Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy centralow.
Speaker 2: Blood. It's everywhere on children at Halloween, in test tubes,
Speaker 2: at the doctor's office. In the very title of the
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven drama there will be blood, and
Speaker 2: it's even inside you right now, which means you're part
Speaker 2: of this story. So buffal up. This is Jordan Klepper
Speaker 2: Fingers the Conspiracy. If you're listening to this podcast, you
Speaker 2: probably already know a little bit about Pizzagate, and we'll
Speaker 2: get into that shortly. But this extremely weird idea that
Speaker 2: pedophiles are using secret symbols is rooted in the belief
Speaker 2: that elitis cabals it's always a cabal, are rounding up
Speaker 2: babies to steal their adrenaline by consuming their blood. There
Speaker 2: are Republicans in Congress who believe this. You might have
Speaker 2: also seen it in the Netflix show The Watcher. It's
Speaker 2: a conspiracy theory that goes way back before Hillary Clinton
Speaker 2: and Comet Ping Pong and twenty sixteen. It goes back
Speaker 2: nine hundred years to win Joe Biden was born. Let's
Speaker 2: get into it. As Chris Cuomo would say, all right,
Speaker 2: let's bring in our own little blood cabal. I have
Speaker 2: two guests today. First, we have doctor Elise Wong, a
Speaker 2: professor at California State Fullerton who studies conspiracy narratives going
Speaker 2: back to medieval England. Elise, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Yes, and my next guest is Matt Gertz, a senior
Speaker 2: fellow at Media Manors for America and extensively covers the
Speaker 2: relationship between Fox News, Donald Trump and Trump supporters. Matt,
Speaker 2: thank you for being here.
Speaker 4: Great to be here, guys.
Speaker 2: You guys ready to talk cauballs so ready.
Speaker 4: It's always an elite cabal.
Speaker 2: It's always elite. There's yeah, is there any lower level
Speaker 2: cabals of just like guys just trying to get through
Speaker 2: it who have like a high school education. It's always elite, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: that's the point. That's the point of kabal's if you're
Speaker 2: in it's.
Speaker 3: No fun to be in the in the like mediocre
Speaker 3: cabal school of cabals. I mean, yeah, come to woe
Speaker 3: with the state school thing.
Speaker 2: I think this podcast is going to start selling t
Speaker 2: shirts that says state school Cabal on it. There really
Speaker 2: is there's you know, it's always elite caballs and the
Speaker 2: illuminati also very elite they need to be more encompassing.
Speaker 2: We need to have our state school Illuminati and cabals.
Speaker 2: We'll sell the t shirts, go to dailyshow dot com everybody.
Speaker 3: I will wear that at my state school at least.
Speaker 2: I want to start with you. Let's break down adrenochrome
Speaker 2: because it feels like the base for a lot of
Speaker 2: theories we're going to dive into in this podcast. First
Speaker 2: of all, is adrenochrome technically real?
Speaker 3: It is, Actually, that's a good place to start. It
Speaker 3: is actually a real thing. It's the oxidation of adrenaline
Speaker 3: and this can happen naturally in your body or in
Speaker 3: a lab. It's actually really easy to come by. You
Speaker 3: can just buy it on the internet, like not the
Speaker 3: dark Web and or not just the Internet. I think
Speaker 3: it's something like twenty five milligrams for fifty five bucks,
Speaker 3: fifties eight bucks, something like that. I looked it up.
Speaker 3: So it's not used for anything really, there's nothing the
Speaker 3: FDA has approved it for. It's occasionally used for things
Speaker 3: like blood clotting. There was some interest in the nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties for treating using it to treat schizophrenia, but it
Speaker 3: really showed no promise, so they dropped it. The history
Speaker 3: of the adrenochrome we're talking about is sort of it
Speaker 3: goes back to I think Alvis Huxley was the first
Speaker 3: one to talk about it as a drug. He talked
Speaker 3: about it indoors of perception, and then Hunter S. Thompson
Speaker 3: in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is really the
Speaker 3: one who cemented the myth of adrenochrome as a drug
Speaker 3: because he turned it into this kind of immortality drug,
Speaker 3: this thing that you have to get from a live source.
Speaker 3: I think the line is a corpse is no good
Speaker 3: but and so that and then the subsequent movie they're
Speaker 3: like dramatized to the effects of adrenochrome.
Speaker 2: What is this ship?
Speaker 3: That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer man.
Speaker 4: A dreamo chrome adrenochrome.
Speaker 3: That's really where our modern perception of it as a
Speaker 3: drug comes from. So it's from these fictional sources.
Speaker 2: Are we saying it correctly? Adrenochrome?
Speaker 3: I mean that's how they say it in the nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety eight video. And if you go, I know, you're
Speaker 3: not supposed.
Speaker 2: To the video. Are we talking about the Terry Gilliam film.
Speaker 2: That's how Johnny Depp pronounces it. Yes, that's where this
Speaker 2: is where we're getting our information from.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, Well that's where they're getting their information from.
Speaker 3: Like I know you're not supposed to go to YouTube comments,
Speaker 3: but if you go to the YouTube comments on this scene,
Speaker 3: they are all about how how this is real?
Speaker 2: Yes, based on fear and loading Las Vegas, which I
Speaker 2: will say for me, I love that book, top ten
Speaker 2: book in my world. It's a great book. But that
Speaker 2: is sort of the central the beginning that in Huxley's
Speaker 2: book is where the first time we actually hear the
Speaker 2: term adrenochrome.
Speaker 3: He even said afterwards that he just wanted a quote
Speaker 3: unquote crazy drug and so he made it up. And
Speaker 3: so he's drawing on Huxley and then like adding his
Speaker 3: own little stuff and the adrenochrome. The way it's become
Speaker 3: it is, as you were saying, it connects to all
Speaker 3: of the different conspiracy theories because it's a grab bag
Speaker 3: of the greatest hits. Right. It's got pedophilia, it's got
Speaker 3: satanic rituals, it's got blood rituals, immortality like satanic panic
Speaker 3: and Hollywood elites. It's got everything.
Speaker 2: It's a good one.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's add some context to it in this world.
Speaker 2: The conspiracy theory is Hollywood liberal elites and Hillary Clinton
Speaker 2: are murdering children and ritual sacrifices, harvesting the chemical compound
Speaker 2: from human children, drinking their blood to ingest adrenochrome because
Speaker 2: it has some sort of sort of life properties. Is
Speaker 2: that right?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, And you're telling me it may not be true.
Speaker 3: I mean you should. You should buy it on the
Speaker 3: internet and find.
Speaker 2: Out it's at least worth at least worth of dabble. Matt,
Speaker 2: When did you first become aware of adrina chrome?
