The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Replay | Pizzagate: Are Democrats Harvesting Children's Blood? | Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

It’s one of the weirder things Jordan Klepper has heard at Trump rallies: Democrats are drinking the blood of children to get their daily adrenochrome fix. What is adrenochrome, and how did Hillary Clinton get involved? Jordan sits down with Matt Gertz, Senior Fellow for Media Matters for America and Elise Wang, an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton. Together, they unravel this conspiracy theory that begins in the Middle Ages, pops up in the 2016 election, and makes its way to the non-existent basement of a Washington D.C. pizza shop.  Originally Aired in 2022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming. Ontario. You're listening to Comedy Central. Blood. It's everywhere. On children at Halloween, in test tubes at the doctor's office. In the very title of the 2007 drama, there will be blood. And it's even inside you right now. Which means you're part of this story, so buckle up. This is Jordan Klepper Fingers The Conspiracy. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know a little

bit about Pizza Gate. And we'll get into that shortly, but this extremely weird idea that pedophiles are using secret symbols is rooted in the belief that elitist cabals, it's always a cabal, are rounding up babies to steal their adrenaline by consuming their blood. There are Republicans in Congress who believe this. You might have also seated in the Netflix show, The Watcher. It's a conspiracy theory that goes way back before Hillary Clinton and comet ping pong and 2016. It goes back 900 years to when Joe Biden was born. Let's get into it, as Chris Cuomo would say. All right. Let's bring in our own little blood cabal. I have two guests today. First, we have Dr. Elise Wong, a professor at California State Fullerton, who studies conspiracy narratives

going back to medieval England. Elise, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Yes. And my next guest is Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and extensively covers the relationship between Fox News, Donald Trump, and Trump supporters. Matt, thank you for being here. Great to be here. Guys, are you guys ready to talk cabals? So ready. It's always an elite cabal. It's always elite. There's, yeah, is there any lower level cabals of just like guys just trying to get through it who have like a high school education? It's always elite, right? Yes, that's the point. That's the point of cabals.

If you're in a cabal, you have to really... It's no fun to be in a, in a, like, mediocre cabal. The state school of cabals, I mean... Yeah. Whoa, whoa, with the state school thing. I think this podcast is going to start selling t-shirts that says state school cabal on it. There really is. You know, it's always elite cabals, and the Illuminati, also very elite.

They need to be more encompassing. We need to have our state school, Illuminati and Cabals. We'll sell the T-shirts. Go to Dailyshow.com, everybody. I will wear that at my state school. Elise, I want to start with you. Let's break down adrenachrome because it feels like the base for a lot of theories we're going to dive into in this podcast. First of all, is adrenachrome technically real?

It is. Actually, that's a good place to start. It is actually a real thing. It's the oxidation of adrenaline, and this can happen naturally in your body or in a lab. It's actually really easy to come by. You can just buy it on the internet, like not the dark web internet, just the internet. I think it's something like 25 milligrams for 55 bucks, 50, 8 bucks, something like that. I looked it up.

So it's not used for anything, really. There's nothing the FDA has approved it for. It's occasionally used for things like blood clotting. There was some interest in the 1960s for treating, using it to treat schizophrenia, but it really showed no promise. So they dropped it. The history of the adrenaline we're talking about is sort of, it goes back to, I think Aldous Huxley was the first one to talk about it as a drug. He talked about it in doors of perception. And then Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is really the one who cemented the myth.

of adrenachrome as a drug, because he turned it into this kind of immortality drug, this thing that you have to get from a live source. I think the line is, a corpse is no good, buddy. And so that, and then the subsequent movie, they're, like, dramatized to the effects of adrenochrome. What is the shit?

That stuff makes pure masculine seem like ginger beer, man. Adrenicrome. That's really where our modern perception of it as a drug comes from. So it's from these fictional sources. Are we saying it correctly? Adrenachrome? I mean, that's how they say it in the 1998 video. And if you go, I know you're not supposed to...

The video, are we talking about the Terry Gilliam film? That's how Johnny Depp pronounces it. Yes, that's how Johnny. This is where we're getting our information from. Yes, exactly. Well, that's where they're getting their information from. I'm like, I know you're not supposed to go to the YouTube comments, but if you go to the YouTube comments on this scene, they are all about how this is real. Yes, based on fear and loading in Las Vegas, which I will say, I love that book.

