope that that will spread.

Yeah, then that spreads because it infects the same point in someone's brain, right? Exactly. We want to feel smart. We want to feel unique. We want to have like esoteric knowledge. So if you can frame it to fit that same mold, then it's not science, it's just playing with the same tactics that got them convinced of this in the first place.

Exactly. Yeah, that's different for sure. Yeah, I think, Shireen, it's true that if somebody is a committed believer in whatever, like Mike Cernovich or something, you're not convincing them. Absolutely not. But the danger, the thing that they're doing that's dangerous

is they're quote-unquote pilling a lot of random people into believing that there's a problem that scares those people, and when those people get scared, they're willing to accept shit they wouldn't otherwise scare. And I think those people you can get to step down from the ledge because one thing we do want, this is also a problem, but like think about like climate change, right? And how much of the denial of climate change is not based around getting people to reject the idea entirely, but getting like

when people bring up a specific problem being like, well, but look at this weird new piece of technology that some kid developed and like, this is going to fix it. And then you get to not worry about it, right? So if somebody suddenly starts freaking out about agricultural fires for the first time, and you're like, actually, they're lower than they are in normal years. This isn't a problem. Then maybe you can get their brain to go like, okay, then I won't worry about that, because I don't want more things to worry about. I just have been given them.

That's my hope. We're targeting the ledge people. Yeah, you're not getting to true believers at this point of any of this stuff for the most part. That takes a wholly different level of work. That's in the ballpark in my mind of

de-radicalization. You're in a wholly different ballpark. If you can target the people who are thinking about jumping into the pool too they tend to if you do change their mind they become some of the biggest proponents of trying to get other people off the ledge that they might know and that's something i've seen or something well it's something i've seen people that are leave a cult or something yeah it's it's it's it's very similar and it's something i see people that are leave a cult or something yeah it's it's it's it's very similar and it's something i've seen even in my friend circles you know talking to people who five years ago were fully you know in the oh let's do donald trump for the lulz thing

you know now those are the same people who are telling their friends oh shit we have a christian nationalist movement that's trying to overthrow democracy and that's a huge you know like that's a huge help um to everyone right you want more people saying the truth to people who might not hear it from someone like us um and can internalize it and we got to infiltrate there's you know the truth takes a lot more work than fiction, unfortunately. But once it starts to work, it's a compounding thing. And the truth tends to really set people free, as corny as that is. If people find out they've been lied to, they want to know why it worked. And that works in our favor and the truth's favor. And reality is the thing.

favor and the truth's favor and reality is the thing we you know we got to protect this at all costs because we're getting tidal wave by unreality and that's a problem for all of us for different reasons that's a more uplifting note i think than a couple minutes ago yeah all right well there Yeah. All right. Well, there we go. Go. I don't know. Fix it. Yeah. Go fix things. Yeah. Go fix things.

Don't go swimming in grain silos. And yeah. Yeah. Avoid grain silos. Always avoid grain silos. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly

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