Speaker 4: I think probably around twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. As part
Speaker 4: of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory posits
Speaker 4: that this cabal of global elites who you know are
Speaker 4: are draining this chemical compound from small children and sexually
Speaker 4: abusing them, is doing so in the basement of a Washington,
Speaker 4: DC pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong. This idea spurred
Speaker 4: in some ways from emails from the John Podesta hack
Speaker 4: during the twenty sixteen election cycle. And I've been to
Speaker 4: the pizza parlor and it doesn't have a basement that
Speaker 4: you can use to abuse children and take their bodily fluids.
Speaker 4: Did you ask?
Speaker 2: I mean it goes one step beyond asking for a
Speaker 2: bathroom key, because they'll happily give you a bathroom key,
Speaker 2: but you have to be a little pushing to be like,
Speaker 2: I need to use the restroom. I also would love
Speaker 2: access to the basement where the children are tied up,
Speaker 2: and I can get the adritachrome. Did you you probably ask?
Speaker 4: I think there probably was a time that you could
Speaker 4: have done that. But as the conspiracy theorists seized on this,
Speaker 4: the pizza parlor started getting bombarded with phone calls from
Speaker 4: people who wanted to know more about the basement and
Speaker 4: the you know, pizzagate conspiracy theory, and eventually one of
Speaker 4: the adherents to this conspiracy theory took a gun, went
Speaker 4: to the pizza parlor looking to save the children, fired
Speaker 4: it off inside, and was subsequently arrested and spent a
Speaker 4: couple of years in jail. So, you know, at that
Speaker 4: point it becomes a little bit rude. I think, to
Speaker 4: ask the people who work at the pizza parlor.
Speaker 2: It became a they had real consequences, and for if
Speaker 2: this is somewhat new to anybody listening, the Podesta emails
Speaker 2: get hacked. WikiLeaks leaks some Podesta emails and emails between
Speaker 2: Podesta and Hillary Clinton reference buying cheese pizza. Right.
Speaker 4: I don't think it's him and Hillary Clinton, but it's
Speaker 4: a some sort of email that references pizza that then
Speaker 4: became a sort of internet meme and brought into the
Speaker 4: broader conspiracy theory that at least was talking about.
Speaker 2: Well, and cheese pizza becomes abbreviated to CP which also
Speaker 2: stands for child pornography and Comet pizza, and so they
Speaker 2: start to connect those links, and common pizza beak comes
Speaker 2: the place to go in a nutshell, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's about it.
Speaker 2: On the road, I somewhat recently talked to somebody who
Speaker 2: was sort of discussing this theory, and it is amazing
Speaker 2: the symbols they see, not only in the Comet pizza
Speaker 2: background and the symbolism there, but I asked them like,
Speaker 2: what do you need to look at. They're like, well,
Speaker 2: in the pizza chain, there's a lot of symbols that
Speaker 2: you have to stay focused on. It was like, what
Speaker 2: do these symbols look like? And they're like, well, they're
Speaker 2: predominantly circles and triangles. There's a huge push for normalizing pedophilia.
Speaker 2: How do they normalize it? Are they making pedophiles look cool? Well,
Speaker 2: if you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols.
Speaker 3: Really, yes, they're They're like circular symbols.
Speaker 4: There's trying, there's a lot of triangles, there's colors.
Speaker 2: A lot of them are in pizza, which, if you're
Speaker 2: at all into purchasing pizza, that tends to be all
Speaker 2: of the symbols you see at any kind of pizza chain.
Speaker 2: So from their perspective, they're holding I have and there's
Speaker 2: just nails everywhere.
Speaker 3: Well, I think watching Pizzagate happen, and then from my end,
Speaker 3: watching the chat rooms and you know, message boards and
Speaker 3: all of these things, both before and afterwards, there's that
Speaker 3: aspect of it, like the people who really get into
Speaker 3: the game of it, like let's let's find the numerology
Speaker 3: and all of the special symbols. And then there's the
Speaker 3: people who are actually mobilized around this. And that's what
Speaker 3: really struck me about Pizzagate. It was the first time
Speaker 3: that I really saw this where you could see there
Speaker 3: was already this this theory about a pedophile ring being
Speaker 3: run by the Clintons, and it was kind of a
Speaker 3: theory in need of specifics, and so they went out
Speaker 3: seeking specifics and they decided basically randomly that Comet Ping
Speaker 3: Pong was going to be the place. And then it
Speaker 3: started this sort of multi media propaganda campaign where people
Speaker 3: they got people to call in harass, as Matt was saying,
Speaker 3: they got people to flood the Yelp reviews and the
Speaker 3: Google reviews and people to go and harass the proprietor.
Speaker 3: And then this sort of culminated in the guy who
Speaker 3: drove up from North Carolina to self investigate. But that
Speaker 3: wasn't really the story. The story was that then people
Speaker 3: talked about it that then it was in the national
Speaker 3: media for like forty eight hours, like a whole week,
Speaker 3: and it was not only in the media. Their theory
Speaker 3: was in the media. And I went back to the
Speaker 3: message boards afterwards and they were just beside themselves with
Speaker 3: joy over this, Like it it was not at all
Speaker 3: about oh, our guy was arrested whoops or huh he
Speaker 3: didn't really find anything. It was not about that. It
Speaker 3: was about the media exposure. And then there were sort
Speaker 3: of further suggestions, well, how can we get them to
Speaker 3: keep denying it, so they saying it, so people keep
Speaker 3: googling it. And when I was seeing that, I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is something else. This is This is a kind
Speaker 3: of savvy media campaign that I think most of us
Speaker 3: at that point were not totally familiar with. Now we
Speaker 3: know if you mentioned something, you have to be very
Speaker 3: careful what sort of buzzwords you mentioned, because it will
Speaker 3: sort of feed the conspiracy theory monster.
Speaker 2: I'm curious in hearing that, what do you think the
Speaker 2: end goal was? How was that a success?
Speaker 3: Was it?
Speaker 2: You know a lot of that online culture. Does you
Speaker 2: know traffic controlling and the successes of trolling often is
Speaker 2: large reaction. Is it that that made it the win?
Speaker 2: Is it the fact that their conversation became mainstream news
Speaker 2: that was the win? Is there still a connection to
Speaker 2: the veracity of this theory and that because it's being
Speaker 2: talked about that that adds some credibility to it? Or
Speaker 2: is just we like sh and we got some shine.
Speaker 3: I think it's a lot of we like shine. But
Speaker 3: I do think that there was the jubilation of being
Speaker 3: able to make the social media to mainstream media jump,
Speaker 3: and then I think it was a huge recruitment tool.