Top 10 book in my world. It's a great book, but that is sort of the central, the beginning. That in Huxley's book is the first time we actually hear the term of Drinacrome. He even said afterwards that he just wanted a quote-unquote crazy drug. and so he made it up and so he's drawing on Huxley and then like adding his own little stuff and the drinochrome

the way it's become it is as you were saying it connects to all of the different conspiracy theories because it's a grab bag of the greatest hits right it's got pedophilia it's got satanic rituals it's got blood rituals immortality

like satanic panic and Hollywood elites it's got everything it's a good one it is yeah let's add some context to it in this world the conspiracy theory is Hollywood liberal elites and Hillary Clinton are murdering children and ritual sacrifices harvesting the chemical compound from human children

drinking their blood to ingest adrenochrome because it has some sort of elixir of life properties. Is that right? Yes, yes. Okay, and you're telling me it may not be true. I mean, you should buy it on the internet and find out. It's at least worth the dabble. Matt, when did you first become aware of adrenochrome?

I think probably around 2015, 2016, as part of the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory. The Pizza Gate conspiracy theory posits that this cabal of global elites who, you know, are draining this chemical compound from small children and sexually abusing them, is doing so in the base. basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor called Comet Pingpong. This idea spurred in some ways from emails from the John Podesta hack during the 2016 election cycle. And I've been to the pizza parlor and it doesn't have a basement that you can use to abuse children and take their bodily fluids. Did you ask? I mean, it goes one step beyond asking for a bathroom key because they'll happily give you a bathroom key. But you have to be a little pushing me like, I need to use the restroom.

I also would love access to the basement where the children are tied up and I can get the adreda chrome. Did you specifically ask? I think there probably was a time that you could have done that. But as the conspiracy theorist seized on this, the pizza parlor started getting bombarded with phone calls from people who, who wanted to know more about the basement and the, you know, Pizza Gate conspiracy theory. And eventually, one of the adherence to this conspiracy theory took a gun, went to the pizza parlor looking to save the children, fired it off inside, and was subsequently arrested and spent a couple of years in jail. So, you know, at that point, it becomes a little bit rude, I think,

to ask the people who work at the pizza parlor. It became a, it had real consequences. And for, if, if this is somewhat new to anybody listening, the Podesta emails get hacked, WikiLeaks, leaks some Podesta emails and emails between Podesta and Hillary Clinton reference buying cheese pizza, right? I don't think it's him and Hillary Clinton, but it's, it's a, some sort of email that references pizza that then became a sort of of internet meme and brought into the broader conspiracy theory that at least was talking about. Well, and cheese pizza becomes abbreviated to CP, which also stands for child pornography and

comet pizza. And so they start to connect those links and comment pizza becomes the place to go in a nutshell, right? Yeah, that's about it. I, on the road, I somewhat recently talked to somebody who was sort of discussing this theory, and it is amazing the symbols they see not only in the comet pizza background in the symbolism there, but I asked them, like, what do you need to look at? They're like, well, in the pizza chain, there's a lot of symbols that you have to stay focused on. I was like, what do these symbols look like? And they're like, well, they're predominantly circles and triangles. There's a huge push for normalizing pedophilia. normalize it. Are they making pedophiles look cool? Well, if you go online, there's a whole list of

pedophile symbols. Really? Yes. They're, they're like circular symbols. There's a lot of triangles. There's colors. A lot of them are on pizza. Which, if you're at all into purchasing pizza, that tends to be all of the symbols you see at any kind of pizza chain. So from their perspective, they're holding a hammer and there's just nails everywhere. Well, I think watching Pizzagate happened and then from my end watching the chat rooms and, you know, message boards and all of these things, both before and afterwards, there's that aspect of it, like the people who really get into the game of it. Like, let's find the numerology and all of like the special symbols. And then there's the people who are actually mobilized around this. And that's what really

struck me about Pizagate. It was the first time that I really saw this where you could see there was already this theory about a pedophile ring being run by the Clintons. And it was kind of a theory in need of specifics. And so they went out seeking specifics and they decided basically randomly that comet ping pong was going to be the place. And then it started this sort of multimedia propaganda campaign where people, they got people to call and harass as Matt was saying. They got people to flood the Yelp reviews. And the Google reviews and people to go and harass the proprietor. And then this sort of culminated in the guy who drove up from North Carolina to self-investigate. But that wasn't really the story. The story was that then people talked about it, that then it was in the national media for like 48 hours, like a whole week. And it was not only in the media, their theory was in the media. And I went back to the message boards afterwards, and they were just beside themselves with joy over this. Like, it was not, it was not a, it's not at all about, oh, our guy was

arrested, whoops, or, huh, he didn't really seem to find anything. It was not about that. It was about the media exposure. And then there were sort of further suggestions, well, how can we get them to keep denying it. So they keep saying it. So people keep Googling it. And when I was seeing that, I was like, oh, this is something else. This is a kind of savvy media campaign that I think most of us at that point we're not totally familiar with. Now we know if you mention something, you have to be very careful what sort of buzzwords you mention because it will sort of feed the conspiracy theory monster. In hearing that, what do you think the end goal was? How was that a success? Was it, you know, a lot of that online culture does, you know, traffic and trolling and the successes of trolling often is a large reaction. Is it, is it that that made it the win? Is it the fact that their conversations became mainstream news? That was the win. Is there still a connection to the veracity of this theory and that because it's being talked about that that adds some credibility to it?

