Oct. 12, 2025
Conspiracy Theories and Mainstreaming the Fringe
Conspiracies aren’t fringe anymore. They’re at the heart of American politics. In this episode, we explore how conspiracy theories have taken root in everything from social media feeds to White House discourse. Today, the internet acts as a megaphone for conspiracies, from flat earth theory to racist ideology such as the "Great Replacement Theory.” When there’s declining trust in media, science, and politicians, conspiracy thinking often fills the void. We dive deep into why people embrace false cures and disinformation, seeking hidden forces to make sense of their own powerlessness.
Follow us down the rabbit hole as we examine how Donald Trump has embraced and amplified conspiracy culture, using it as a political tool to manipulate public perception, and how the Trump administration has normalized what was once considered extreme. We also look at a few government coverups and lies (there are far too many to fit in one episode) to argue how historical reality is often far darker than the worst conspiracy.
"Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts." – William Burroughs
It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves.
Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where the news gets weirder, and so do we.
Today we're talking about conspiracy theories, so take out your tinfoil hats and come with us down the rabbit hole.
If you trust us, I'm your shadowy skeptic Lola Michaels with a Deep State dropout, Ezra Saeed.
0:29
I went outside and saw the moon, then I checked my phone and the battery was at 66%.
Moon equals lunar 66 equals route 66.
You travel on the routes.
The moon landing folks, it's all connected.
And hi everyone.
And our paranoid prophet Cam cruise.
0:47
What's up, everybody?
Check out our new website, unwashedun-ruly.com.
You can find all our episodes and extra content.
Join our mailing list or buy us coffee.
And don't forget to rate and review the show or we'll assume you're part of the cover up.
The earth is flat, stationary, and enclosed by a glass Dome known as the firmament.
1:07
Mandela Effects are just the government gaslighting us and trying to see what they can get away with.
The reptilian, as you call it.
Remains of Atlantis are located in the eye of the Sahara desert.
They.
Introduced their DNA into these lower hominids and made human beings chemtrails over American skies.
1:25
Are they part of some secret chemtrails and contrails?
Do you know the difference are in a simulated reality, which the evidence suggests is true.
So how exactly did the CIA try to recruit the 9/11 hijackers?
6 celebrities Who Have Been Supposedly Replaced by clones #1 Jamie Foxx The adrenochrome conspiracy suggests that celebrities and elites harvest a chemical called adrenochrome from the blood of children.
1:51
The Great Replacement of white people is far more sinister than any redistricting project.
Conspiracies aren't living in the shadows anymore.
They're mainstream.
They're at your family dinner table, your social feed, the media, the White House.
Some conspiracies aren't even fringe.
2:08
They're a central part of how people make sense of the world.
In this episode, we dive into the anatomy of conspiracy theories, what they are, why people believe them, and how Big Power uses them to manipulate us.
We'll explore the real life consequences of disinformation and how decades of government lies and financial crises created fertile ground for paranoia, doubt, and collective delusion.
2:33
Conspiracies feed on uncertainty, distressed religiosity, and economic insecurity.
In the digital age, they're amplified by algorithms, anonymity, and mass reach, creating a perfect storm where belief becomes identity and facts lose their grip.
2:50
We'll talk about what conspiracies turned out to be true, and how capitalist reality is often more disturbing than any conspiracy.
Let's get into it.
The late, great writer Gore Vidal said in his later years that he was not a conspiracy theorist, but a conspiracy analyst.
3:12
He was an anti establishment aristocrat critical of the ruling class.
He was both an insider and an outsider and highly rational.
I think the point is that when US imperialist policy and the domestic agenda is always driven by economic interests and manipulates the public through lies and cover ups, it is often hard to tell what's real and what's not.
3:32
So let's kick it off with a question for both of you.
What do you think fuels conspiracies and why are there so many right now?
I mean, I think as long as there's been people and governments, there's been conspiracies.
In a lot of ways, I look at conspiracies and the same way I look at religion.
3:49
There's an element of something that makes sense in terms of the heart of the heartless world, trying to figure out that what you see but can't understand.
And at the same time, their growth and wider dissemination in the current period and in the last couple of decades in particular in this country, I think are very much tied with the desperate situation that a lot of people find themselves in and that sense of both distress of the government and powerlessness in terms of how to explain things.
4:17
And so there's a tendency to look for nefarious forces that are hidden behind the man behind the curtain, whereas I think the reality is both very much in plain sight and very much worse than any conspiracy.
Yeah, I totally agree with that, Ezra.
4:34
I think a lot of the reasons why people believe so much in this right now is conditional or based on the conditional reality that people are living in.
People are desperate, people are angry, people feel betrayed by their government, by institutions.
And I just like to add that the Internet plays a really, really big role in this.
4:52
People are getting their information in a different way than they have in the past, and news and information spreads quickly, and the kinds of people that the public trust have shifted over time.
So I think it's a combination of those two things.
5:08
Yeah, there's a massive erosion and trust in government and science and the media.
We're also in a really socially reactionary period.
People have less control over their lives and power makes conspiracy theories very appealing.
There's also the religiosity point.