Speaker 3: I think people hearing the name would then go google
Speaker 3: it and then would find their way to these message boards.
Speaker 3: So I think for them the coup was really through recruitment.
Speaker 2: Matt, what did you notice the coverage of Pizzagate? What
Speaker 2: do you first remember seeing it and who was who
Speaker 2: was first to jump on that?
Speaker 4: You know, I think I want to bring in Alex
Speaker 4: Jones here because I think he played has played a
Speaker 4: key role in conspiracy theories for quite some time, but
Speaker 4: I think really made almost a sort of mainstream jump
Speaker 4: during this conspiracy theory. He was one of the major propagators,
Speaker 4: one of the people with the biggest platforms who would
Speaker 4: talk about Pizzagate and try to encourage people to look
Speaker 4: into pizzagate. You know, we had been following Alex Jones
Speaker 4: at Media Matters for quite some time, but we always,
Speaker 4: i think, as at least was alluding to, were very
Speaker 4: hesitant to bring too much direct attention to his conspiracy
Speaker 4: theories for fear of just sort of bringing more attention
Speaker 4: to them. And so when we wrote about Alex Jones
Speaker 4: in twenty ten twenty eleven, we were largely writing about
Speaker 4: how other people were giving him their support. Fox news
Speaker 4: personalities who would go on his show, Ran Paul and
Speaker 4: Ron Paul, who would go on his show and use
Speaker 4: the platform of someone who you know is one of
Speaker 4: the chief popularizers of the idea that nine to eleven
Speaker 4: is an inside job, you know, sort of bringing him
Speaker 4: into political prominence. And Pizzagate, I think was really a
Speaker 4: turning point because we saw that someone could use those
Speaker 4: conspiracy theories, could inflate them, and that there could be
Speaker 4: a big real world impact when people who came to
Speaker 4: believe those conspiracy theories went too far. It was a
Speaker 4: I think pretty disturbing time for all of us when
Speaker 4: we saw that come together.
Speaker 2: I mean, as somebody both with The Daily Show and
Speaker 2: having done a TV show after that, you know, parrotying
Speaker 2: the Alex Jones talking points and what was happening in
Speaker 2: that far right world. That was always a conversation about
Speaker 2: what point you don't want to amplify these wild ideas,
Speaker 2: but at the same time turning a blind eye to
Speaker 2: something that's already having an effect on culture. It's already
Speaker 2: been amplified by legitimate politicians, even the Donald Trump legitimizing
Speaker 2: the points of view there. You saw people taking what
Speaker 2: they would hear from info Wars in the conversation around
Speaker 2: that and was becoming very real world news. I want
Speaker 2: to talk a little bit more about how some of
Speaker 2: these things spread, but I want to focus one more
Speaker 2: time on the adrenochrome specifically, at least I want to
Speaker 2: know if we trace back this specific theory, even the
Speaker 2: origins of adrenochrome. Does it go back before Hunter Thompsons,
Speaker 2: Does it go back before it becomes sort of pulp
Speaker 2: in modern culture? Is there a history that dates back
Speaker 2: to even earlier.
Speaker 3: It definitely does, and the way that it dates back
Speaker 3: is a little bit of sort of associative thinking. So
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories often work this way. They kind of jump
Speaker 3: on to think they have a very lazy logic. They
Speaker 3: jump onto things that are already fully formed. One of
Speaker 3: the conspiracy theories that is attached to Adrenochrome, or that
Speaker 3: Adrenochrome is basically drawing on and modeling itself on, is
Speaker 3: blood libel, which is a conspiracy theory dating back to
Speaker 3: the Middle Ages that Jewish people drink or use the
Speaker 3: blood of Christian children for their religious rituals, specifically it passover.
Speaker 4: And for the record, we don't do that.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, thank you, Matt, thank you.
Speaker 3: For taking thank you for for yeah, specifying that it's
Speaker 3: and it's designed specifically to incite violence, like that is
Speaker 3: what blood libel is for. So there's that kind of
Speaker 3: thematic connection. But then there's also the fact that the
Speaker 3: main purveyors of adrenochrome, like Alex Jones, like Liz cro
Speaker 3: Can say that it's blood life. I'll say that it
Speaker 3: actually dates back to that. And if you look at
Speaker 3: these adrenochrome memes, one one sort of popular one that
Speaker 3: goes around has this very obviously medieval image of a
Speaker 3: baby being drained of blood with people standing around it,
Speaker 3: and it says at the top, why does this image
Speaker 3: even exist? And the image is of Simon of Trent,
Speaker 3: which is the most famous and well documented blood libel,
Speaker 3: and it's this particular blood libel started Passover fourteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: A father had come to the Bishop of Trent and said,
Speaker 3: my two year old son, Simon is missing. And this
Speaker 3: bishop already had a story ready to go. He decided
Speaker 3: it must be the Jewish community, the very small Jewish
Speaker 3: community in Trent. He had a couple of reasons for
Speaker 3: wanting this story to be true. One he felt like
Speaker 3: the Pope was too soft on the Jewish people and
Speaker 3: that he was too cozy with them. So this was
Speaker 3: his little power grab in opposition to the Pope. And
Speaker 3: then also if you had a saint, if he could
Speaker 3: prove that Simon was martyred by the Jews, if you
Speaker 3: had a saint in your town, that was a huge
Speaker 3: money making opportunity, Like you could get people from all
Speaker 3: around to make pilgrimages to your little altar, and then
Speaker 3: you would make money basically off of like brand, brand building,
Speaker 3: and so it was it was like the brand building unity.
Speaker 2: I was like that cheesecake factory if you had If
Speaker 2: you had a cheesecake factory in town, you know you're
Speaker 2: gonna get people from the suburbs who are gonna come in.
Speaker 2: They're gonna pay some money. It's gonna help the town.
Speaker 3: That's the thing. And he wanted to kind of put
Speaker 3: Trent on the map. And so even before they start
Speaker 3: any kind of trial or anything, they round up the
Speaker 3: Jewish community, the entire Jewish community, and imprison them, and
Speaker 3: he hires a physician to write this very inflammatory autopsy
Speaker 3: that talks less about Simon's body and more about the
Speaker 3: I think the phrase is dry throated Jews howling for
Speaker 3: Christian blood, like this really over the top kind of autopsy.
Speaker 3: And then he takes this autopsy.
Speaker 2: That was the doctor, that was the doctor. That's a
Speaker 2: that's a really high end literary anti semin yep.
Speaker 3: And well it gets more high end because then he
Speaker 3: takes this and he sends it around to poets and
Speaker 3: to artists and is like, make stuff from this, and
Speaker 3: they do. Like the poets start writing poems about Simon
Speaker 3: of Trent, and the woodcutters start making images. And that's
Speaker 3: the image that shows up in that Adrenochrome meme. Is
Speaker 3: this sort of propaganda campaign by this Italian bishop who
Speaker 3: decided he really wanted his own little ritual cult.