or it's just we like shine and we got some shine? I think it's a lot of we like shine, but I do think that there was the jubilation of being able to make the social media to mainstream media jump. And then I think it was a huge recruitment tool. I think people hearing the name would then go Google it and then would find their way to these message boards. So I think for them, the coup was really through recruitment. Matt, what did you notice the coverage of PizzaGate?

What did you first remember seeing it and who was first to jump on that? You know, I think I want to bring in Alex Jones here because I think he has played a key role in conspiracy theories for quite some time. But I think really made almost a sort of mainstream jump during this conspiracy theory. He was one of the major propagators, one of the people with the biggest platforms who would. talk about Pizagate and try to encourage people to look into Pizagate. You know, we had been following Alex Jones at Media Matters for quite some time, but we always, I think as Elise was alluding to, were very hesitant to bring too much direct attention to his conspiracy theories

for fear of just sort of bringing more attention to them. And so when we wrote about Alex Jones in 2010, 2011, we were largely writing about how other people were giving him their support. Fox News personalities who would go on his show, Rand Paul and Ron Paul, who would go on his show and use the platform of someone who is one of the chief popularizers of the idea that 9-11 is an inside job, you know, sort of bringing him into political prominence. And PizzaGate, I think, was really a turning point because we saw that someone could use those conspiracy theories, could inflate them, and that there could be a big real world impact when people who came to believe those conspiracy theories went too far. It was a, I think, pretty disturbing time for all of us when we saw that come together.

I mean, as somebody, both with The Daily Show and having done a TV show after that, you know, parodying the Alex Jones talking points and what was happening in that far right world, that was always a conversation of at what point you don't want to amplify these wild ideas. But at the same time, turning a blind eye to something that's already having an effect on culture. It's already being amplified by legitimate politicians, even the Donald Trump, legitimizing the points of view there. you saw people taking what they would hear from Info Wars and the conversation around that and it was becoming very real world news.

I want to talk a little bit more about how some of these things spread, but I want to focus one more time on the adrenachrome specifically. Elise, I want to know if we trace back this specific theory, even the origins of adrenachrome, does it go back before Hunter Thompson's? Does it go back before it becomes sort of pulp in modern culture? Is there a history that dates back even earlier? It definitely does. And the way that it dates back is a little bit of sort of associative thinking.

So conspiracy theories often work this way. They kind of jump on to think. They have a very lazy logic. They jump on to things that are already fully formed. One of the conspiracy theories that is attached to Adrenica, or that adrenachrome is basically drawing on and modeling itself on is blood libel, which is a conspiracy theory dating back to the Middle Ages that Jewish people drink or use the blood of Christian children for their religious rituals, specifically at Passover.

For the record, we don't do that. Yes. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for context. Thank you for specifying that. to incite violence. Like, that is what blood libel is for. So there's that kind of thematic connection. But then there's also the fact that the main purveyors of adrenachrome, like Alex Jones, like Liz Croken, say that it's bloodline. I'll say that it actually dates back to that.

And if you look at these adrenachrome memes, one sort of popular one that goes around has this very obviously medieval image of a baby being drained. of blood with people standing around it, and it says at the top, why does this image even exist? And the image is of Simon of Trent, which is the most famous and well-documented blood libel. And this particular blood libel started Passover 1475. A father had come to the bishop of Trent and said, my two-year-old son, Simon, is missing. And this bishop already had a story ready to go. He decided it must be the Jewish community, the very small Jewish community in Trent.

He had a couple reasons for wanting this story to be true. One, he felt like the Pope was too soft on the Jewish people and that he was too cozy with them. So this was his little power grab in opposition to the Pope. And then also, if you had a saint, if he could prove that Simon was martyred by the Jews, If you had a saint in your town, that was a huge money-making opportunity. Like, you could get people from all around to make pilgrimages to your little altar, and then you would make money basically off of, like, brand building. And so it was like that brand building opportunity.