5:24
Supernatural and paranormal beliefs are very widespread in the US, and conspiracies have a lot of tentacles.
There's a lot of overlap in propaganda and disinformation, superstition and lies and cover ups and unexplained mysteries.
5:41
And there's a massive range of conspiracies.
Right.
Like there's the ones that seem kind of incomprehensible in the modern era, and the ones that are really terrible and dangerous.
And it's sometimes very hard to separate this skepticism from fallacy because in this world, I think everyone feels like they've done their research.
6:02
Yeah, totally.
And The thing is, because of the way the Internet is, you can do your research and really find any conclusion that you're looking for.
I would recommend for anyone, if you find anything that you agree with, as a general rule, find the dissenting view, especially when it comes to these factual questions, so that you can hear what the other side has to say and reach a conclusion.
6:25
The other thing is always try to know what you don't know.
There are times when you need experts, people who have devoted their lives to the study of a particular question that most human beings aren't going to be able to do it, nor should they have to.
Now, that doesn't mean blind trust, but it does mean you have to at least take into account what somebody who claims to be an expert says, and then see what other experts say.
6:47
Yeah, Speaking of experts, it's clear that the Flat Earthers don't have a good map maker.
Because if you guys have ever seen the map that Flat Earthers subscribe to, it's pretty wild.
I've never.
Actually seen that.
I'm going to look it up as yeah, look at that.
We.
Speak.
The Pacific Ocean is huge.
7:04
It covers about 1/3 of the map.
It's pretty much like a flattened, warped version of the world map, but it's warped in a way that makes it impossible to scale.
There is never a scale included on this map.
I would put Flat Earth in the incomprehensible category like 1, where I cannot believe that people still think this way.
7:24
I mean, there's so many middle school level projects that you can do to prove the world is around.
It's also confusing because I feel like embedded in each of these conspiracies is an anxiety.
But what is the conspiracy?
How is pretend ending that the world is round benefiting anybody?
7:41
You can go back more than 2000 years to an ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician named Christophanes, and he demonstrated without any satellites, without going into space or anything, by just basic math, that the earth is round, and he actually calculated the size of the earth pretty close.
And this is not even unique to that culture.
7:58
I know there are stories of cultures all around the world that understood that the world was round many, many years ago.
Yeah, flat earthers today are kind of like this.
Silly, incomprehensible, because I just don't even understand and.
It's like without motive.
I think another one that is also without motive is the reptilian theory, the idea that the government is full of alien lizard people who wear this kind of human flesh disguise.
8:26
But sometimes you can see their eyes glitch, so you can see the cat eye for a moment.
Celebrities are sometimes lizard people.
So if you go online, you can find all these really great compilations of, like, Lindsay Lohan, what is the point of this?
I don't get it.
But I think it demonstrates how alienated people feel from the elites, pun intended.
8:45
I guess they just feel like they're just not of this Earth.
They're not of us, you know.
One question, if you're an alien and you come to Earth and you're going to go through all this trouble to where the disguise and the lizard people that you are, the person you would present yourself as is Lindsay Lohan.
9:01
I mean, Mean Girls does have a pretty.
I know, but that was one movie many decades ago or many years ago.
I mean it's.
Really funny.
Yeah.
Another funny celebrity one is the idea that celebrities have clones.
Like the real celebrity died a long time ago or something happened to them.
9:18
Like so Avril Lavigne and apparently is a clone.
Paul McCartney is a clone.
Ryan Seacrest is a recent clone.
How do you determine that the person has become a clone?
I'm so glad you asked because I think one of the things about this is Americans have this really crazy relationship with the celebrities that they love.
9:36
And if the celebrities change in any way, they get upset about it in this way where it's like, oh, there's going to be an article written about how this person gains 40 lbs or how they have a little too much fillers.
So people get like upset that the celebrities that they love look different or change over time and then it's a clone has replaced them.
9:56
What about the idea that celebrities didn't really die and they're still alive?
Yeah, Tupac is out there on the islands.
This is where it drives me crazy.
Let's say Tupac is alive or Elvis or whoever you want to pick.
If they're not releasing the albums, if they're not out there doing their thing, what's the point of believing this conspiracy theory?
10:13
What are we getting out of it?
They escaped the paparazzi, OK.
Maybe it's like too sad for us to that Michael Jackson has died.
It's better for us to think that he's living happy somewhere, going to supermarkets just like he wished during his lifetime.
So some of those are silly.
10:29
What would you say are some of the low stake conspiracies?
Well, among the more fun ones, I really like the Mandela Effect.
So the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon where large groups of people remember events or facts or details differently from how they actually occurred.
10:44
So there's a lot of people who say they remember watching Nelson Mandela's funeral in the 80s, but when Mandela died, a bunch of people were like, wait, I already saw Nelson Mandela died.
So like, they were confused about it and they were like, this has been changed.
There's some shift of the timeline or the government is trying to like, change the past.
11:05
And you can see it leading out into other things in the culture.
I think that the Mandela Effect existed or people started promoting it before he actually died, when he was still alive and in power in South Africa.
