Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 88: Republic Of Half Truths (w/ special guest Anna Merlan)

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

Writer Anna Merlan (@annamerlan) stops by the show to talk about her new book, Republic of Lies, which details the weird world of conspiracy and propaganda lying just beneath the surface of US culture. Preorder Anna's book here: https://www.powells.com/book/republic-of-lies-9781250159052 Subscribe to the Patreon here: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Hello, Trillbilly family. I've been listening to this podcast, this deeply diseased podcast called Without Fail about some dipshit from This American Life or something who is the CEO now and he feels bad about it, so he's making a podcast about it but at the top at the top of every podcast there is an advertisement for this show made by linkedin um linkedin is in the podcasting business now they have a show called hello monday and their pitch for it is work how to like it how to change it maybe even how to like it, how to change it, maybe even how to love it. And every time it comes on, it makes me grind my teeth so hard. But I am going to have to do that with you right now.

That's right. I am pitching an advertisement, not an actual advertisement. I'm just saying I'm pitching an advertisement for our Patreon. Before we get started on our wonderful interview this week with Anna Merlin, writer with Gizmodo Media and author of the new book Republic of Lies, I just want to ask you to please go to our Patreon and support us there. go to our Patreon and support us there. We have weekly episodes on the Patreon. It comes out every Sunday. If you don't know how to get there, we are no longer listed as adult content, so you can search and find us that way. Or you can plug in the good old-fashioned URL, p-a-t-r-E-O-N.com slash Trill Billy Workers Party. No apostrophes or anything like that. And $5 a month will get you all access to, like I said, about four episodes a month. We put one out every Sunday. And I know all of you out there are addicted to podcasts, just like I am and everybody else is,

and you want more Trailbillies content, so go there. I hope Tom or Tanya don't hear this, because they will think that I'm already more insane than they already think for recording this all by myself in my living room with literally nobody else around except my cats watching me so go to the patreon please support us so that um we can keep doing it for you the listener and so that we can continue uh getting great guests like anna merlin here who as i said will be discussing

her new book and it's a good one i think you you're really going to like it. We had a lot of fun recording it. So enjoy, and I'll see you on the other side. This week we're having Anna Merlin on the show, Jezebel Ryder, and author of the book Republic of Lies, which comes out next month, right? Yeah, it comes out on April 16th. I actually work for Jezebel's parent company, Gizmodo. I'm part of this weird little offshoot called the Special Projects Desk. But most of my work is on Jezebel.

Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's like this big labyrinth of corporate ownership now, I suppose. Yeah, it's great. It's real fun. Enjoying it. Yeah.

And you're kind of the special forces of that. Yeah, I'm real special. Like the Army Rangers of Gizmodo. Basically, I'm old. I'm old compared to everybody else who's there, so I just sort of wander around the office shedding dust and talking about the good old days. She's been crotchety.

Yeah, that's essentially what I do. I guess our strategy is targeting all of the former Gawker writers, you know. Yeah, clearly. Brendan Kinlane. Yeah, that's true, right? Right, right. Right. Well, I support any podcast that just dunks on Brendan.

I think it's really important to dunk on Brendan. And I think people should do more of it in really whatever form they can. This is a pro-Brendan dunking podcast. It's important to dunk on Brendan. Yeah, for sure. Well, Anna, thank you. Welcome to the show this week. This week we're going to be tackling a sort of, I don't know,

it's not necessarily a heady topic, but it is something that we've kind of wanted to talk about for a little bit, and your book gives us the perfect way to do that. We're going to be talking about conspiracy theories, but more specifically than that, I think we're going to be talking about this country's very specific relationship with conspiracy theories. And so, you know, you have this book,

and the title kind of leads us into that. The title is Republic of Lies. I kind of just want to throw the question out to you. Why did you title it that? And, you know, what what is it about this country that makes it such like sort of fertile breeding ground for conspiracy and paranoia? or conspiracy and paranoia? So Republic of Lies wasn't my first title. My first title was actually False Times because I feel like Republic of Lies sounds a little bit judgmental and also like a John Grisham novel. But you don't always win the discussions that you have about those things.

And so it is accurate to say that the United States has a relationship to conspiracy theories that is sort of unusual, especially outside of countries with autocratic regimes. power structure and where people feel a personal sense of pessimism about their power in society and their abilities to like affect change in their government, for instance. So it's not that surprising that we see it in America. And it's not surprising that as our government has grown, there has been more and more paranoias and conspiracy theories specifically directed at the government. And we also have the added bonus here of having had numerous government conspiracies, like real ones that were uncovered over the last 50 years that are so

insane that they have given endless fuel to any conspiracy theory that will ever be created. I mean, just alone, the fact that the FBI the cia did so much work to overthrow democratically democratically elected regimes and quell the civil rights movement is something that will fuel citizen paranoia forever um so part of the reason why we feel so much paranoia and conspiracy and mistrust here is because we have cause to yeah yeah yeah no um i think there's even a quote at one point in your book it's a really great quote it's like this guy's like, you know, if you look at this sort of Tuskegee experiments, it's really not that, you know, incredible to good point. It's just like there is a lot of historical evidence. The thing about conspiracy theorists is the general contours of what they say are absolutely true. It's just the players and how they arrive at those things are the wonky part.

Yeah, I mean that quote is specifically in a chapter about conspiracy theories among black Americans. And the main point about conspiracy theories among black Americans is that they're pretty reasonable. And a lot of them are based in real historical events like Tuskegee. You know, so conspiracy theories aren't the disease, right? They're the symptom. And it's a symptom that tends to flare up or die down depending on how well like the American experiment is working for people. on how well like the American experiment is working for people. So it's unsurprising that folks who are not white in the United States have a slightly higher correlation of believing in conspiracy theories because, you know, societally things have not worked as well for them ever. Yeah.