I was like there was cheesecake factory. If you had a cheesecake factory in town, you know you're going to get people from the suburbs who are going to come in, they're going to pay some money, it's going to have. help the town. That's the thing. And he wanted to kind of put Trent on the map. And so even before they start any kind of trial or anything, they round up the Jewish community, the entire Jewish community, and imprison them. And he hires a physician to write this very inflammatory autopsy that talks less about Simon's body and more about the, I think the phrase is dry-throated Jews howling for Christian blood, like this really over-the-top, kind of

autopsy. And then he takes this autopsy. That was the doctor? That was the... That was the doctor. That's some really high-end literary anti-Semitism. Yep. And, well, it gets more high-end because then he takes this and he sends it around to poets and to artists and is like, make stuff from this. And they do. Like, the poets start writing poems about Simon of Trent, and the woodcutters start making images. And that's the image that shows up in that adrenachrome meme is this sort of propaganda campaign by this Italian bishop who decided he really wanted his own little ritual cult. Those f***ing woodcutters. They just will take money, whoever puts it out. Where is the

artistic integrity in 15th century woodcutters? I hold them in such high regard. I love them. I think it's the best century for woodcutters. And yet they are so willing to turn a blind eye to the social responsibility of being a woodcutter in that time. They're taking dirty money to put out anti-Semitic propaganda. Shame. Shame on the – I'm never buying 15th century woodcutter art again.

Shame. I feel like the parts of this that are really useful, though, is kind of – it's kind of that. Like, it was the propaganda campaign that really made this take off. It wasn't like this was kind of a grassroots rumor that was rooted in sort of general anti-Semitism. I mean, that's why it took off was sort of latching onto generalized anti-Semitism. But the actual formation of the blood libel was very intentionally crafted for a political end by someone who was powerful. I have never heard of that. I think it's so easy to look at the, um,

those in power and also the religious heresy at the time and the institutions at the time, the point of view they wanted to get out, but the fact that they were using artists to spread that message to affect culture, I mean, you see obvious comparisons to what happens today, but that even then it was still important, you want this thing to stick, culture needs to stick. And the fact that we're using those images yet today as proof of what Hillary Clinton is doing is bonkers. Well, I want to take a short ad break. When we come back, we're going to talk more about how adrenochrome spread as an idea,

even before the Internet was even around. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Jordan's upper fingers, the conspiracy. I mean, I didn't actually plan to work on conspiracy theories. Like, I'm a medievalist. I'm like a huge nerd. I like books. And this was not the way I saw my studies going.

But here we are. Is it just you basically stumbled on it and we're like, here we go. Also, is that something was in the ether, the modern ether that you saw a connection between the two? Yeah, it was basically in 2015, I started, I mean, like all of us, I think, I was a little bit concerned and uneasy about the fake news phenomenon. And in particular, this epistemology aspect to this you can't trust anything that you see. and I started hearing echoes with the stuff that I study and speech patterns like that's what they want you to think, do your own research, I've heard or people are saying these kinds of gestures towards sources. I started seeing those things. I was like,

uh-oh, that doesn't sound good. That sounds familiar and not good. And I just sort of started following that. And now my autocorrect nose adrenochrome. So here we are. In the case of these historical conspiracy theories and the beginnings of blood libel, how do you see these theories spread

before modern news and communication and memes and 4chan and 8chan and parlor and true social and should I keep going? I'm not going to keep going. Well, they spread remarkably well. I think that the essential shape of blood libel was a very compelling shape. It was, you know, there are evil forces that are out to get Christian children. And there was also the fact that it was pretty

common for medieval children to die in accidents or disappear or fall into a river. Like, child death was quite common. And so it became kind of a predictable thing that if a child died in a Christian community, that pretty soon suspicion would fall on the Jewish community. And it did spread by word of mouth, but it also spread by all of these sort of cultural productions. It's spread by these woodcuts. It's spread by these poems that were written in honor of Simon. And it also spread because these stories got baked into the official histories. These historians think of themselves as, you know, responsible, reliable. And they go back to the local histories and they just sort of draw from whatever the local history is. And so these

blood libels get baked into sort of accepted history as fact. And then anyone who reads that will, that will be their primary interaction, basically, with the Jewish community for a lot of places because these pogroms have already taken place. Magda Tater has done a really great job. She studies blood libel and she's done a really great job of showing how actually before the printing press, word of mouth didn't work that great. It really needed to be written down. And that also shows that it was mostly educated people, mostly higher class people who were spreading blood libel. It wasn't a low class theory. It was a kind of upper class theory. And that's interesting. And I mean, there's great book by Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death,

that talks a lot about how the mediums affect the message. The invention of the printing press affected not only the way information was spread, but the way we think about information, the way we process information, and then you suddenly have television come out and out the way in which we communicate and the way we process information is very different than the way we used to with the printing press. I think it's fascinating to think of that in terms of who is spreading information and that it was an elitist thing. You had to be able to speak that language then. But now that we see information changing, the technology changing, man, I want to bring you in here. How are you seeing conspiracy theories like PizzaGate and other Q theories