Yeah, I was going to say, those people who think he died in the 80s, who do they think ran South Africa after the fall of apartheid?
11:21
Then there became this whole list of things that people remember in a different way.
But they are always quick to suggest wild theories like alternate realities or like timeline shifts.
Those Internet forums started accumulating other stories of other things that people noticed had changed.
11:41
There's a lot of them.
So one of them is Looney Tunes.
People thought Looney Tunes was spelled like the word looney and then T0 0NS like cartoons tunes, but it's actually spelled tunes like the sound tune and they're like, this has been changed.
11:56
Berenstein Bears is another one.
Fruit of the Loom cornucopia.
Everybody's like, I used to have a cornucopia, but then they're like, no, it didn't.
But everybody's like, I remember that.
Couldn't possibly be that their memory is just mistaken?
Exactly.
And a lot of these are just logos.
12:11
Your mind is easily malleable.
And so when they look really similar, you might go, oh, I think I remember it that way.
I think I remember it this way.
When you have this kind of social reinforcement of people saying, Oh no, this is what it used to look like, then it becomes kind of embedded in your memory as a fact.
12:27
And so the main way that people get obsessed with it is that there are these alternate realities or like timeline shifts and that proof of these Berenstein versus Berenstain Bears or Shazam the movie Shazam and Sinbad, and they remember you don't know the Shazam.
12:45
I mean, I know the movie, but I don't know what on earth this one I.
Know nothing about Oh my God you got Mandela infected.
There is no Shazam.
Movie.
Yeah, I know that because I I know I always confuse it that way, but I know it's not Shazam.
Yeah, exactly.
So this definitely falls into a low stake silly category for me because.
13:04
I am.
I am.
Curious.
Obvious that it's like a logical.
I'm curious though, that's seems like a fuck of a lot of effort to go into, you know, wiping people's memories, changing timelines, all of that just to change the Fruit of the Loom logo.
Underwear is a powerful thing.
It is.
13:20
What about the controversy about the moon landing?
I won't call it a controversy.
The conspiracy.
I would say this is a proper conspiracy.
Yeah, this is one of the old classics, and it's one of the ones that when people pull it out, you're just kind of rolling your eyes, like, all right, already Ezra and me were talking about this, and he made some really good points about how essential the moon landing was in the space race and how the level of surveillance that the Russians had on us at the time would make it virtually impossible to fake something like that.
13:49
Yeah.
You know, ever since the Second World War ended and especially going into the 1950's, the US and the Soviet Union were in a space race over who could get satellites into the orbit first, who could get animals into orbit, can you bring them back alive?
And eventually who can get a human being up there?
14:05
The Soviets did that, and so then the next step became who can get to the moon?
And it was partly seen as a capitalism versus communism thing.
But it was also deeper than that in the sense that it was a driving force for technology that was mainly used in the case of the US, but also in the Soviet Union to drive military technology.
14:23
It's such a nationally narrow way of looking at things like the US is the only country in the world they fake the moon landing.
Think about it for a second.
The Soviet Union was in this tight space race.
They had already pulled ahead in one way and they are like Hawks keeping an eye on everything the Americans are doing and vice versa.
14:41
If they thought for a minute that the moon landing was fake, and by the way, if you remember it's multiple moon landings, they went until the early 70s.
If they thought for a minute that the moon landing was fake, they would have done everything in their power to publicize in order to embarrass the United States.
There's no logic to it.
14:58
What about, like, intriguing mysteries?
Do those fall into conspiracies?
They're not called UFO's anymore.
Uaps.
Yes, unidentified aerial phenomena.
Yeah, what about Uaps?
What about these mysteries around the building of monuments and ancient ruins and things like that?
15:16
Some conspiracies grow out of curiosity.
Ancient ruins and Uaps and plane crashes.
All of these things we know exist, right?
The pyramids are there.
There's many many videos of UAP's.
We know that a plane took off and it never came back.
15:33
I think humans are intrigued by mysteries.
I think people love to try to solve a mystery and put together pieces and speculate about all the different things that could have happened.
So sometimes I think conspiracies are just kind of fun and interesting to think about.
Yes and no.
In my mind, sometimes you get a mystery and you can have fun going down a rabbit hole.
15:51
But I never, ever hear anyone saying the Roman Colosseum is so amazing.
Aliens must have built it.
Yep, it's it's African artifacts, maybe artifacts in the New World that tend to fall into that category.
And I think, I think there's an element of racism in this.
And I don't mean that by everybody who says it, but I mean in terms of it being part of a widespread meme in society that these people in Africa or in the New World couldn't have built these amazing structures.
16:18
It must have taken aliens to build them.
I have never in my life heard anyone apply that logic to European architecture, which is complex.
Look at Roman architecture.
Those arches are holding a ridiculous amount of weight and no aliens were involved there.
Yeah, I'm really, really glad you brought that up, because the idea of quote, UN quote, ancient aliens is really about the pyramids.
16:40
It's about the Mayan and Aztec ruins, anything that's like brown people.
The only thing I would say that fits outside of that, that gets the same kind of speculation is Stonehenge.