No, I'm honestly, before I'd read the book, I was completely unaware of the 1927 um i think it's what year it was the great mississippi flood um when they basically you know blew i guess the levees or the dams around this town around new orleans and they killed several hundred people in the process mostly black and um and and so it's like yeah when you look at that and you look at katrina it's like it's not that big of a leap they had the good little wine lyric in there. Oh, yeah Yeah, I hope he doesn't get mad at me You don't want that smirks I don't want that but yeah

I mean the whole point is that there's this belief in New Orleans that the levees were purposely destroyed during Katrina and While we don't have any any evidence that that's true, and far more evidence that it was just incredibly ridiculous, staggering neglect, there's a reason why people believe that. There's a historical basis for that. And that is this decision in the 1920s to destroy the levees. The logic at the time was that it would save New Orleans while flooding the surrounding areas. So yeah, it killed people. It destroyed people's homes.

It triggered one of the greatest migrations in American history. But all that was apparently worth it to save wealthier parts of New Orleans. You know, I've always loved that Randy Newman song, Louisiana 1927, but I didn't know that was the dark event that inspired that until I read this part yeah there are so many I mean it's it's like a trauma and it's like any trauma there are so many songs about it there's so much there's so many like references to it it's not surprising that it continues to recur in conspiracy theories like in the region yeah yeah well and that's I think that's a theme that kind of goes in and out of the book is that trauma is the sort of root cause of a lot of this.

You know, I've told this story on the show a few times, but I was working at a basketball camp one time with Louis Farrakhan's grandson up near Pittsburgh. And we got to be kind of friendly a little bit. And, you know, we started talking about this stuff. I was fascinated at the time with like hip hop conspiracies with like this idea that Jay-Z and Kanye West were like part of the Illuminati or whatever. Yeah. And so we were talking and, you know, I was like, you know, does your granddad like really believe the origin stories of like, you know, this like sort of apostate Islam and all this kind of stuff.

And he was like, you know, I don't think that's as an important of a question as like the strong body of evidence he has for, you know, sort of feeling the way he does. And that's not, that's not to like,

you know, excuse his antisemitism or any of these other things, but like growing up, seeing that and being devalued and dehumanized your whole life, it makes total sense that you would- Draw that sort of conclusion. Yeah, that white people are irredeemable. And again, it's kind of like the- I think it's that white people are literally devils. Well, yeah, and made in a factory by Dr. Yaakov.

Yeah, which which why not maybe um it's no kookier than any origin story of any religion or anything else we come up with well and also like the christian identity movement holds that like non-white people are like literal mud people and the children of satan so it's not like it is a unique belief to believe that the people that you're demonizing are literally not human. Right. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, yeah, you got that. But one of the things I thought was pretty sort of fascinating about it was like, you know, you've got people sort of acting on historical precedent. then like there's a sort of other side to this where people are acting on these sort of material circumstances around them whether that's sort of austerity or inequality or you know any of the other things that make this country the sort of hellhole that it is i thought like the one of the

craziest things uh was like they're like the chapter on anti-vaxxers um like i thought that it was pretty interesting that um you know they sort sort of deduce a lot of their sort of theories from very real complaints with the sort of health care system. And it wasn't just the vaxxers either. It was also, I don't know, there's the whole chapter on medical oddities had a sort of rundown of several. oddities had a sort of a rundown of several yeah like the belief that the government is hiding the cures for cancer and aids and this sort of crackdown that the fba fda made on like fake cancer cures that nonetheless kind of fed people's conspiratorial beliefs that maybe these cures were being uh quelled because they were real it's like it's interesting where you see i mean the the thing that like recurs over and over is that when a system is opaque, it's interesting where you see, I mean, the, the thing that like recurs

over and over is that when a system is opaque, when it's hard for people to understand, when it's hard for people to impact and when it is fundamentally unjust, whether it's, you know, the financial system or the healthcare system, you see conspiracy theories spring up around it. So the anti-vaxxer one is obviously so frustrating because it impacts like children who can't make their own decisions and it impacts public health but it's also like in a way very sympathetic to me because like what do we care about more than we care about the health of our children like i i don't have any trouble talking to people and being like i don't agree with your decision making i think you're relying on really

flawed science but i understand why you're doing this yeah so as angry as i get about the people who sell anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories, I completely understand the people who are buying them. And I think they're being tricked in a way that is really cruel and really heartbreaking. Yeah. Well, and that's, again, that's another sort of theme. And I highlighted it in one of the questions I sent you is that you almost have a sort of ecosystem in a lot of these sort of subcultures where you have the sort of like people at the top, like Alex Jones and James Tracy's and people who are in it pretty much for the money. And then the people sort of directly below them who, yeah, who are searching for some kind of truth or some kind of answers.

Like the Morton guy that's gone to the pokey for 625 years. Yeah, that was pretty. The true belief. Oh, no, he's only doing like five now. Oh, okay. But yeah, David Morton, he's a good example of somebody who is both a conspiracy peddler and a conspiracy consumer. You know, it's hard to tell what people actually believe

versus what they're just selling to make money. Right. I mean, I would, yeah, like Alex Jones, I don't know what Alex Jones really believes. I don't know how much of it he buys. Very hard to tell. Right. Yeah.

Before we go too far away from what we were just talking about, I do think it's interesting that, like, a lot of people sort of search for, you know, this sort of ephemeral thing. It sort of escaped us, the cure for cancer, you know. And throughout the 20th century, there was this thing that I guess it's called latryl. Is that it? Latryl. Latryl, okay. Latryl, yeah. It's basically taken from apricot seeds.

Apricot seeds, yeah. It's essentially a cyanide derivative, yeah. Right, right. So it basically poisons people. It's not great. No. It's not great. No.

After I was reading this, it was pretty crazy, though. It's just like the only thing I'm aware of that's actually cured cancer is communism. They did it in Cuba with lung cancer. Did they? I didn't know that. There's a lung cancer vaccine that the Cuban government has. They're very proud of it. They're very proud of it.