spread given the new technology that we have? Well, the core benefit that social media companies will say that they provide to their customers and that internet companies say they provide to their customers is the idea of bringing the world together, giving people an opportunity to find communities to communicate with people across the globe and to sort of find a common purpose together. And I mean, there's a dark side to that. It also has made it much, much easier to find a community of conspiracy theorists, to share your ideas about the, you know, dark hidden messages in the world's events, to share your views about. the Illuminati or whoever else is manipulating what's going on around you. And that's just

an incredibly powerful force. The barrier to entry for producing one of these conspiracy theories is much lower. You don't, you know, the JFK conspiracy theories, you know, you had to like write letters to people later on as Xeroxes and what, faxes and so on and so forth. It's just It shows you just how lazy conspiracy theorists are now. Can you imagine if you had to write letters to spread just some BS you read on Twitter? You're like, oh, I want to put that out. Elon Musk, he would not be pushing conspiracy theories if he had to write a letter to get that thing going. Do you also look at places like Fox?

You know, we look at what's happening with social media, but more of the mainstream media outlets. How are you seeing that affect this conversation, specifically with something like Pizza Game? Sure. So, I mean, the reality is that. we live in a bifurcated news environment. There is one set of sources of information that is generally used by people in the left on the center, just sort of mainstream news outlets. And then you have this entirely separate realm of right-wing media outlets that speak very clearly and directly to a right-wing audience.

You know, the way we see conspiracy theories moving these days is they'll start at the sort of message board and social media platform level with a sort of army of individuals who are coming up with their own spin on what's happening on a particular event. It will spread from there through a network of hyper-partisan news sites,

places like Gateway Pundit, that do not have standards of any sort that are not interested in the basic rules of journalism, but that want to have political impact and make money off of advertising. And from there, you can see them sort of get woven into the broader debate. You know, the reality is that the writing media figures at the sort of higher level, your Fox News is, are not interested in batting down those sorts of conspiracies. They're not interested in challenging their audiences and telling them that what they might have heard is incorrect. Instead, you'll see either them ignoring it all together or providing a sort of

wink and a nod at the conspiracy theory or telling their viewers that it's okay, more or less, that like there are reasons to be skeptical of things that are happening around you, that the elites want to keep you from talking about QAnon or what have you, and that, you know, whether or not that's true, it's not a danger the way, you know, other people will tell you. I mean, if this is an issue with right-wing media, Yeah, they have this weird rhetoric that is politicizing children in the name of protecting them. Anything from disturbing conspiracy theories to don't say gay bills, anti-trans bills, etc.

Do you see a connection there? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these conspiracy theories get rolled up together. There was a big push over the last year and a half or so on the right, you know, throughout the entire ecosystem to talk about the idea of groomers. of uh save the children save the children absolutely uh basically that that teachers are trying to turn your kids gay turn your kids trans and possibly molest them and it all kind of gets wound up together there aren't really firm barriers to a lot of these conspiracy theories uh people who start to believe one of them uh tend to start adopting uh others as well alice historically has there

ever been a way to get people to stop believing conspiracy theories? I mean, it's a complicated question, right? It depends on who you're talking about. Like, I don't, Johannes Vindhinderbach, the bishop of Trent, I don't know that he actually believed that Simon was killed by the Jews. That was sort of beside the point. I think he believed that Jewish people are evil and he wanted to drive them out. And this was a convenient way to do it.

plus a bunch of other political benefits, I don't know that he actually believed it. So if you're talking about these sort of cynical purveyors of it who use it for radicalization and use it for their own sort of economic and political gain, I think you just have to take away the gain, and then, like, that will kind of kill it. For everybody else, I think it is a complicated question because the thing about conspiracy theories is they're not about the details, they're not about the stories, they're not about the story, there. I mean, I feel like your segments Jordan have really shown this well. As soon as you ask them a question, like, that's the end. It doesn't go anywhere. You can't actually have a conversation about conspiracy theories. I don't even think that conspiracy theorists could have a conversation with each other about it because it's fundamentally not discursive. It's not something you can have a discussion about. It is just an attempt to make this sort of core story about yourself, match up with the world. And every conspiracy theory has this same core story, and that's why it's so

powerful. It's the story that the theorist holds on to and then sort of tries to match up with the world in a kind of messy way. The story is basically, once upon a time, we were happy and everything was good, and we were in charge, and we were safe. And then the monsters took hold. but no one knew that they had. And these monsters are not of the sort of vaguely threatening variety. They have to be absolutely gigantic, demonic, sort of the most hyperbolic thing you can think of, go another step.