But Stonehenge is kind of before it was civilized, people quote UN quote living there, right?
Yeah, but it gets that aliens built.
16:56
It gets the alien treatment sometime.
That's the only one though.
That's the only outlier.
I just had to bring it up, but you're totally right and I do think that there is a huge element of racism.
In terms of planes and things like that, I mean, Uaps or UFOs or whatever you want to call them, sure that you look up in the sky, there's many things you don't identify.
17:12
Sometimes it's a military drone that they're testing, things like that.
I mean I personally think it's human hubris to think that in this vast universe of billions and billions of stars and even more planets, we are the only living thing that's not the same as aliens landed in Iowa and probe me up the ass.
17:32
I'm sorry, I just don't that's that's a far fetched thing.
So just to put it out there, I have really, really strong opinions about aliens.
Go for it.
I'm super into like paranormal world and the government has come out and said that there are unidentified flying objects.
17:48
There's stuff that they admit to openly.
There's been within the last five years a lot of really exciting hearings about it.
Military leaders come forward and they're like, there's these tic tac shaped objects coming out of the ocean.
We have no idea what they are.
And there's all these videos and stuff and.
I also don't know what the military technology of other countries are.
18:06
This is way beyond that.
So you say.
They move in a way that defies physics as we know it.
I would find that very hard to believe.
Right, we'll have another episode where I'll show you the evidence.
You show me the evidence.
All right, let's talk a little bit about the dangerous ones.
18:23
When I think of dangerous, I think of things that have real life consequences that will cause people to die or mob hysteria, you know, will cause people to act in violence.
I think of all the Satanic Panic conspiracies.
Yeah, there was one that happened surprisingly recently in Hempstead in Britain.
18:41
So in Hempstead in 2014, there was a satanic panic started.
A mother and her children accused some teachers and local residents of satanic activity where they would kill babies and drink babies blood and do other kinds of horrific things.
18:59
And there's all these recordings of the kids that she released where they're saying, yes, they keep the babies in these drawers and they do this and that.
And these actually went viral.
And people in the community latched on to them.
And even though the police didn't find anything, the rumors persisted.
And the people who were accused of these crimes, a lot of them lost their jobs.
19:17
Their reputations were really destroyed.
Their kids were being affected at school.
So many families uprooted their lives and had to leave town.
So.
That is the definition of a witch hunt.
You just can call someone a witch and it doesn't matter.
You don't need any proof to it at all.
Yeah, the accusation alone is enough.
19:33
It's an old European tradition.
I guess it happens in Britain every couple of decades or so because there was a whole other thing that happened in the year 2000.
This isn't another Satanic panic you're talking about.
It's a pedophile panic.
OK, to protect the children is kind of at the heart of all.
19:48
Those exactly.
So it's a parallel panic.
So a doctor named Yvette Cloet, a specialist in pediatric medicine at a hospital in Newport in Britain, was literally driven out of her home by a mob because they confused the word pediatric.
With the word pedophile.
20:04
No.
Are you being serious?
I'm being serious.
I'm actually as I'm talking to you, I'm looking at the Guardian article from the Year 2.
Thousand, Oh my God.
And the neighborhood Beauty and the Beast Eater.
Yeah.
I don't know what happens in Britain every couple of decades that they go down that rabbit hole.
I mean, we've had some here too, a really big one in the 80s, right?
20:23
Yeah.
And I mean, obviously, we're going to talk more about Trump later on, but how can you not talk about all the many conspiracies that are part of this administration and touted every single day in terms of vaccines, the most recent one about Tylenol and the devastating effects that this is actually going to have on pregnant women and on the already declining state of healthcare in this country?
20:47
I would put medical conspiracies in the category of some of the most dangerous.
So, so many people lose their lives because of misinformation about medicines.
Like you said, in the 20 twenties, we've had measles outbreaks in this country.
We haven't had measles outbreaks in decades.
21:03
A lot of people were unhappy with the COVID vaccine.
I would say the criticism of it not being an actual vaccine obviously has a lot of merit, But the measles vaccine, polio vaccines like these are top tier vaccines.
These have saved so how many lives?
So having somebody in the White House who's saying to not vaccinate your kids in 2025 is really, really scary and really sad.
21:26
And the repercussions could be pretty devastating.
I sometimes get the sense that people seem to have the memory of a goldfish.
This stuff is not ancient history in terms of how many people were dying from diseases that vaccines, at least in countries like the United States have basically eradicated.
I the numbers if you go like in the early 1900s was in the 10s of thousands every year people die.
21:46
That's on top of the people who become paralyzed, lose limbs, disfigured, etcetera.
There's an element here where a completely understandable hatred, distrust towards the medical industry becomes translated into going after probably the one thing that's most responsible for increasing life expectancy outside of things like clean water and shelter and antibiotics.
22:08
And the ruling class, when it implements these things, it's not out of the goodness of their heart.
And it's not that the medical industry doesn't make a shit load of money on vaccines.
They make decent profits.
It's not as much as people think, but they do make good profits on them.
It's more that if you're the ruling class of a country, you don't want these diseases rampant in your country.