You could take tours of the facilities they came up with it in. Really? Oh, yeah. I had no idea. Yeah, the American government's been trying to get their hands on it. They're the ones that pioneered the whole idea of using viruses to break the blood-brain

barrier and things like that. That's crazy. I had no idea. Yeah, so anyways, it's my plug for... For communism? For communism.

I knew we were going to get there. I just didn't know how we were going to get there, you know? I was like, surely that's your endgame here. So, you know, you did good. You got it in the first 20 minutes. Good, thank you. Thank you. First quarter.

That's a new record for me. Yeah, it's important. Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, so, okay. So, like, you know, don't want to go too far away from that either. It's sort of, you know, I mentioned this to you and I sort of sent you some questions, but I kind of feel like, you know, conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in many ways.

I'm not referring to the theories themselves specifically but like the sort of fascination with them like the other night i was watching this guy do you know do you know who shane dawson is he is an insufferable youtuber uh he's like they're all insufferable yeah he's like he yeah he like came up with like logan paul and jake paul and all these guys. Oh, God. Oh, he's real terrible. But he's got a series on YouTube now about conspiracy theories. It's got like 30 million views.

It's huge. So I think that it's hard to actually gauge what's mainstream or not by what's popular on YouTube. But I do feel like the theories themselves and the sort of American public's fascination with them has gone more mainstream than it once was. The example I told you over the email was like, you know, I feel like a decade ago, if you would have told me that people were joking about jet fuel not being able to melt still beams or whatever,

that that being a pretty common joke among people, you know, just normal people, that I would have said you were crazy, but it's a pretty common joke among people you know just normal people that i would have said you were crazy but it's a it's a pretty belabored joke now yeah or that graphic of charlie from it's always sunny in philadelphia with his like pictures everywhere and his red yarn connecting things like this like idea of the like archetypal conspiracy theorist or conspiracy concept like jet fuel can't melt steel beams is like a thing right um i mean so we tend to see that an interest in conspiracy theories and an interest in conspiracy theorists really waxes and wanes and again gets stronger in times of social instability instability and social

upheaval and like flux uh right now we also have a lot more journalists who cover subcultures which makes this stuff more visible even sometimes sort of dragging stuff out that is genuinely really fringe and being like, look at this crazy thing, you know, the sort of like antiquated, like old school vice model of like, look at this crazy person, let me make fun of them. Right. So that's definitely one reason why we see more stuff about conspiracy theories in general and discussion about them. But there's

also like a real change in the information ecosystem that everyone is registering, where there's been this flattening of every source of information, you know, because it's all coming from the internet. It all kind of looks the same when it's on social media. And so it's genuinely hard for people to tell what is a good source of information, what is fringe, what is a mainstream belief, what is a less mainstream belief. what is fringe what is a mainstream belief what is a less mainstream belief um and it also means social media means that like conspiracy theories are easier for people to find and see you don't have to go to like a weird bookstore anymore or go to like a bizarre conference or have the right person you know hand you a crazy pamphlet on the

street it's just like there um and so it's just a lot easier for people to find. It's a lot easier for people to spread. Like something like Twitter is just a perfect sort of mechanism for spreading a conspiratorial belief. And because there are so many journalists on it, something like QAnon that has gotten a lot of traction on Twitter was inevitably going to be covered a lot in the media. But again, it's also a product of people having more and more sophistication about genuine government conspiracies and having new ones be uncovered all the time. So people constantly have this sense that there's more like yet to be revealed. Yeah, for sure. I'm kind of, you know, I'm not quite sure how to pose this question, but like, what about its sort of current manifestation makes it so unique?

Like, one of the questions I sent you was like, is it capitalism? Like, is it very sort of acute right now and concentrated because of capitalism? Or have these things always existed? Have they always been with us? So one way that researchers have tracked conspiracy theories and how they wax and wane is by looking at letters to the editor. Like some of these researchers, like there's two researchers from University of Florida who looked at letters to

the editor over the last hundred years to see when people were complaining about whatever crazy thing. And so you can see, again, that they do wax and wane with like some like predictability. But like one thing that has really changed is this this new phenomenon of the conspiracy entrepreneur, which is I'm not the first person to use that term, but it's a good sort of shorthand. People are trying to make their names or some portion of their living from conspiracy theories. And it's really hard to actually make your living that way. But you can definitely get famous and alex jones is the model for people who are like i can i can get really fucking famous and i can get really fucking rich yeah and i think what people don't realize is that alex jones is really

rich because he has supplements yeah you know like he sells nutritional supplements it's not just that people are like tuning in to hear about the frogs turning gay it's like you know like they're buying things he's very he's also very good at like um he you know he built a pretty good like web platform and he was using twitter and facebook and shit like a long time before like a lot of conspiracy sites look really bad yeah they're hard to get to and they're hard to navigate and And so he was really good at that stuff. But yeah, so we see all these people who are like, this is this is a good way to get famous. And I have like a receptive audience who will like buy my stuff and hear me speak and buy my DVDs. And so like we also have these hardcore sort of conspiracy consumers that seem to be a

bigger group than they were before. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Part of me, and this is just me musing. This isn't really going anywhere, but part of me does wonder if it does feel very postmodern.

Like people's explanations for things don't make sense anymore. Like there's, there are no real grand narratives that really explain why things are the way that they are anymore. And so they, you know, sort of search for answers. And I think that like, you know, obviously people like Alex Jones and people like that step in and sort of fill that void. But I don't know. It just feels like, you know, we live in this sort of we live in this sort of a world of hyperreality, hyper normalcy where nothing really makes sense.