Speaker 2: Woodcutters, they just will take money who ever puts it out.
Speaker 2: Where's the artistic integrity in fifteenth century woodcutters? They you know,
Speaker 2: I hold them in such high regard. I love them.
Speaker 2: I think it's the best century for woodcutters. And yet
Speaker 2: they are so willing a blind eye to the social
Speaker 2: responsibility of being a woodcutter in that time. They're taking
Speaker 2: dirty money to put out anti Semitic propaganda. Shame, shame
Speaker 2: on the I'm I'm never buying fifteenth century would cutter
Speaker 2: art again, shame.
Speaker 3: I feel like the parts of this that are really useful, though,
Speaker 3: is kind of is kind of that that, like, it
Speaker 3: was the propaganda campaign that really made this take off.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like this was kind of a grassroots rumor
Speaker 3: that was rooted in sort of general anti semitism. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's why it took off, was sort of latching onto
Speaker 3: generalized anti semitism. But the actual formation of the Blood
Speaker 3: Libel was very intentionally crafted for a political end by
Speaker 3: someone who was powerful.
Speaker 2: I have never heard of that. I think it's so
Speaker 2: easy to look at those in power, and also the
Speaker 2: religious heresy at the time and the institutions at the
Speaker 2: time and the point of view they wanted to get out.
Speaker 2: But the fact that they were using artists to spread
Speaker 2: that message to affect culture. I mean, you see obvious
Speaker 2: comparisons to what happens today, but that even then it
Speaker 2: was still important. You want this thing to stick. Culture
Speaker 2: needs to stick. And the fact that we're using those
Speaker 2: images yet today as proof of what Hillary Clinton is
Speaker 2: doing is is bonkers. I want to take a short
Speaker 2: ad break. When we come back. We're going to talk
Speaker 2: more about how adrenochrome spread as an idea even before
Speaker 2: the Internet was even around. We'll be right back. Welcome
Speaker 2: back to Jordan's upper fingers. The conspiracy.
Speaker 3: I mean, I didn't actually plan to work on conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: Like I'm a medievalist and like a huge nerd. I
Speaker 3: like books, and this was not the way I saw
Speaker 3: my studies going.
Speaker 2: But theory, it just basically stumbled on it. We're like,
Speaker 2: here we go. Also, is that something was in the ether,
Speaker 2: the modern ether, that you saw a connection between the two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was basically in twenty fifteen, I started, I mean,
Speaker 3: like all of us, I think I was a little
Speaker 3: bit concerned and uneasy about the fake news phenomenon, and
Speaker 3: in particular this epistemology aspect, this you can't trust anything
Speaker 3: that you see. And I started hearing echoes with the
Speaker 3: stuff that I study and speech patterns like that's what
Speaker 3: they want you to think. Do your own research. I've heard,
Speaker 3: or people are saying these kinds of gestures towards sources.
Speaker 3: I started seeing those things. I was like, uh, oh,
Speaker 3: that doesn't that doesn't sound good. That sounds familiar and
Speaker 3: not good. And I just started started following that, and
Speaker 3: now my autocorrect nose adrenochrome. So here we are.
Speaker 2: In the case of these historical conspiracy theories and the
Speaker 2: beginnings of blood libel. How do you see these theories
Speaker 2: spread before modern news and communication and memes and four
Speaker 2: chan and eight chan and parlor and true social and
Speaker 2: should I keep going, I'm not.
Speaker 3: Going to keep going. Well, they spread remarkably well. I
Speaker 3: think that the essential shape of blood libel was a
Speaker 3: very compelling shape. It was, you know, there are evil
Speaker 3: forces that are out to get Christian children. And there
Speaker 3: was also the fact that it was pretty common for
Speaker 3: medieval children to die in accidents or disappear or fall
Speaker 3: into a river. Like child death was quite common, and
Speaker 3: so it became kind of a predictable thing that if
Speaker 3: a child died in a Christian community that pretty soon
Speaker 3: suspicion would fall on the Jewish community. And it did
Speaker 3: spread by word of mouth, but it also spread by
Speaker 3: all of these sort of cultural productions that it's spread
Speaker 3: by these woodcuts, it's spread by these poems that were
Speaker 3: written in honor of Simon, and it also spread because
Speaker 3: these stories got baked into the official histories. These historians
Speaker 3: think of themselves as you know, responsible, reliable, and they
Speaker 3: go back to the local histories and they just sort
Speaker 3: of draw from whatever the local history is, and so
Speaker 3: these blood libels get baked into sort of accepted history
Speaker 3: as fact, and then anyone who reads that will that
Speaker 3: will be their primary interaction, basically with the Jewish community
Speaker 3: for a lot of places, because these programs have already
Speaker 3: taken place. Mud Ditator has done a really great job.
Speaker 3: She studies blood libel and she's done a really great
Speaker 3: job of showing how actually, before the printing press, word
Speaker 3: of mouth didn't work that great. It really needed to
Speaker 3: be written down. And that also shows that it was
Speaker 3: mostly educated people, mostly higher class people who were spreading
Speaker 3: blood libel. It wasn't a low class theory. It was
Speaker 3: a kind of upper class theory.
Speaker 2: And that's interesting. And I mean, there's a great book
Speaker 2: by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death that talks a
Speaker 2: lot about how the mediums affect the message. The events
Speaker 2: of the printing press affected not only the way information was,
Speaker 2: but the way we think about information, the way we
Speaker 2: process information. And then you suddenly have television come out
Speaker 2: and out the way in which we communicate and the
Speaker 2: way we process information is very different than the way
Speaker 2: we used to with the printing press. I think it's
Speaker 2: fascinating to think of that in terms of like who
Speaker 2: is spreading information and that it was an elitist thing.
Speaker 2: You had to be able to speak that language then.
Speaker 2: But now that we see information changing, the technology and changing, Matt,
Speaker 2: I want to bring you in here. How are you
Speaker 2: seeing conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and other q theories spread
Speaker 2: given the new technology that we have.