22:25
They destroy morale, they hurt your workforce, they hurt your military.
Every war, basically until the modern era, more soldiers died of disease than they died of actual fighting.
They actually extend a chance of infecting you because guess what?
Disease germs and viruses and things like that, They don't care what class you're in.
22:43
And so it's actually in the interest of the ruling class to have at least some basic things like vaccines so these kinds of diseases can be controlled, if not eliminated.
Don't forget, you actually had an American president from a very aristocratic family, FDR, who was in a wheelchair because of polio.
23:01
Again, it's not ancient history that tells you that stuff reached throughout all the classes.
So the other side of it is, I think the government, the way it deals with this stuff and the way it conducts itself has made a bad situation worse.
So I'll give you 2 very simple examples. 1 you touched on was the COVID vaccine.
23:18
The COVID vaccine is essentially like the flu vaccine.
Yeah, it's not a cure.
It's it's effective in so far as it gets that particular strain or strains it's targeted at.
If it's a different strain it's less effective or not effective.
You should get it because they usually target the most dominant strains.
23:34
But the way they portrayed it was like this was going to eliminate all of COVID.
They made promises that you couldn't keep and basically open the door for all the anti vaxxers to step forward and just show that they were lying, which they were.
And then the other side of it is the third world. the US government multiple times in the past through the CIA, has used vaccination programs in let's say a country like Pakistan where you do have polio, still a polio vaccination program as a cover for really murderous covert CIA operations.
24:07
And when you do that a few times, people just aren't going to get vaccinated because they're going to associate vaccines with CIA programs that result in their homes and families being droned.
And that's the government's doing.
Yep, they created that monster.
So as Ezra was talking about this distrust of the pharmaceutical companies and the American Medical institutions, another result of that is this romanticizing of Eastern and holistic medicine.
24:34
And another thing that you'll see if you go online is all of these alternative medicines.
Is a cancer killing fruit?
This is a dog dewormer only use eastern medicine.
24:50
Infamous miracle broth.
Organic sulfur.
Compresses.
Vapor cut seeds.
Red Clover, two more frequencies and resonance.
AOH 1996 that the recordings of Bayhaven Symphony #5IN C minor.
25:06
Wheat grass juice every day.
Fresh wheat grass.
Juice grape seed extracts.
So instead of taking chemotherapy, maybe you can try eating apricot seeds or dog dewormer.
There's this guy Joe Tippins, and he has this quote UN quote protocol that starts with you taking dog dewormer.
25:26
Because another piece of disinformation that's going around is that cancer is somehow linked to parasites.
There's like a whole branch of people on TikTok, even outside of cancer, who are like really fixated on the idea that everybody has parasites and parasites are causing all of these ailments and everybody just needs to get dewormed.
25:45
While I was researching for this, I was listening to an interview with a woman who was a doctor and she was talking about how as a surgeon, she is always performing on women, giving them mastectomies and, you know, other kinds of cancer related treatments.
And they would ask her about this thing they found online or that thing.
26:03
And it was very frustrating to her because she had been a doctor for a really long time and she knows the real information.
And instead of taking the treatment that she recommends, they go online and they find all this other stuff.
But then she got cancer herself.
One day she got breast cancer.
And the first thing she did was she went online and started looking things up because the prospect of getting chemotherapy sucks.
26:22
Dying sucks.
So like when you're desperate and you don't want the traditional answer, of course you're going to seek other alternatives.
So there's there's a lot of snake oil salesman too, and people who benefit from false cures.
Yeah, but again, the people who have dealt with medical abuse in their lives and discrimination and bigotry in the healthcare system, they feel scarred by that.
26:42
And there's doubts around, is this going to kill me or make me more sick?
You know I don't trust this system to make me better.
Yeah, and it's justified because look at how many people suffer.
Look at how many people don't get approved for things that they need.
And then this country throughout its history, medical experiments on people have been a repeated thing that happened here to the point that even today, while it's not, as far as I know, at least, I'll write medical experiments, the treatment of black patients get is so atrocious that there is going to be a certain high degree of mistrust in the medical industry.
27:15
The question is, again, you have to think this stuff through.
What has actually made people live longer?
I think some of the stuff that you're speaking to in terms of skepticism about the healthcare industry also applies in politics.
And there's there's a range of really dangerous political conspiracies.
27:33
And then there's also government conspiracies that are just politicized.
But then there's the ones that are kind of politically debatable or potentially plausible because they fall into that framework of, well, the government is so corrupt and so full of cover ups that this could be there could be a different explanation.
27:53
Yeah, and I would say that the JFK assassination fits into this.
And I would even go so far as to say that 911 fits into this, too, because anytime the government has something to gain or there's an agenda, you kind of just are like, I don't know.
28:09
And especially when it comes to assassinations, there's always a lot of ideas about what's really going on, who the real color is, what the real motive is.
And that's just, I think, fair game.
Yeah, I think assassinations and attacks are always going to fall into that category because there's always classified information, the official narratives never feel very credible or there's fabricated evidence, and then like the culprits and the motives are always used as some sort of political justification to carry out crimes against the population.