So it's always children, Satan, mutilation and torture, pedophilia. And the story goes that everything seemed fine because the monsters made sure this was all kept secret. So the monsters control what you know. and only the heroes of the story knew the truth, and then they arrived to save the world. And that's the benefit that you get from it. You get that worldview about yourself, that you are a continuously, just sort of horrifically embattled hero of the story. And you can't really give up on this self, like this self-image of embattled heroism.

It's very difficult to give up on. It's not just the high of thinking of yourself as a hero. It's also that you convince yourself that you are in this battle of absolute good and absolute evil. And so then you get to issues of like if you ask about democracy or fair play, what are you nuts? Like this is about this is about the end of the world. So it makes it impossible to sort of dial back to issues of fairness or accurate. it's actually not about that. And I feel like you can kind of hear that when you're talking to these Q&ON followers. When they try to answer your questions, they aren't actually trying to

say, like you say, so what did actually happen in January 6th? They'll say FBI, CIA, Clinton's, just sort of a grab bag. But what they're actually trying to tell you is this story, that the monsters are out to get us and I'm trying to save us, there's kind of no other point to it. That's the whole ball game. And when the monsters, when there's a partisan overlay on that, when the monsters are one party and the people who are trying to save you are Donald Trump, I mean, there's no room for debate at that point, right? Like there's no room to talk about it's important to respect electoral defeats, right?

because if the people who you are losing elections to are monsters who are abusing children, then you have a moral responsibility to go try to subvert those election results. And the resistance is kind of like baked into the story, because the story is that the monsters came and took over and they covered it up. They kept everybody from knowing. So any information that you get in from the outside is suspect. Even information that you might get from sympathetic sources. So the only thing then you're left with is kind of like going with your gut. And what feels true, it feels

true that I am a victim and it feels true that I'm the hero of the story. And so let's just go with that. So you're telling me I shouldn't read this story to my son every night before going to bed. He loves it. It's a dark Eric Carl story, but I like it so much better than that hungry caterpillar. you might be you might be unhappy with the results of raising your child this way i tell you all of his peers are reading it they seem to really be into it that hero's journey uh um after the break we're going to talk about how the adrenochrome conspiracy theory is related to the attack in nancy pelosi's house it seriously is this is jordan klepper figures the conspiracy we'll be right back welcome back to jordan clapper fingers the conspiracy i'm here with dr elise

Wong and Matt Gertz, two experts who follow conspiracy theories. And we're talking about Adrenachrome, how Democrats are drinking baby's blood, allegedly, allegedly. And what that means for American politics. Now, recently Nancy Pelosi's house was broken into by a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He was looking for Pelosi and ended up attacking her husband with a hammer. But Matt, you've written about how the conspiracy theories, this attacker specifically believed, and how he was radicalized in the ecosystem of right-wing misinformation. How does this all connect? Well, the alleged assailant had a substantial internet paper trail.

He had a couple of blogs, various other social media platforms, and what he posted on those sites was very much the kind of textbook, online, right-wing, conspiracy theory radicalization pattern that we've been seeing for years now. His social media and blogs are filled with references to QAnon, to Adrenachrome, to Pizza Gate, to Gamergate, as well as a sort of grab bag of bigotries related to black people and women and Jews and gay people and trans people. It's a grab bag Yeah, no

It's the greatest hits Honestly, I spent some time Looking through these websites On Friday And I was like, oh, it's just It's all of it From there And this happened very, very quickly

You did not see People on the right saying Oh my God The things that people on the right are saying Are leading to political violence Instead, a story about political violence committed by someone who believed right-wing conspiracy theories about how Democrats are depraved, it was turned into another right-wing conspiracy theory about how Democrats are depraved. The story that developed over the following hours was that the assailant had not broken into the House, but in fact he had been involved. invited in by Paul Pelosi because they were gay lovers, and that the violent attack on Pelosi

was in fact some sort of gay lovers spat. That's what they came up with, and that spread remarkably quickly, as it tends to do through this right-wing information ecosystem, until you had Elon Musk tweeting out a link to a sort of hyper-partisan fake news website on Sunday morning. So it was, you know, 72 hours, 48 hours from the assault becoming known to the conspiracy theory reaching the wealthiest man on earth. Elise, something like this pops up. Is this how you imagine it playing out this quickly and evolving or devolving? in this similar manner?

Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me. I do think the speed is different from sort of the history that I study, but the manner in which things spread is really not. And I think a few things are key that the platform matters. It depends on who is picking this up and who is running with it. And then there's also a durability to conspiracy theories that because they have this sort of epistemological challenge built into them by that, by that. I mean, they challenge how you know what you know.

And they say these things that you think you know, you don't know. But it doesn't replace it with anything. So it's just sort of epistemic destabilization. So you just don't have anything to stand on. And that creates an environment in which conspiracy theories really thrive. Because once you can't trust anything, then the only thing you can trust is your own sense of the story that you like or the one that sounds good to you. This was definitely true in sort of the medieval and early modern period of blood libel. There were often powerful people who opposed blood libel.