Speaker 4: Well, the core benefit that social media companies will say
Speaker 4: that they provide to their customers and that Internet companies
Speaker 4: say they provide to their customers is the idea of
Speaker 4: bringing the world together, giving people an opportunity to find communities,
Speaker 4: to communicate with people across the globe, and to sort
Speaker 4: of find a common purpose together. And I mean there's
Speaker 4: a dark side to that. It also has made it
Speaker 4: much much easier to find a community of conspiracy theorists
Speaker 4: to share your ideas about the you know, dark hidden
Speaker 4: messages in the world's events, to share your views about
Speaker 4: the illuminati or whoever else is manipulating what's going on
Speaker 4: around you. And that's just an incredibly powerful force. The
Speaker 4: barrier to entry for producing one of these conspiracy theories
Speaker 4: is much lower. You don't you don't you know the
Speaker 4: JFK conspiracy theories. You know, you had to like write
Speaker 4: letters to people later on as xeroxes and whatever factes
Speaker 4: and so on and so forth. It's just very easy.
Speaker 2: Now, how lazy conspiracy theorists are out. Can you imagine
Speaker 2: if you had to write letters to spread just some
Speaker 2: bs you read on Twitter? You're like, oh, I want
Speaker 2: to put that out Elon Musk. He would not be
Speaker 2: pushing conspiracy theories if he had to write a letter
Speaker 2: to get that thing going. Do you also look at
Speaker 2: places like Fox? You know, we look at what's happening
Speaker 2: with social media, but more of the mainstream media outlets.
Speaker 2: How are you seeing that affect this conversation conversation specifically
Speaker 2: with something like Pizzagate.
Speaker 4: Sure? So, I mean, the reality is that we live
Speaker 4: in a bifurcated news environment. There is one set of
Speaker 4: sources of information that is generally used by people in
Speaker 4: the left on the center, just sort of mainstream news outlets,
Speaker 4: and then you have this entirely separate realm of right
Speaker 4: wing media outlets that speak very clearly and directly to
Speaker 4: a right wing audience. You know, the way we see
Speaker 4: conspiracy theories moving these days is they'll start at this
Speaker 4: sort of you know, message board and social media platform level,
Speaker 4: with a sort of army of individuals who are coming
Speaker 4: up with their own spin on what's happening on a
Speaker 4: particular event. It will spread from there through a network
Speaker 4: of hyperpartisan news sites, places like Gateway Pundit that do
Speaker 4: not have standards of any sort, that are not interested
Speaker 4: in the basic rules of journalism, but that want to
Speaker 4: have political impact and make money off of advertising, and
Speaker 4: from there you can see them sort of get woven
Speaker 4: into the broader debate. You know. The reality is that
Speaker 4: the writing media figures at the sort of higher level
Speaker 4: your Fox News is are not interested in batting down
Speaker 4: those sorts of conspiracies. They're not interested in challenging their
Speaker 4: audiences and telling them that what they might have heard
Speaker 4: is incorrect. Act Instead, you'll see either them ignoring it
Speaker 4: all together, or providing a sort of wink and a
Speaker 4: nod at the conspiracy theory, or telling their viewers that
Speaker 4: it's okay more or less that like, there are reasons
Speaker 4: to be skeptical of things that are happening around you,
Speaker 4: that there the elites want to keep you from talking
Speaker 4: about QAnon or what have you, and that you know
Speaker 4: whether or not that's true, it's not a danger the way, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, other people will tell you.
Speaker 2: I mean, if this is an issue with right wing media,
Speaker 2: they have this weird rhetoric that is politicizing children in
Speaker 2: the name of protecting them anything from disturbing conspiracy theories too.
Speaker 2: Don't say gay bills, anti trans bills, et cetera.
Speaker 4: Do you see a connection there, Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 4: think a lot of these conspiracy theories get rolled up together.
Speaker 4: There was a big push over the last year and
Speaker 4: a half or so on the right, you know, throughout
Speaker 4: the entire ecosystem to talk about the idea of rumors
Speaker 4: of save the children, save the children absolutely basically that
Speaker 4: teachers are trying to turn your kids gay, turn your
Speaker 4: kids trans, possibly molest them, and it all kind of
Speaker 4: gets wound up together. There aren't really firm barriers to
Speaker 4: a lot of these conspiracy theories. People who start to
Speaker 4: believe one of them tend to start adopting others as well.
Speaker 2: At last, historically, has there ever been a way to
Speaker 2: get people to stop believing conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a complicated question, right, It depends on
Speaker 3: who you're talking about, Like I don't Johann spinn Hinderbach,
Speaker 3: the Bishop of Trent, I don't know that he actually
Speaker 3: believed that Simon was killed by the Jews. That was
Speaker 3: sort of beside the point. I think he believed that
Speaker 3: Jewish people are evil and he wanted to drive them out,
Speaker 3: and this was a convenient way to do it, plus
Speaker 3: a bunch of other political benefits. I don't know that
Speaker 3: he actually believed it. So if you're talking about these
Speaker 3: sort of cynical purveyors of it who use it for
Speaker 3: radicalization and use it for their own sort of economic
Speaker 3: and political gain, I think you just have to take
Speaker 3: away the gain and then like that will kind of
Speaker 3: kill it for everybody else. I think it is a
Speaker 3: complicated question because the thing about conspiracy theories is they're
Speaker 3: not about the details. That are not about the story.
Speaker 3: They're I mean, I feel like your segments, Jordan have
Speaker 3: really shown this well. As soon as you ask them
Speaker 3: a question like that's the end, Like there's it doesn't
Speaker 3: go anywhere. You can't actually have a conversation about conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: I don't even think that conspiracy theorists could have a
Speaker 3: conversation with each other about it, because it's fundamentally not
Speaker 3: It's not something you can have a discussion about. It
Speaker 3: is just an attempt to make this sort of core
Speaker 3: story about yourself match up with the world. And every
Speaker 3: conspiracy theory has the same core story, and that's why
Speaker 3: it's so powerful. It's it's the story that the theorist
Speaker 3: holds on to and then sort of tries to match
Speaker 3: up with the world in a kind of messy way.
Speaker 3: The story is basically, once upon a time, we were
Speaker 3: happy and everything was good, and we were in charge
Speaker 3: and we were safe, and then the monsters took hold,
Speaker 3: but no one knew that they had. And these monsters
Speaker 3: are not of the sort of vaguely threatening variety. They
Speaker 3: have to be absolutely gigantic, demonic, sort of the most
Speaker 3: hyperbolic thing you can think of. Go another step, so
Speaker 3: it's always children satan mutilation and torture, pedophilia, And the
Speaker 3: story goes that everything seemed fine because the monsters made
Speaker 3: sure this was all kept secret. So the monsters control
Speaker 3: what you know, and only the heroes of the story
Speaker 3: knew the truth and then they arrived to save the world.