And so that just seems to me like the sort of perfect atmosphere for, you know, people. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I thought about a lot is that people who are like we're all in the conspiracy pool together most of us believe in at least one conspiracy theory so but the people in the what I call like the deep end of the pool I don't think there is any way to like overstate how much their specific conspiracy theories give like shape and meaning and purpose to their lives yeah you know what I mean? Like I was thinking about this a lot with Pizzagate people because the Pizzagate people I talked to

were really like convinced that children were being harmed and that they were participating in like the grand overthrow of a system that was harming children. And it really gave them a purpose. It gave them a direction and it made people feel like they were like heroes, you know, like it made people feel important. And there's, I mean, there are some studies that people who get really into conspiracy theories, like it's because it makes them feel special. But in a way, I think that's too dismissive. I think it's like,

yeah, I don't know. We want some like ordering purpose to our lives. But in a way, I think that's too dismissive. I think it's like, yeah, I don't know. We want some like ordering purpose to our lives. And for some people, conspiracy theories really do that. For sure. Yeah. Speaking of that, the most recent news as of yesterday is all these documents might be released from the Jeffrey Epstein case. So we might have a lot of pizza gators might be vindicated. A little bit.

A little bit. Yeah. I have been interested in how sort of fitfully engaged they seem with the Epstein thing. Like, they don't always seem super, like, on it. And I don't know why that is. Maybe it's, like, too public for them to be super engaged in. But definitely, like definitely the Clinton part,

the fact that Bill Clinton was indisputably on that fucking plane and buddies with Jeffrey Epstein, that part is interesting to them, obviously. And again, I talk about this a little bit in the book, and it's only happened more so, but a lot of Pizzagate people and QAnon people have taken genuine cues from the real world. The Me Too movement was kind of big for pizza

gator because they were like we've been talking about all these secret predators and pedophiles and look here they are right so you know like yeah he's if they're if they're looking for a monster to give shape to some of this stuff jeffrey epstein is a pretty fucking good candidate. Yeah. On that same note, you know, sort of looking at sort of things as they develop and I guess what you consider the real world, even though it's really hard to pin down, and sort of matching it up with the sort of narratives that they tell in these sort of subcultures. It is interesting to hear that. Another example that you give is, you know, It is interesting to hear that. Another example that you give is, you know, in the chapter on UFOs where it was, you know, all these things came out in the last maybe year or so.

The Department of Defense released these really insane videos. You've got this, I don't know, rock that was, you know, umau mau. Do you know how to say it? I don't know how to say it. I'm not an expert in it, but I think it's really interesting. I think it's really exciting. Yeah.

Spotting this crazy space rock. Right, right, right. Yeah. Bummer, Ken couldn't make it. Yeah, I don't want to talk about crazy space rocks. Right, right, right. Well, he even wrote something about that in Popula. Ken Lane from Desert Oracle, right?

Right. And so it's like you know it's just interesting to watch how it sort of like matches up with the sort of portrayal of the world that they've created yeah i mean so the ufo subculture specifically for me is really fun to spend time in because nobody is yelling at me about being fake news and nobody is telling me that the holocaust didn't happen which is just it's very like restful for me to just talk about ufos um yeah but so yeah i mean basically the belief in the ufo world is that at some point there will be this thing called disclosure when the government or government scientists or whoever's in charge finally reveals what they know about aliens and alien life and alien visits to earth and what these ufos are whether

they're actually extraterrestrial crafts or just like you know china or russia or somebody making this crazy technology that we didn't know about um and so the idea is that when disclosure happens we're also going to know a bunch of stuff about um alien technology that can make our lives better so there's a belief that aliens know about like healing and anti-aging technology there's a belief in um free or zero point energy you know that would replace coal and everything else um gonna be a bummer if all they have is ipads they're like here oh you already got this um but yeah so like the thing that has happened is when like the department of defense releases these videos and when there is more discussion about like the fact that the government, you know, did have a secret UFO program for a pretty long time and might still. There's not a lot of surprise in the hardcore UFO world because they're like, yeah, this is disclosure is happening in stages.

This is just what they want us to know there's this belief that if they disclose everything all at once we'll lose our minds and we'll like literally go out in the street and start setting stuff on fire like they like they will tell you that that's why the government hasn't disclosed anything yet is that it will like destabilize society um so they definitely when you talk to them about stuff like those videos people in the ufo world they will tell you like this is just the tip of the world, they will tell you like, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm not surprised. You know, they're unfolding things, you know, like too slowly.

They're hiding the real stuff. Are they sort of like hipster about it? They're like, I was on this way before. That is a really, really, really good way to put it, is that by the time something is on the front page of The New York Times, according to them, it's either old news or it is, you know, controlled opposition. Like it's a release of information to lull us, dissuade us, distract us from what's really going on. Like you'll see a lot of that. Yeah, it's a head fake. Exactly.

So I saw a lot of that that was like, why does The Times have this? They're fucking with us. They're messing messing with us they're trying to distract us um there's also a lot of pizzagate stuff in the ufo world and this belief that there are like secret sex slave colonies on mars and that like nasa employees are engaged in like you know ritual child abuse there's this guy c Corey good. Yeah. Um, who claims to, he's in my book and he claims to have like been part of like a secret space Navy. Um, and yeah, like periodically, yeah. Bring up the, uh, the pedophiles, the space pedophiles. That's kind of what I thought was so interesting. It's like, um, I think you haven't noticed this,

like some of the old like whistleblowers, like Bob Lazar, who was on desert oracle they talk about him a lot on desert oracle it's like uh his his claims were pretty you know i mean relatively credible it's like oh i worked at area 51 i was looking at alien technology and now it's like two or three decades later it's like the whistleblowers were like listen i served in the space navy i busted pedophile rings on mars well yeah so there's the guy who says he claims claims he served in the Space Navy. I busted pedophile rings on Mars. Well, yeah. So there's the guy who claims he served in the Space Navy, Corey Gooden,

and then there's Andrew Basiago who claims that he went to Mars with Barack Obama before Obama was president. He says Obama's name is Barry Cetera, which is a birther thing. So it's this amazing mixture of birtherism. And he says that they got there via a space elevator created by the cia nice uh and that there are dinosaurs on mars like i his lecture is one of the only ones that i've ever had to leave early because i was just like my i

can't can't take any more truth today like it's just such a powerful shock to my system that i need to go like sit outside staring into space totally yeah yeah so the whistleblowers in the ufo world now are uh real wild so when when like trump comes along and says we're going to start a new branch of the military called the space force oh is that kind of validate like a cork something like that like the president united states saying something. Yeah. Or proposing something that absurd. Yeah.