For Simon of Trent, the reason why we have so many documents on it is the Pope tried to intervene in this. He tried to put a stop to it. And then the very first blood libel in the 12th century, this was a boy named William of Norwich. The Norwich Sheriff actually got involved. and protected the Jewish community. So there's always been pushback from kind of mainstream sources and yet these conspiracy theories just thrive if there's already a kind of destabilized trust in the regular sources of knowledge. So I think the modern speed, that is new, how quickly that happens. But you would have a blood libel come out and the next week all of the Jews in town

would be arrested and tortured. And it was pretty fast. It happened pretty fast. Well, we mentioned the platform here. And Matt, you brought up Elon Musk in the tweet that he had adding to this confusion. He referenced a website that claimed Hillary Clinton died in 2016 and was replaced with a clone. So what does this say now in this new era of Elon's Twitter? What is that going to do to these conversations? I mean, I think it's going to continue to accelerate them. I think there has been some effort by the social media platforms some of the time to try to rein in the most extreme and dangerous forms of misinformation. It's been half hazard. It's been imperfect. But Elon Musk's Twitter is going to do is kind of toss

that aside. He himself is quite obviously a bit of a conspiracy theorist, someone who has accused people of being pedos, that's just sort of his wheelhouse, so to speak. And it's difficult to imagine Twitter being interested in throttling conspiracy theories that its own owner is spreading.

That's just not going to happen. And so, you know, I think that platform is going to become less stable. It's going to become a less value source for credible information because of that. Elise, I'm curious, can you talk about the progression of belief into action? Like, what takes somebody from Pizzagate to an actual act of political violence in 2022? I mean, this is what scholars of radicalization study, right?

How do you come from an idea into actual action? Um, radicalization online is part of the story. It's not the whole story, but it certainly, um, directs your any sort of anger or dissatisfaction you already have. It validates it and it amps it up and it focuses it on a target. Um, so it's a little bit like pointing a loaded gun at, um, a specific target. And can I go back to the Elon thing for just a sec? yes please um the the whole verification thing really struck me because i think you know it's clear the the money of it doesn't actually matter like he's like 20 dollars eight dollars whatever to sell sell verification right that's his new thing he's going to sell verification on twitter what really struck me is that this is not an attempt to get the money it's an attempt to devalue verification in general because verification is meant to show you which sources are trustworthy, right? It was meant to sort of identify members of the media and corporations and so that you knew that it was actually

coming from that source and you knew that you could trust it. It was not a sort of celebrity thing originally. That was that was not the purpose of verification. And by turning it into something that you can buy, it just completely devalues verification. And it gets rid of that layer of validation so that you know what you can trust, which sources you can trust. It gets rid of that sort of, you know, it's destabilizing the way we know what we know. And that seems to me to be the point of the whole verification thing. In fact, because Musk is so polarizing, we can see a situation where his supporters who are largely on the right are much more willing to actually shell out the money than, you know, more credible mainstream journalists are.

Those less credible sources will get sort of algorithmically accelerated more than everybody else and become a bigger part of the conversation. I'm curious what advice you would have to consumers, specifically of Twitter. I think a lot of people are looking at this. They see these issues, see the problem, and are asking themselves the question, do I divorce myself from this platform? I don't know if the answer is to step away from it and not be a part of the conversation or understand the conversation, but are you complicit in what is becoming a less and less trustworthy place? So I think part of the issue here is I don't

really view it as a place for conversation. I mean, I use Twitter. I got a lot of interesting things to say, come at me, we'll go back and forth. It's fun. We playful. I got some gifts. I'll send your way. It's a really fun chat. The way I use Twitter, I use it as a broadcast medium, right? It's a way for me to get my views and my work out into the public. It's a way for me to hear views from people who might have interesting ideas or thoughts. But I don't do that much interaction with it because I think it's actually a really bad medium for having debates of any kind. If I want to have a conversation with someone, I will try to follow up with them and start an email conversation or phone or what have you. It's hard to have a substantive discussion with the rest of the world trying to

involve itself in that. I will use Twitter less if that becomes less feasible. If I think that my tweets aren't getting read or if I think that I am not able to easily find credible information that I want to be reading, that's when the value proposition will fall to basically nothing. I feel like this is where our disciplines come into play because you're in media. I'm in medieval studies, so I have a very, my following, you will be shocked to hear is tiny. I'm also locked, so I really just use it for conversation. Like, I really just use it to connect with other people in my field or who study the same things that I do.