Speaker 3: And that's the benefit that you get from it. You
Speaker 3: get that worldview about yourself that you are a continuously
Speaker 3: just sort of horrifically embattled hero of the story, and
Speaker 3: you can't really give up on this self like this
Speaker 3: self image of embattled heroism, it's very difficult to give
Speaker 3: up on. It's not just the high of thinking of
Speaker 3: yourself as a hero, it's also that you convince yourself
Speaker 3: that you are in this battle of absolute good and
Speaker 3: absolute evil. And so then you get to issues of like,
Speaker 3: if you ask about democracy or fair play, what are
Speaker 3: you nuts say? This is about This is about the
Speaker 3: end of the world. So it makes it impossible to
Speaker 3: sort of dial back to issues of faireness or accuracy.
Speaker 3: It's actually not about that. And I feel like you
Speaker 3: can kind of hear that when you're talking to these
Speaker 3: QAnon followers, when they try to answer your questions, they
Speaker 3: aren't actually trying to say, like you say, so, what
Speaker 3: did actually happen in January sixth? They'll say, FBI, CIA,
Speaker 3: Clinton's just sort of a grab bag. But what they're
Speaker 3: actually trying to tell you is this story that the
Speaker 3: monsters are out to get us, and I'm trying to
Speaker 3: save us. There's kind of no other point to it.
Speaker 3: That's the whole ball game.
Speaker 4: And when the monsters, when there's a partisan overlay on that,
Speaker 4: when monsters are one party and the people who are
Speaker 4: trying to save you are are Donald Trump, I mean,
Speaker 4: there's no room for debate at that point, right, Like
Speaker 4: there's no room to talk about it's important to respect
Speaker 4: electoral defeats, right because if the people who you are
Speaker 4: losing elections to are monsters who are abusing children, then
Speaker 4: you have a moral responsibility to go try to subvert
Speaker 4: those election results.
Speaker 3: And the resistance is kind of like baked into the
Speaker 3: story because the story is that the monsters came and
Speaker 3: took over and they kept they covered it up, they
Speaker 3: kept everybody from knowing. So any information that you get
Speaker 3: in from the outside is suspect, even information that you
Speaker 3: might get from sympathetic sources. So the only thing then
Speaker 3: you're left with is kind of like going with your
Speaker 3: gut and what feels true. It feels true that I
Speaker 3: am a victim, and it feels true that I'm the
Speaker 3: hero of the story, and so let's.
Speaker 2: Just go with that. So you're telling me, I shouldn't
Speaker 2: read this story to my son every night before going
Speaker 2: to there. He loves it. It's a dark Eric carl story,
Speaker 2: but I like it so much better than that hungry caterpillar.
Speaker 3: You might be you might be unhappy with the results
Speaker 3: of raising your child this way.
Speaker 2: I tell you all of his peers are reading it.
Speaker 2: They seem to really be into it. That hero's journey.
Speaker 2: After the break, we're going to talk about how the
Speaker 2: adrenachrome conspiracy theory is related to the attack in Nancy
Speaker 2: Pelosi's house. It seriously is This is Jordan Clapper Figures
Speaker 2: the conspiracy will be right back. Welcome back to Jordan
Speaker 2: Clapper Figures the Conspiracy. I'm here with doctor Elise Wong
Speaker 2: and Matt Kertz, two experts who followed conspiracy theories, and
Speaker 2: we're talking about Adrina Chrome, how Democrats are drinking baby's
Speaker 2: blood allegedly, allegedly, and what that means for American politics. Now, recently,
Speaker 2: Nancy Pelosi's house was broken into by a right wing
Speaker 2: conspiracy theorist. He was looking for Pelosi and ended up
Speaker 2: attacking her husband with a hammer. But Matt, you've written
Speaker 2: about how the conspiracy theories this attacker specifically believed, and
Speaker 2: how he was radicalized in the ecosystem of right wing misinformation.
Speaker 2: How does this all connect well.
Speaker 4: The alleged assailant had a substantial internet paper trail. He
Speaker 4: had a couple of blogs, various other social media platforms,
Speaker 4: and what he posted on those sites was very much
Speaker 4: the kind of textbook online right wing conspiracy theory radicalization
Speaker 4: pattern that we've been seeing for years now. His social
Speaker 4: media and blogs are filled with references to QAnon, to
Speaker 4: Adrina Chrome, to Pizzagate to gamer Gate, as well as
Speaker 4: a sort of grab bag of bigotries related to black
Speaker 4: people and women and Jews, h and gay people and
Speaker 4: trans people. Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's the it's
Speaker 4: it's the it's the greatest hits. Honestly, I spent some
Speaker 4: time looking through these websites on Friday, and I was like, Oh,
Speaker 4: it's just it's it's all of it from there. And
Speaker 4: this happened very very quickly. You did not see people
Speaker 4: on the right saying, oh my god, the things that
Speaker 4: people on the writer saying are leading to political violence. Instead,
Speaker 4: a story about political violence committed by someone who believed
Speaker 4: right being conspiracy theories about how Democrats are depraved. It
Speaker 4: was turned into another writ being conspiracy theory about how
Speaker 4: Democrats are depraved. The story that developed over the following
Speaker 4: hours was that the assailant had not broken into the house,
Speaker 4: but in fact he had been invited in by Paul
Speaker 4: Pelosi because they were gay lovers, and that the violent
Speaker 4: attack on Pelosi was in fact some sort of gay
Speaker 4: lover's spat. That's what they came up with, and that
Speaker 4: spread remarkably quickly, as it tends to do through this
Speaker 4: right wing information ecosystem, until you had Elon Musk tweeting
Speaker 4: out a link to a hyperpartisan fake news website on
Speaker 4: Sunday morning. So it was, you know, seventy two hours,
Speaker 4: forty eight hours from the assault becoming known, to the
Speaker 4: conspiracy theory reaching the wealthiest.
Speaker 2: Man on earth at least something like this pops up.
Speaker 2: Is this how you imagine it playing out this quickly
Speaker 2: and evolving or devolving in this similar manner.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me. I do think the speed
Speaker 3: is different from sort of the history that I study,
Speaker 3: but the manner in which things spread is really not.
Speaker 3: And I think a few things are key that the
Speaker 3: platform matters. It depends on who is picking this up
Speaker 3: and who is running with And then there's also a
Speaker 3: durability to conspiracy theories that because they have this sort
Speaker 3: of epistemological challenge built into them. By that, I mean
Speaker 3: they challenge how you know what you know, and they
Speaker 3: say these things that you think you know, you don't know,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't replace it with anything, So it's just
Speaker 3: sort of epistemic destabilization. So you just don't have anything
Speaker 3: to stand on, and that creates an environment in which
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories really thrive because once once you can't trust anything,
Speaker 3: then the only thing you can trust is your own
Speaker 3: sense of the story that you like or the one
Speaker 3: that sounds good to you. This was definitely true and
Speaker 3: sort of the medieval and early modern period of blood libel,
Speaker 3: there were often people who are powerful people who opposed
Speaker 3: blood libel. For Simon the tenth, the reason why we
Speaker 3: have so many documents on it is the Pope tried
Speaker 3: to intervene in this, he tried to put a stop
Speaker 3: to it. Then then the very first blood libel in
Speaker 3: the twelfth century. This was a boy named William of Norwich,
Speaker 3: the Norwich Sheriff, actually got involved and protected the Jewish community.