What they think is that Trump is revealing the existence of a space force that existed already. Yeah. Oh, wow. So he, without knowing it, he has like given incredible fuel to all kinds of shit. You know, I mean, Trump also constantly makes reference, obviously, to the deep state. That's one of his big things is the idea of a deep state working for his destruction these other shadowy groups within the government and so he has really done a pretty good job of convincing all kinds of people across the spectrum that they're that their fears about the government are real and are about to be disclosed which is also like essentially what q anon is about

or it was at the start now q anon is about or it was at the start now q anon is about just every fucking thing yeah everything i think you pointed it out on twitter it's like everything packed into one yeah it's every single it's crazy you know and like every time i read like i'm pretty immersed in this stuff and then i'll read an article you know by like will summer or obbyk at the Washington Post and be like, what? Like they're making that claim to like when it's wild. They are so busy. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know what what accounts for that. Like, why are the whistleblowers now even like why are their claims even more incredulous than they used to be? Why? Why is QAnon just like so just, you know, the amp turned up to 11, like, you know, as opposed to 30 years ago? It just is a Trump, I guess. I don't know. Well, I think there are two different things. I think the whistleblowers in the UFO world, like I don't want to be cynical, but they these guys are. I think interested in being famous, certainly, and their claims have a lot to do with their own personal heroic exploits. Whereas QAnon is much more like it is.

I'm not being dismissive. I'm not being snotty. But it's like an older group of people trying to make sense of a very chaotic information environment and a lot of stuff they're seeing on the internet and trying to make it fit like there's a lot of interest in making sort of a grand unified theory of everything and uh making it work within these like you know the the clues the crumbs that q is supposedly dropping are so insane and lend themselves to so many different interpretations that it really has created like a road that sort of branches in every direction. So yeah, I don't know. QAnon exhausts me.

Yeah, as I was reading this, and it's funny, like I think you even pointed it out eventually. It feels like the UFO thing is probably the most harmless of the sort of subcultures. Correct. I mean, I feel that way, but I'm also biased because I think aliens are real and I think the government is probably hiding what they know about UFOs. So like like anything else, you know, the conspiracy theories that we believe in are predicted by our political beliefs and like our our social background. And so it's unsurprising that I would fasten on that one and then be like well this is harmless because i believe it you know like so you know but yeah i mean like nobody

is uh stopping traffic to wave a gun around and yell about aliens or at least not anymore you know i mean maybe that happened in like in the 60s and 70s perhaps and it's been lost to history but at least now it is such an embedded part of the culture that it's just like yeah okay aliens cool right it's funny how like that New York Times thing ran and people were just like oh whatever

I know and it's kind of sad and it really speaks to how like I mean the Trump era is doing this thing to us where it's just making our memories so short and it's making our capacity to be amazed or outraged so much higher. Like we just, we don't even, yeah, have the emotional energy for aliens. Like I was really excited about the aliens and I was like, are we not going to talk about this for longer? Really? Like we're just going to get back to this asshole?

No one wanted to talk about the alloys oh yeah the alloys yeah it's actually a great example of that might be this week's news like um it feels kind of like the past three years have been so insane like pedal to the metal that i think that like after the last three weeks of just this sort of like contrived ilion omar controversy like no one had any news left and so all they had was like old videos of tuggar carlson saying things that we already knew he thought and like this college admissions story which is insane but i'm surprised it got so much traffic i'm surprised it got so and i think that everybody's just kind of it's kind of like it feels like 2014 sort of like peeping back through just like.

Yeah, it does. I don't know. I thought the college admission story was funny because it was like all these people simultaneously being like, I can't believe America isn't a meritocracy. I can't believe rich people are cheating to get ahead. And it was like, weird. That must be a crazy thing for you to realize guys totally i don't know i'm glad they got arrested i'm glad that that's apparently what the fbi has been doing

like that that's fine with me honestly like if they're if they're gonna do something if they're gonna exist i guess like you know bust jailing a bunch of rich people sure yeah for sure. Why not? So, okay, so we have like the sort of more harmless series. I guess let's go now to the opposite end of that spectrum, the probably the most harmful ones. You know, you have a chapter here on white nationalists and the white nationalist movement. You know, it doesn't have anything, you know, really supernatural or anything that, you know, hints at really any overt governmental conspiracies.

But it is really important. I think it's it sort of bolsters the overall message you're driving at. What is that message and why is the chapter important for realizing? So I think it's important to recognize the ways that conspiracism is sort of overlapping with like a resurgent white nationalist movement. And it's really important to recognize that some of the most entrenched conspiratorial ideas in America and in the world are racist and xenophobic ones, like the idea of Jewish control of the banking systems or even the weather. systems or even the weather, you know, like Jewish conspiracy, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories became so popular, popular at one point that even Henry Ford was promoting them in his newspapers. And so, you know, I think they're important to remember sort of historically and how bad they can get when they recur. But really, I wanted to draw a connection between some particularly

right wing conspiracy theories, which are often based in some level of xenophobia, like birtherism is the classic example, and then literal white supremacist conspiracy theories, which are based on this suspicion of the other and this claim that people who are not like you are evil and subhuman and secretly seizing control of the country or the world. You know, because it's not just that white nationalists believe that they're under siege by the Jews or Muslims or Latinos or whatever. They genuinely believe, a lot of them, that these people are driving world events. That is as conspiratorial belief as anything.