28:38
So post 9, 11, obviously, like the War on Terror.
So that just creates like, yeah, so that just creates fertile ground.
I think even just recently in terms of the Charlie Kirk assassination, within minutes there were 10's and thousands of posts alleging that Israel was behind it.
28:54
And the more that it was clear that the government was going to use it to go after leftists, and the more this bizarre story came out about the suspect, the more people started circulating accusations that Israel was behind it, that the Mossad did it.
And the more evidence started to come out that Kirk had these Zionist backers that were turning on him.
29:15
And then Netanyahu started to come out and repeatedly and explicitly deny Israel's involvement, that he just sounded completely guilty to people.
And so that created this feedback loop and more people started pushing it after that.
Yeah, I thought it was really crazy that while we're setting up for this show, we had this crazy event happen and all these conspiracies around it.
29:35
But like I was saying about JFK and 911, when the government, the Israeli government in this case, has something to gain in silencing this person who is starting to criticize him.
And the US government has something to gain by having this martyr.
Because the way that they've capitalized on the death of Charlie Kirk has just blown my minds.
29:55
Never in a million years would I have expected this person to be lionized to this degree by not only conservatives, but even by liberals.
It's pretty mind blowing.
I'm not going to speak to Mr. Kirk.
Assassinations happen all the time.
I know nothing about his assassination.
30:11
I have no particular knowledge of the JFK assassination to say anything.
I can look at any assassination of anybody and come up with fairly intricate theories as to who benefits and why and how this could have happened and how that could have happened, and there may even be truth to it, or they may not, and I wouldn't know.
30:28
I do, however, put a distinction between an assassination like that and something like 911, because you can always kill a person or the state can organize the killing of a person.
When you're talking about 911, if you were to say that the US government orchestrated this, it's an extraordinary claim.
30:46
I would argue that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what it would require is for the American government to carry out an incredible operation on so many levels through so many different branches of the government, and that here we are 1/4 century later and nothing has leaked about it.
31:06
I don't think the American government is that smart.
Nothing it does demonstrates that level of depths or intelligence at all.
Quite the opposite.
These people marched into Iraq two years later and basically handed it over to Iran, which could have been avoided if they just cracked open a book about the region.
31:22
The other reason I don't buy it is because all the repressive stuff that they did after 911, they had started to before 911.
Now, did the 9/11 give him an impetus and an opening to carry it out of even further and further?
Absolutely.
I mean, Condoleezza Rice openly said in front of Congress, we have to discuss how we can use this opportunity, this opportunity being the murder of 3000 Americans.
31:44
So of course they do.
They saw it as an opportunity.
But, you know, opportunities do come up.
There's also the fact that Osama bin Laden said, yeah, we did it.
We didn't expect the buildings to go down, but God damn, that's a plus.
So you put all that together, I see no evidence to suggest anything else.
Ezra, you bring up a really fairpoint when you talk about the level of coordination that this would take and also the number of people who would have to participate in any of this to stay quiet.
32:08
And if you examine a lot of these conspiracy theories, many of them fall apart under that same logic.
So if we go back to Flat Earth for a moment, the number of people who would have to be involved in this conspiracy theory is just outrageous.
Because in addition to everybody who works for NASA, it would also include everybody who works for every other space agency all around the world, every astronomer, every person who has a commercial boat where they sail around the world.
32:37
Flat Earth would require like 200,000 people to hide this conspiracy.
So it's it's a fair, fair criticism.
And don't forget Eratosthenes from 2000 years ago or 2200.
He's in on.
The He was one of the early ones on the.
He was getting a check from the Pentagon they're sending through their time machine.
32:54
But my thing about that is history is not a conspiracy.
But there's plenty of conspiracies in history, and there's plenty of times where the US government just straight out carried out a conspiracy lie.
It usually unravels pretty quickly.
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Within about a year, that thing was in their face.
33:10
It wasn't a mistake they see today.
The conspiracy is it was a mistake.
No, they knew and they all knew it.
Was a lie.
It was a lie.
It was a lie, but it got exposed pretty quickly because it was demonstrable.
The people who couldn't sell you Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
33:26
You want me to believe that these same people orchestrated what are the most sophisticated attacks that have ever taken place If if it's really by the United States government ever on American soil, Gulf of Tonkin.
Gulf of Tonkin, an incident where a US naval ship was bombed, supposedly, and it was used as an excuse to escalate a Vietnam War.
33:46
All it took is a few journalists and Oh no, that's not what happened.
But that's why people believe other things to be false flags.
There's a bunch of people who think Sandy Hook, it was a false flag for the US government to try to take people's guns.
You know, So we were talking about how the government's own actions and behavior have sown this mistrust.
34:05
And like, it's exactly what you said.
There have been instances where the US has allowed Americans to be killed or they've allowed attacks or even done their own attacks on civilians or military people to get policy started or get a war started or whatever, whatever else the agenda is at the time.
34:21
Yeah, that's kind of the point is the truth is darker than the conspiracy theories.
And we'll talk about the conspiracies that turned out to be true throughout this episode.