Speaker 3: So there's always been pushback from kind of mainstream sources,
Speaker 3: and yet these conspiracy theories just thrive if there's already
Speaker 3: a kind of destabilized trust in the regular sources of knowledge.
Speaker 3: So I think the modern speed that is new how
Speaker 3: quickly that happens. But you would have a blood libel
Speaker 3: come out, and the next week all of the Jews
Speaker 3: in town would be arrested and tortured, And it was
Speaker 3: pretty fast. It happened pretty fast.
Speaker 2: Well, we mentioned the platform here, and Matt you brought
Speaker 2: up Elon Musk in the tweet that he had adding
Speaker 2: to this confusion. He referenced a website that claimed Hillary
Speaker 2: Clinton died in twenty sixteen and was replaced with a clone.
Speaker 2: So what does this say now in this new era
Speaker 2: Elon's Twitter, what is that going to do to these conversations.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it's going to continue to accelerate them.
Speaker 4: I think there has been some effort by the social
Speaker 4: media platforms some of the time to try to rein
Speaker 4: in the most extreme and dangerous forms of misinformation. It's
Speaker 4: been haphazard, it's been imperfect. But Elon Musk's Twitter is
Speaker 4: going to do is kind of costs that aside, he
Speaker 4: himself is quite obviously a bit of a conspiracy theorist,
Speaker 4: someone who has you know, accused people of being petos.
Speaker 4: That's just sort of sort of his wheelhouse, so to speak.
Speaker 4: And it's difficult to imagine Twitter being interested in throttling
Speaker 4: conspiracy theories that its own owner is spreading. That's just
Speaker 4: not going to happen. And so, you know, I think
Speaker 4: that platform it's going to become less stable, it's going
Speaker 4: to become a less valuable source for credible information because
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 2: At last, I'm curious, can you talk about the progression
Speaker 2: of belief into action, like what takes somebody from pizzagate
Speaker 2: to an actual act of political violence in twenty twenty two?
Speaker 3: I mean, this is what scholars of radicalization study, right,
Speaker 3: how do you come from an idea into actual action?
Speaker 3: Radicalization online is part of the story. It's not the
Speaker 3: whole story, but it certainly directs your any sort of
Speaker 3: anger satisfaction you already have. It validates it, and it
Speaker 3: amps it up, and it focuses it on a target.
Speaker 3: So it's a little bit like pointing a loaded gun
Speaker 3: at a specific target. And can I go back to
Speaker 3: the Elon thing for just a second.
Speaker 2: Yes, please.
Speaker 3: The whole verification thing really struck me because I think,
Speaker 3: you know, it's clear the money of it doesn't actually matter.
Speaker 3: Like he's like twenty dollars, eight dollars whatever to sell verification, right,
Speaker 3: that's his new thing. He's going to sell verification on Twitter.
Speaker 3: What really struck me is that this is not an
Speaker 3: attempt to get the money. It's an attempt to devalue
Speaker 3: verification in general, because verification is meant to show you
Speaker 3: which sources are trustworthy, right. It was meant to sort
Speaker 3: of identify members of the media and corporations and so
Speaker 3: that you knew that it was actually coming from that
Speaker 3: source and you knew that you could trust it. It
Speaker 3: was not a sort of celebrity thing originally, that was
Speaker 3: not the purpose of verification, And by turning it into
Speaker 3: something that you can buy, it just completely devalues verification,
Speaker 3: and it gets rid of that layer of validation so
Speaker 3: that you know what you can trust, which sources you
Speaker 3: can trust. It gets rid of that sort of you know,
Speaker 3: it's destabilizing the way we know what we know, and
Speaker 3: that seems to me to be the point of the
Speaker 3: whole verification thing.
Speaker 4: In fact, because Musk is so polarizing, we can see
Speaker 4: a situation where his supporters, who are largely on the
Speaker 4: right are much more willing to actually shell out the
Speaker 4: money than you, more credible mainstream journalists are. Those less
Speaker 4: credible sources will get sort of algorithmically accelerated more than
Speaker 4: everybody else and become a bigger part of the conversation.
Speaker 2: I'm curious what advice you would have to consumers, specifically
Speaker 2: of Twitter. I think a lot of people are looking
Speaker 2: at this, They see these issues, see the problem, and
Speaker 2: are asking themselves the question, do I divorce myself from
Speaker 2: this platform? I don't know if the answer is to
Speaker 2: step away from it and not be a part of
Speaker 2: the conversation or understand the conversation, But are you complicit
Speaker 2: in what is becoming a less and less trustworthy place.
Speaker 4: So I think part of the issue here is I
Speaker 4: don't really view it as a place for conversation. I mean, I.
Speaker 2: Know a lot of interesting things. I come at me,
Speaker 2: We'll go back and forth. It's fun, we playful. I
Speaker 2: got some gifts, I'll send you a way. It's a
Speaker 2: really fun chat.
Speaker 4: The way I use Twitter, I use it as a
Speaker 4: broadcast medium, right. It's a way for me to get
Speaker 4: my views and my work out into the public. It's
Speaker 4: a way for me to hear views from people who
Speaker 4: might have interesting ideas or thoughts. But I don't do
Speaker 4: that much interaction with it because I think it's actually
Speaker 4: a really bad medium for having debates of any kind.
Speaker 4: If I want to have a conversation with someone, I
Speaker 4: will try to follow up with them in a start
Speaker 4: an email, conversation or phone or what have you. It's
Speaker 4: hard to have have a substantive discussion with the rest
Speaker 4: of the world trying to involve itself in that. I
Speaker 4: will use Twitter less if that becomes less feasible. If
Speaker 4: I think that my tweets aren't getting read, or if
Speaker 4: I think that I am not able to easily find
Speaker 4: credible information that I want to be reading, that's when
Speaker 4: the value proposition will fall to basically nothing.
Speaker 3: I feel like this is where our disciplines come into play.
Speaker 3: Because you're in media. I'm in medieval studies, so I
Speaker 3: have a varioues. My following you will be shocked to
Speaker 3: hear is tiny. I'm also I'm also locked, so I
Speaker 3: really just use it for conversation, like I really just
Speaker 3: use it to connect with other other people in my
Speaker 3: field or who study the same things that I do.