And I think it is important to sort of recognize what their understanding of the world is and how they think the world works, you know? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's a, it's a narrative. I mean, it's an incredibly bleak and, you know, disgusting narrative, but it does impart some sort of coherence to the world. And I think in a world in which, you know, as we were talking about earlier, you've got this sort of like breeding ground that makes it perfect for those sort of conditions to arise, you know, inequality and lack of infrastructure and health care and all these other things. You know, you can see people turning to that as a sort of way to understand the world. Yeah, I mean, I wrote about Matthew Heimbach and the traditionalist worker party that has now fallen apart because he was sleeping with his father-in-law's wife, which is hilarious that that is what led the TWP to their downfall.

the TWP to their downfall, but he was, Matthew Heimbach was really smart about saying, look at these social ills, like a lack of clean drinking water in Appalachia, and then slowly leading people to the reason why you don't have good drinking water or dental care is the Jews. You know, like he was, he was very much like, if somebody is already disaffected, I can lead them in the direction that I want them to go. And really, that is what white nationalists and other xenophobic conspiracy theories do is they say, OK, here is a social ill. Let me show you your enemy. Let me show you who to hate. Let me show you who to be mad at. And it's really interesting for me, obviously, as a Jewish person to talk to them and realize all the things that I have evidently been doing where i'm like i am much busier than i realized um but also just to talk to them and realize that their conception of how jewish people work and what they do is so narrow that it's almost hard for them to believe at times that they're that they're talking to me

and that i am jewish you know like that that jews are not just some like faceless demon no it was like it was just like there's this like great part where you're like talking to this guy and you like tell me like oh i'm jewish and he like he's like oh well you seem really nice or something like that he was like worried about offending me and i was like, I truly do not know how you're going to back out of this conversation. It was Sonny Thomas, who's like a white nationalist radio host from Ohio, I think. And he was like, he was he was telling me this is in the book. He was like, you know, I can feel like the winds of change are sweeping over us and we can all talk openly about the secret Jewish conspiracy conspiracy theory and so it seemed to me you know that that was the time to mention that i was jewish right uh you took it well you recovered good time as anybody you did fine totally i mean a lot of these people get unplugged here for a Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my bad. Sorry. Amateur hour.

Go on. Amateur hour. Anyways, talking about, like, Heimbach and the TWP and, like, their whole, like, little crusade in Appalachia, and I guess you said you had went to the Pike Bowl. Oh, she was even here. You even came to our Whitesburg Walmart parking lot. I did. Yeah, I did.

It was nice. I mean, the shitty thing is that Eastern Kentucky is so beautiful otherwise. And I was so happy to be there. And I was like, God, now I'm going to associate it with this thing. So I was here with my partner because he was also, he was photographing the rally for the village boys and so after we got done at this white supremacist rally i got in the car and was just like yelling and like cursing like i just had this like string of things come out of my mouth

that was apparently me decompressing and then i was like we're going to dairy queen we're gonna go swimming we're gonna go for a hike i have like all these things that i wanted to do because i was like it's so beautiful here and i'm gonna make sure that I do not just associate it with these like fuckheads who are not from here. Totally. We're all from like Indiana and Detroit. And it was interesting to see, obviously, people in Eastern Kentucky being like, why are you here? Like, why did you do this? Well, and that was my other point is like they never really had the traction that like a lot of people thought they did.

Yeah. Because like my sister and brother-in-law called me and like my brother-in-law's like you know the stereotypical like coal miner voted for trump blah blah blah blah and like they sent me this like message saying like hey don't answer your doors there's this racist group going around and i'm like wait a second you know like exactly the type of people you think would be vulnerable or amenable to that message, you know. Yeah. And totally.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty extreme. Even like even if you voted for Trump, that is not going to turn you into a fascist. Not necessarily. Like it's just it's a leap. It's more of a leap than they realized. coalition that I wrote about is falling apart because the National Socialist Movement's leader, Jeff Scoop, was tricked by a black activist into signing over the rights of the group. Like the National Socialist Movement. Yeah. It's in the Washington Post. It's incredible. This fucking guy, this activist whose name I'm forgetting, he's done this twice. He's convinced white supremacist leaders to hand over control of their groups twice. It is amazing. It is so funny. I wish I could remember his name and i would google it if we were not on the phone but yeah it's hilarious so like you know but like

white supremacist conspiracy theories are pretty like durable because they're about creating an enemy and they're about tapping into people's like pre-existing hatred and xenophobia and suspicion you know and especially like recently you know with the ilhan omar stuff we just we see how like close to the surface that stuff is and how easy it is for people to be persuaded into expressing really xenophobic ideas like the ilhan omar stuff really is based in this belief that she is some kind of double agent like that is fundamentally what what folks are trying to say about her, even if they're not saying it explicitly. Which is like the history of that particular allegation is I mean, that is straight up Third Reich shit. It is really, really concerning.

So I guess, you know, before we get too far away from that um something that i think is kind of adjacent to that uh not quite obviously i'm not you know i don't want to say it is that but it is certainly adjacent to it is the sort of militia movement um and it you know there's some overlap um some of them some of the militias are more like sort of constitutional whatever one of the things i the reason i like the very first question i sent you was about redemption theorists was because like prior to reading your book i'd never even heard of this and the more i heard about it like the more i read about it and the more i heard about it i was like this is phenomenal like it is amazing it's it's um it's really amazing. This is really, really amazing. So I'm going to butcher it. Could you give me a short rundown on what it is?