The one that I was thinking about is the project Northwood in 1962, which was during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the US was going to carry out fake terrorist attacks on the military and civilians in order to justify going to war with Castro in Cuba following the Cuban Revolution.
34:49
And the only reason why it never went forward is because JFK knew it would cause a big war with the Soviet Union and it was during the Cold War.
I think one of the things that defines conspiratorial thinking are these huge leaps of logic.
One of the clips I wanted to play for you guys is a man talking about all these coincidences between JFK and Lincoln.
35:11
So if you guys want to roll that clip.
The real truth, you better wake up and find out has been around you all of your life, you just didn't see it.
Example Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John Kennedy was elected to Congress 1946.
35:29
Abe.
Lincoln was elected president in 1860.
John Kennedy was elected president 1960.
The names Lincoln and Kennedy both contained 7 letters.
Both presidents were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both the president's wives lost children while living in the White House.
35:48
Both presidents were shot on a Friday in the head.
President Lincoln's secretary was named Miss Kennedy.
Kennedy's secretary was named Miss Lincoln.
Both were assassinated by Southerners.
Both were succeeded by Southerners.
Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808.
36:05
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.
John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated Kennedy, 1939 Both assassins were known by three names.
36:20
John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Both names are comprised of 15 letters.
President Lincoln was shot in a theater named Ford.
Kennedy was shot in a car named Lincoln made by Ford.
John Wilkes Booth ran to a theater and was caught in a warehouse.
36:37
Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.
Booth and Oswald were both assassinated before they could go to a trial, and a week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland.
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe.
Isn't that so great, guys?
36:55
Coincidence.
I think not.
It ends in Marilyn Monroes pants.
President Penny, what is it in Marilyn Monroe?
I, I got to tell you when I was watching that I was wondering, is this an act or is this for real?
And then like the Marilyn Monroe thing is like, wait, this is an act.
37:11
And how far they're reaching to find connections.
It's like he has 8 letters in his name.
So does he.
He ran from a theater to a warehouse.
Like the connections are so, so funny.
This is what I'm trying to highlight by playing this clip is that there's this really, really huge leap in logic that happens.
37:29
So if you guys, I can't guess.
This is tied to simulation theory.
So the fact that history repeats itself is because of programming.
So who still believes in simulation theory?
Can you first explain what is simulation?
Theory.
OK, so simulation theory is pretty much like the movie The Matrix.
37:47
Our real bodies are are dormant somewhere and everything we're experiences in simulation.
And then other versions are like our physical bodies don't actually exist at all.
And our consciousnesses are all just artificial and we're existing in a simulation.
And this is something that started with tech Bros and it's something that Elon Musk will talk about in interviews and be like, it's possible.
38:09
It's totally possible.
We can't know, but it's possible.
Oh my God, is Elon here?
Yeah, so that's the idea of simulation theory.
And people who believe in this are saying that you can see the programming sometimes, or there's a glitch in the matrix where something doesn't line up.
38:26
This clip shows how the programming just repeats itself over and over and over.
So actually a lot of the things in that clip weren't true.
Like the secretary thing I read wasn't actually true, But people love to like latch on to these kind of things and retell them.
And I think the entertainment value of them is actually one of the things that really helps it Prolifer, right?
38:47
It was very funny as I was watching it.
One of the things I'm thinking is humans will almost as a tendency, want to find patterns.
That's how you explain exactly.
And so you just throw up a bunch of random numbers and random dates, and somehow we're going to create a pattern out of it and find one where nothing exists, because that's just what we do.
39:08
Yeah, Ned, that's how the human brain works.
We just organize things.
But we also can find false patterns everywhere and make false correlations.
And on TikTok, somebody predicted the rapture, and there was all these people talking about the rapture.
And the person who created that prophecy was online and they were talking about how one of the ways they knew is because of license plates, and they saw the numbers in license plates.
39:30
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
They saw the numbers in license plates of the dates and like that's one of the most common forms of cognitive bias is with numbers.
There's a special name for it and everything where it's like, oh, I'm the number 23.
I see the number 23 everywhere.
39:46
Like the Jim Carrey movie you.
Know, I got to tell you these rapture guys have gotten a lot lazier than they used to be used to be you had to sit there and with calendars and, and actually do some real mathematics where you're calculating, you know, when per the Bible, the earth was created, where are we now since creation and, and how we're going to count the dates and, and based on that, make a projection on, on, on rapture.
40:08
They just had to look at it, basically.
Yeah, what a waste.
Put some effort into it man.
Just fucking go look at license plates.
Did it happen?
I mean, I I'm still.
Here as you should be.
Did you really think you were going to go up Cam?
Let let me just say I packed the lunch for the next day.
40:23
I was told I should wear clean underwear.
Well, I think this episode is also particularly relevant in Trump 2.0 because this is a president who's really leaned into conspiracy theory.
I guess that's an understatement.
It's seems more like a pathology.
40:40
But, you know, the ruling class has always lied.
Trump is, I think, the most unhinged, and there's an entire Wikipedia page of all of the many conspiracy theories that he peddles openly.