Speaker 3: And I think one of the really one of the
Speaker 3: reasons a lot of people are mourning this is it
Speaker 3: has been an incredible tool for people to connect within
Speaker 3: their own tiny little subfield. Like I feel more connected
Speaker 3: to other medievalists of color on Twitter because we have
Speaker 3: kind of created our own little ecosystem than anywhere else,
Speaker 3: and I wouldn't get that anywhere else. I would miss
Speaker 3: it for that. And obviously, if again, if like you said,
Speaker 3: if that becomes impossible, then then like I'm not going
Speaker 3: to use it anymore. But I also think this whole
Speaker 3: question of so do you stay, do you go? Do
Speaker 3: you pay the eight dollars, twenty dollars whatever it ends
Speaker 3: up being, I feel like it has a very American question,
Speaker 3: like how can we make this the individual responsibility to
Speaker 3: decide what to do? This is the the robber baron
Speaker 3: has screwed up the system, and now we are responsible
Speaker 3: for fixing it. And you know, my recycling or not
Speaker 3: recycling my water bottle is really what's leading to climate change.
Speaker 3: Like that's that's really, that's really the thing, the sort
Speaker 3: of individual responsibility for these things, and I think that's
Speaker 3: kind of what gets us into trouble with conspiracy theories
Speaker 3: to begin with. Right, do your own research, find out
Speaker 3: for yourself. The thing is, with huge platforms and huge
Speaker 3: areas of knowledge, you just can't do it yourself. I mean,
Speaker 3: as we all discovered in the pandemic when we all
Speaker 3: became amateur epidemiologists, right, we're not very good at this.
Speaker 3: I don't remember high school biology very well. I'm not
Speaker 3: not going to be good at making choices personal choices
Speaker 3: about my own level of risk and my kids level
Speaker 3: of risk, and you know, I am not a good
Speaker 3: person to put that decision on. And that's kind of
Speaker 3: how we've offloaded it. And so I feel like that's
Speaker 3: maybe not I know that it's sort of going to
Speaker 3: be personally difficult for a lot of people to figure
Speaker 3: out what to do about Twitter, but I don't really
Speaker 3: feel like that's that's where the change comes from.
Speaker 2: I want to wrap this up kind of looking specifically
Speaker 2: at what happened with Nancy Pelosi's husband and what we've
Speaker 2: sort of been discussing here, but sort of to zoom
Speaker 2: out as well, how do politicians like Nancy Pelosi try
Speaker 2: and convince people that they don't partake in ritual children sacrifices.
Speaker 2: At a rally weeks ago, and a man was convinced
Speaker 2: that Nancy Pelosi is a vampire and drinks children's blood.
Speaker 2: He was convinced. I followed up and I asked, you
Speaker 2: said literally? Did you mean literally? He said? Literally? You
Speaker 2: see Republicans on one side, and are we talking metaphorical
Speaker 2: devil like, oh, they do bad stuff?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: Literally, you know, vampires drinking blood.
Speaker 2: I don't want a nitpick here, but vampires tend to
Speaker 2: be eternally youthful. And I look at Nancy Pelosi and
Speaker 2: she's a lot of things, But I guess I don't
Speaker 2: think Bampi somebody in her party definitely prints. How does
Speaker 2: someone like that attempt to knock down this issue and
Speaker 2: with those difficulties, what does that say about where we're
Speaker 2: at politically if we struggle to even do that, Matt.
Speaker 4: I don't know, honestly. I mean it's very difficult to
Speaker 4: reach someone who believes that you drink the blood of children.
Speaker 4: The you know, I think that it's just a hard problem,
Speaker 4: and so we end up talking around it, right, we
Speaker 4: end up talking about what are the ways that policy
Speaker 4: can weaken the structures that are in place that allow
Speaker 4: these conspiracy theories to flourish, Because, as at least says,
Speaker 4: these conspiracy theories have always been with us, but it
Speaker 4: has become easier for them to propagate and easier for
Speaker 4: people to come to accept them. And I think that's
Speaker 4: really the available channel.
Speaker 2: Elise, is there is there any advice you have for
Speaker 2: Nancy Pelosi or anybody else who looks at this is
Speaker 2: pulling out their hair, just attempting to try to knock
Speaker 2: down what seems like to be the unconceivable.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think there's sort of the media answer,
Speaker 3: and then there's the personal answer about approaching this person personally.
Speaker 3: So the media answer like, I don't I'm not a
Speaker 3: media expert and so I wouldn't know exactly how to
Speaker 3: do this. But I think that platforms really are the key,
Speaker 3: the platforms that we give people to propagate these ideas.
Speaker 3: I think that, you know, when Alex Jones got involved,
Speaker 3: things really took off. And when Alex Jones was taken
Speaker 3: off of Twitter and sort of deplatformed from a bunch
Speaker 3: of places, his influence really did die. Down for a
Speaker 3: little while, like it actually had an influence. And I
Speaker 3: think deplatforming and treating social media as the sort of
Speaker 3: communities that they are and the news sites that they are,
Speaker 3: and having even stricter standards for them than we do
Speaker 3: for sort of in person conduct, I think is is
Speaker 3: not going to happen. But that would be my suggestion
Speaker 3: for the media side of things. I think you have
Speaker 3: to control the amplification of these conspiracy theories. And there's
Speaker 3: also just sort of the larger problem of society wide radicalization,
Speaker 3: and that is a that's a bigger question than just
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories. The only people who can really get to
Speaker 3: people who are deep into it are those who are
Speaker 3: already intimate with these people, who are already friends with
Speaker 3: these people, who already have some other form of connection
Speaker 3: with them. You're not going to get through to them,
Speaker 3: that's not Sorry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know you family and family out there to
Speaker 2: talk to those you love. I mean you also speak
Speaker 2: to to something there. There's the intimate relationship people have
Speaker 2: with their computers when they're alone in their room, and
Speaker 2: that person interesting.
Speaker 3: Visions like a parasocial relationship.
Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, exactly. And I see going to these rallies,
Speaker 2: this myth of American exceptionalism. We talk with such rhetoric
Speaker 2: of everybody on their own hero's journey. And I will
Speaker 2: say a lot of those maga rallies you talk about
Speaker 2: all the problems in the world, and then somebody gets
Speaker 2: on stage and they says, you're a patriot, you can
Speaker 2: be a hero, you can do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, guys, this has been lovely, Alis Wong, Matt Gertz.
Speaker 2: I leave this conversation energize as if I've sucked on
Speaker 2: the blood of a child.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: That's all I could ask for. I appreciate your insight
Speaker 2: and your thoughts. Thank you, guys, thanks for having you
Speaker 2: listen to Jordan Klopper Fingers the Conspiracy from The Daily
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