conspiracy theorists that I wrote about for Jezebel and realized while I was on the cruise that all these people who are on the cruise with me were in debt and were hoping to get out of debt with the help of these people who were presenting themselves as financial experts. And so I was sitting in one of their lectures, this guy, Sean David Morton, who I write about a lot in the book and realizing like, oh, everything he's presenting to these people is either insane, illegal, or both what the fuck is going on um which led me to learning about redemption theory so basically redemption theory was an offshoot of posse comitatus which is the far-right group that in the mid-60s was created by members of the christian identity movement and also as you say are the ancestors of the modern militia movement um and so one of the

fixations of posse comitatus was income tax so namely the idea that income tax and debt collection are secret tools of jewish control yeah it always comes back to the jews we're very busy right um and so one person who got who was very like fascinated by these ideas with this was this guy named roger elvick who what who had been a farmer in north dakota and lost his farm um because of debt issues and subsequently became the spokesperson for this thing called the committee of the states which was a posse comitatus group that was trying to overthrow the federal government and that didn't work and so roger elvick got focused on this other thing he started to believe that in the 1930s

the government stopped using the gold standard to back the dollar right we don't use the gold standard anymore as far as i knew we hadn't replaced it uh with anything else what elvick believes is that we replaced with human beings um which yeah so that every time someone is born the u.s government deposits six hundred and thirty thousand dollars into a secret bank account and creates what elvick called a straw man persona like a legal straw man. And so the important thing to realize about redemption theory is that it is this idea that if you file the right set of paperwork, you can reclaim your straw man and you can get access to

the secret bank account. And so redemption theory has like branched off in all these different directions since then. And not everybody, most people who follow it now don't believe anymore that there is a secret bank account, but they do believe that there are secret sort of arcane tools for getting out of debt, not having to pay federal income tax and accessing secret money. And so once you know what to look for, you start seeing it a lot of places. And there are a lot of sort of small time redemption theory peddlers who try to sell this stuff to people. And you can find redemption theory explainers on YouTube. And so if you are financially desperate and maybe not super financially literate and you come across this stuff for a lot of people, it seems like the

secret door, the way out, you know, and so it's very attractive to people. Is there any significance to the figure, the 630,000? I don't know where that came from. Just kind of arbitrary. I'm sure it's not arbitrary, but I tried to reach Roger Elvick and he's real hard to find. He's still alive. He's pretty old. But he has a lot of past and possible addresses. He has just been a man on the move and he's been in and out of jail a bunch of times um which is a common theme for redemption theorists uh a lot of the common like

redemption schemes now are very well known to the rs and you do go you go to jail for them like they're really they do not fuck around with it at all which i know because i eventually watched sean david morton the redemption theorist and his wife go to trial over their redemption theory beliefs and like what they did as a result of them. Yeah. No, that's a really fascinating section of it too. Just like watching this guy,

like go up against this sort of system and then just sort of slowly realizing like, Oh fuck. Like this might've not been a great idea. Slowly realizing that the system is pretty fucking durable and that he was not. I think that Sean David Morton, in my conversations with him, was holding a lot onto the idea that the jury in his case, you know, essentially he and his wife, Melissa, were charged with tax fraud. You know, it's a very complex weird form of tax fraud that even i'm not totally sure i explained correctly but they were charged with

tax fraud and i think he hoped that once he got his case in front of a jury the jury would be like yeah the irs is evil you were just doing what you thought was right go ahead and go and that is not what happened yeah uh yeah at all and so i was sitting with him right before the verdict and just watching him realize that his life's work was collapsing and that his belief system was had taken him to this extremely dark and life-ruining place it was it was sad i feel a lot more sympathy for him than i probably should and it was really it was a hard thing to watch. Well, another thing that's interesting about people in this sort of circle or belief system is that they have like a specific way of almost talking or writing, at least. Yeah.

I guess one of the Bundy guys was in. He was a sovereign citizen. So sovereign citizens and redemption theorists are like two branches on the same tree. And one thing that both of them do is they have this really interesting style of writing and like legal documents where they a lot of times they don't capitalize their names because they believe that a capitalized name is your straw man and a lowercase name is the natural man, like the real person. lowercase name is the natural man, like the real person. They use a lot of sort of legalese that like faux legalese that is specific and like recognizable once you see it. And so, yeah, like it was, I think it was Ryan Bundy. Yeah. I have the section right here.

I just wanted to read it out. Yeah, you should read it because he filed that like legal document that was incredible. It was really great. I, Ryan C, lowercases, man, am an idiot of the legal society, that's in quotations, and, semicolon, am an idiot, layman, outsider of the Bar Association, and I am incompetent and am not required by any law to be competent. But he was acquitted.

He was acquitted. You're right. He did something right. Maybe it worked. I mean, it takes a lot of self-awareness to just say, you know what? Yeah. I have read a lot of sovereign legal documents. Sovereign citizen stuff is very popular, obviously, obviously with people in prison and redemption theory is very popular with

people in prison. So you can read a lot of like handwritten homemade pro se, like habeas corpus petitions from prison that are based in sovereign and redemption theory ideas that are like, there's a lot of like self-styled lawyers who are based in these movements. And the fact that they don't succeed uh does not keep them from trying and it doesn't keep them from selling their services to other people who are also incarcerated this reminds me and you know when you were in eastern kentucky

did you come across a character named ellis keys yeah he was uh i think he was the person who was renting the land. He put up the TWP. Yeah, he did. This is Ellis' MO locally. For people listening that have no proximity to this, Ellis Keyes is the guy. He's like the sovereign citizen, white nationalist sympathizer guy that put up the traditionalist workers party when they did the rally in Pikeville. He gives me a headache. I did not realize that he was a sovereign citizen, and that makes a lot more sense.

I was trying to figure out what his deal was. Go Google Ellis Keys, and you can look at all these weird legal documents. He sues people constantly. Sure, sure, sure. He ran for mayor of San Francisco in the 80s or early 90s. There's a video on C-SPAN of him. Yeah, there's a video.

I saw that. He's a video on C-SPAN, and he, what was his party? He was like. The life party? Life is a party. Life is a party. It was something fucking weird. He's like.

But I guess he had enough traction to get on the debates or something. I don't know. Does he have any friends, like locally? something i don't know does he have any friends like locally is he no but there is a fucking amazing blog spot blog post yeah about this one guy's interaction with him and it's labeled as part one but there is no part two and it is the biggest fucking cliffhanger of all time i I mean, it is good. We've been laughing about this for years. I have been dying to know part two. I want to see it. Will you send it to me?