And I think one of the really, one of the reasons a lot of people are mourning this is it has been an incredible tool for people to connect within their own tiny little subfield. Like, I feel more connected to other medievalists of color on Twitter because we have kind of created our, our own little ecosystem than anywhere else. And I wouldn't get that anywhere else. I would miss it for that. And obviously, again, like you said, if that becomes impossible, then I'm not going to use it anymore. But I also think this whole question of, so do you stay, do you go, do you pay the $8, $20, whatever it ends up being? I feel like that's a very American question. Like, how can we make this the individual responsibility to decide what to do? This is the, the robber baron has screwed up the system and now we are responsible for fixing it.

And, you know, my recycling or not recycling my water bottle is really what's leading to climate change. Like, that's really, that's really the thing, the sort of individual responsibility for these things. And I think that's kind of what gets us into trouble with conspiracy theories to begin. with, right? Do your own research. Find out for yourself. The thing is with huge platforms and huge areas of knowledge, you just can't do it yourself. I mean, as we all discovered in the pandemic when we all became amateur epidemiologists, right? We're not very good at this. I don't remember high school biology very well. I'm not going to be good at making choices, personal choices about my own level of risk and my kids' level of risk.

And, you know, I am not a good person to put that decision on. And that's kind of how we've offloaded it. And so I feel like that's maybe not, I know that it's sort of going to be personally difficult for a lot of people to figure out what to do about Twitter. But I don't really feel like that's where the change comes from. I want to wrap this up kind of, looking specifically at what happened with Nancy Pelosi's husband and what we've sort of

been discussing here, but sort of to zoom out as well, how do politicians like Nancy Pelosi try and convince people that they don't partake in ritual children sacrifices at a rally weeks ago and a man was convinced that Nancy Pelosi is a vampire and drinks. children's blood. He was convinced. I followed up and I asked, you said literally. Did you mean literally? He said literally. You see, Republicans on one side and the devil on the other. Are we talking metaphorical devil? Like, oh, they do bad stuff? You know, literally, you know, vampire drinking blood. I don't want to nitpick here, but vampires tend to be eternally youthful. And I look at Nancy Pelosi and she's a lot of things, but I guess I don't think vampire. Somebody in her party definitely

drinks blood. How does someone like that? attempt to knock down this issue and and with those difficulties what does that say about where we're at politically if we struggle to even do that matt i don't know honestly i mean it's very difficult to uh reach someone who believes that you uh drink the blood of children um the you know, I think that it's just a hard problem. And so we end up talking around it, right? We end up talking about what are the ways that policy can weaken the structures that are in place that allow these conspiracy theories to flourish? Because as Ily says, these conspiracy theories have always been with us, but it has.

has become easier for them to propagate and easier for people to come to accept them. And I think that's really the available chattel. Elise, is there any advice you have for Nancy Pelosi or anybody else who looks at this is pulling out their hair, just attempting to try to knock down what seems like to be. the inconceivable? I mean, I think there's sort of the media answer and then there's the personal answer about approaching this person personally. So the media answer, like, I don't, I'm not a media expert. And so I wouldn't know exactly how to do this. But I think that platforms really are the key, the platforms that we give people to propagate these ideas. I think

that, you know, when Alex Jones got involved, things really took off. And when Alex Jones was taken off of Twitter and sort of de-platformed from a bunch of places, his influence really did die down for a little while. Like, it actually had an influence. And I think de-platforming and treating social media as the sort of communities that they are and the news sites that they are and having even stricter standards for them than we do for sort of in-person conduct, I think is not going to happen, but that would be my suggestion for the media side of things. I think you have to control the amplification of these conspiracy theories. And there's also just sort of the larger problem of society-wide radicalization. And that is a, that's a bigger question than just

conspiracy theories. The only people who can really get to people who are deep into it are those who are already intimate with these people, who are already friends with these people who already have some other form of connection with them. You're not going to get through to them. That's not, sorry. I know. I know. It's a new family. Your family out there, talk to those you love. I mean, you also speak to something there. There's the intimate relationship people have with their computers when they're alone in their room and that person. Yeah.

Interesting video. It's like a parissocial relationship, yep. Yeah, exactly. And I see going to these rallies, this myth of American exceptionalism, we talk with such rhetoric of everybody on their own hero's journey. And I will say a lot of those MAGA rallies, you talk about all the problems in the world. And then somebody gets on stage and they says, you're a patriot. You can be a hero. you can do this.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, guys, this has been lovely. Elise Wong, Matt Gertz, I leave this conversation, energized as if I've supped on the blood of a child. That's all I could ask for.

I appreciate your insight and your thoughts. Thank you, guys. Thanks for having you. Listen to Jordan Klepper Figures The Conspiracy from The Daily Show on Apple Podcast, the Iheart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcast.

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