Yeah, we'll dig it out and find it for you. When I was on his land, he was playing the trombone or the tuba. Trumpet. Trumpet by the fire, staring into the fire for a good hour. And I was like, i don't know what is going on with this guy and i have too many nazis competing for my attention right now but i really want to know what's going on jesus christ he's like um he honestly the best way to describe him is he's like a character out of like a cormac mccarthy novel like sure sure just

a sort of like southern i think he's kind of like a hateful version of like ignatius riley or something like that that's pretty accurate yeah like he like he like swindled like all this land in eastern kentucky like his family doesn't own this land he like made like some dubious claim to it nobody's challenged him on it oh yeah that's the sovereign citizen thing also that's like they were they were having a really good track record of success for a while. So these people and like laying claim to basically claiming people's houses were abandoned and moving into them when the houses were not abandoned and people very much own them. Right. like tax liens against like individual court officers or judges or irs agents who have pissed them off right and like again you can't actually do that you can't just put a lien on somebody's house and eventually it gets cleaned up but it takes a while like some of their legal maneuverings

like are effective in the short term so for sure oh alice wow i should have talked to him more god damn we'll send you the blogs we'll send you i can't wait we've been we've been looking for a Oh, Alice. Wow, I should have talked to him more. God damn. We'll send you the blogs, Bob. We'll send you the blogs. I can't wait. We've been looking for a way to try to work it in, but it's like, is it punching down? Is it like, I don't even know. It would be so, people wouldn't even get the reference.

I don't even know. That is really interesting to me. I wondered, I was like, there is no way that you have all these Nazis on your land without having some sympathy to them but he was clearly not in any of their right groups so right amazing yeah um well uh you know before we start wrapping things up a little bit I kind of just wanted to talk um I kind of just wanted to go back to the in my email that I sent you I was like just wanted to go back to the, in my email that I sent you, I was like,

I wanted to add this, like these grand ambitions for this. I was like, I'm going to split this up between like non supernatural stuff and supernatural stuff. And the reason why is because like a lot of these conspiracy theories, you can look at them, you know,

whether it's like false flags or vaccines or, or all this stuff, like, you know whether it's like false flags or vaccines or all this stuff like you know we can look at them and we can see clear scientific explanations well maybe not in the case of like autism because that's a little more sort of hard to pin down but you know for the most part like we sort of rely on science and we rely on science to sort of like impart some sort of explanation or meaning to our to our lives yes but when you get to like the sort of UFO impart some sort of explanation or meaning to our lives. Yes. But when you get to like the sort of UFO stuff, the supernatural stuff,

one thing that occurred to me when I was reading it is there's like, you're from New Mexico, so you've probably heard of the Chupacabra, right? Yeah. There's like every place has its own sort of like folklores and myths and monsters and stuff like that. Like, is there any kind of like, I don't know, larger sort of explanation that we can put onto UFOs and these sort of supernatural things that happen to us?

Or is this like, are we just going to constantly be in this like sort of position of never really knowing what it is i mean i don't know it's like kind of feels like x files like i want to believe but i don't know yeah i think we do want to believe i think that there are these i think first of all just it is like human nature to seek out like the mysterious the ineffable like whatever is on the other side of the veil you know um there are also some things that i believe are truly like archetypal expressions like there are phenomena that seem to occur across cultures and in different incarnations like

monsters and aliens are described in a lot of different places and like like monsters specifically have been seen in every culture yeah you know for thousands of years literally and so i genuinely believe that there's probably things out there that we don't yet have the language to understand and that we're constantly trying to give a name and a shape to them and sort of nail them down. And I think that like that desire to find stuff and that sort of interest in the mysterious is like genuinely one of the better things about human beings. I think it's really like it's a it's an expression of our curiosity about the world and our, our knowledge that we're probably not alone. And I think that it is, I think that it is a good thing. And I think too often, sort of skepticism, or trying to like beat down conspiracy theories, becomes people sort of railing against like, imagination and against people's desire to look beyond our day-to-day reality. I think those

things are not just harmless. I think they are actively good for us and something that human beings have always done. For sure. Well, that's a really good way to put it. I'm glad to hear you believe in aliens. Sure. Again, I'm from new mexico so i think i'm like legally obligated to believe in aliens but you know like i i yeah i don't know i am kurt anderson wrote this book fantasy land um and i completely understand where he's coming from you know and a lot of it is about conspiracy theories as part of a larger culture that is, you know, believes in crazy things. But some of the things that he talks about, like, you know, uh, cosplay or like, uh, you know, enthusiasm about aliens or whatever, like some of these things are, are harmless. Like they're sort of good for us, you know, especially in a political and social reality

is depressing as the one that we exist in. Like if people want to spend some time thinking about like the mysterious, that is cool with me and probably a better use of your time. For sure. It would be incredibly depressing if the aliens finally did get here and they were like,

look, we power our spaceships on coal. And so we're going to... We too are kind of over a barrel on that one. We're like, fuck. Yeah, I mean, like everything else, they probably will be a disappointment when they appear. But, you know, we can hold out hope. For sure, for sure.

Well, I think that's a good sort of message to end on. So, you know, this has been really fun. It's been very informative. Hell yeah. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. Yeah. You oh yeah thank you guys i really appreciate it and um yeah can you want to tell people where they can find your book and when it's going to be out uh yeah my book again is called republic of lies it's out on april 16th and you can buy it lots of

places you can definitely buy it from indie retailers like powell's um if you google my name i have a website and you can find a bunch of places to buy it if you do not want to buy it on amazon which you do not have to so cool yeah thank you guys so much this was great great yeah thanks and well we'll have to do it again um next time you write a book or or when the aliens come or when the whichever comes first whichever comes first exactly okay cool all right i'll see you guys thanks again thank you talk to you later bye it's a good ass episode Thank you. Talk to you later. Thank you. Bye. That was a good-ass episode. Thank you.