But I did want to talk about a little bit of this false binary that can conspiracy theorists are all right wingers or uneducated or MAGA supporters, because conspiracy theorists do exist across the political spectrum and class and race and education levels, and it's not strictly partisan.
41:12
But let's talk a little bit about Trump because I think the most dangerous theory that we're seeing that's been propagated a lot is the great replacement theory.
The great replacement theory is a far right ethno nationalist idea that white populations are being deliberately replaced by non white immigrants.
41:33
But the claim is that the elites or the political leaders are facilitating this immigration basically to change the political, cultural or racial character of countries.
And it's it is pushed by Tucker Carlson and Lauren Southern, Steve Bannon, Matt Walsh, Charlie Kirk.
41:51
And it was used in assassinations like the anti Muslim bigot murder at the Christ Church mosque in New Zealand.
So yeah, it is one of those conspiracies that exists, particularly because it shapes ideology and creates the mob mentality and effects policy.
42:08
It's one of those where it's a conspiracy theory, but it's also a call to action at the same time.
He does more than lean into it or do dog whistles.
I mean, he just gave a whole UN speech where that was a central tenet of his speech, that you're being replaced by the brown Muslims in Europe and we're going to stop it here in America.
42:26
There are some very, very powerful people in this country and around the world that are promoting this and are selling it and doing everything they can, including playing on the fears that populations like whites in the US feel.
And it serves a purpose too, because it directs any sense of anger downwards towards people who are worse off than you, as opposed to the people who actually have made your life unlivable.
42:50
As much as Trump is seen as a buffoon, he is in many, many ways.
But he's also incredibly smart in the way he mobilizes his base.
He knows who his supporters are.
He knows where their hearts are.
He knows what's happening on the Internet space that they inhabit.
43:07
So if we even think about his trajectory into the White House, he came in on this wave of birtherism.
That was one of his things is that he was like, show me your birth certificate, Obama.
And he was able to get all these racist people to like get behind him and demand that birth certificate too.
43:22
He said he was going to clean up the swamp, right?
He was going to get rid of the deep state.
He called the media fake news.
He really harnessed the anxiety and the mistrust his segment of the American populace was feeling.
The way that Trump was able to frame himself as an outsider, the anti establishment guy.
43:40
He's just the genius businessman who's going to come in and make the country a bunch of money, just like he made his businesses a bunch of money.
And really when he was coming in for his first term, I think a lot of people honestly looked at it like that.
And over time, he went from giving these like small nods and winks to his base to being open and embracing things.
44:01
So one of the things that he does in interviews is that he'll take whatever the dialogue is that's happening online and kind of mention it in a speech.
So like for the people who are reading online, they're like, yes, our guy, our guy is in the White House and he's saying the thing and he does it like with weird stuff like that.
44:17
He said Justin Trudeau could be the son of Fidel Castro.
Who could know?
Who could know?
We don't know.
Yeah.
And I think stuff like that, like the Justin Trudeau thing, is him playing on the idea that there are so many secrets, so many secrets that you don't know.
But I know, and I know and I know, and I'm just going to spill a little bit here and a little bit there.
44:37
He is actually a very smart man.
Not book smart, but he's very smart.
A smart con man.
And we have to talk about Q Anon.
Obviously, Q Anon is somebody who claimed to be really high up in the government, somebody who spoke to the President on a regular basis and they were leaking information about what was happening, but they were doing it in these very cryptic kind of Nostradamus esque type posts.
45:01
You can kind of interpret in many ways, Hugh.
And on was really, really huge within the MAGA set.
So there's even this moment where they're in the White House, they're about to take a photo and Trump is like, you know what this feels like, guys?
You know what this feels like?
This feels like the calm before the storm.
45:17
And within Q Anon lore, the storm referred to when Trump was going to come in and clean up everything.
So he was saying something that made no sense to anybody who's unfamiliar with Hugh.
So he was doing this directly to his people.
You guys know what this represents, what all of it.
45:38
Remember, you could tell it was.
Lift the storm.
Could indeed calmly fly the storm.
We.
Have the world's great military people that was really going to tell you that.
45:54
And we have a great evening.
Thank you all.
For coming.
Thank you.
What store, Mr. President?
You'll find out.
Give us a hint.
Thank you everybody.
I think it's actually very telling that a bunch of people who were there are saying what is the storm, what is the storm?
46:14
And that he won't answer them because it's not for them, it's for the people who are watching online.
I think you're right.
He knows how to reinforce this outsider appeal.
And in that way he's really like a kind of classic populist strongman.
Like he really knows how to manipulate people and play on their deprivation to initiate and spread all these lies.
46:36
But what's really remarkable to me is even to this day that he still claims to speak for the people against the corporate elites and has centralized so much power in his hands.
So you have this authoritarian figure who to his base doesn't feel like an authoritarian figure.
46:54
Like they see it as someone who's strong enough to take on the system.
And whenever he says anything like the media is lying or the system is rigged, they don't see him as a representative of that system.
They see him as as an outsider to it.
47:10
Yeah, the strongman who is an authoritarian figure, but a man of the people is actually.
Very classic.
It's actually very common in history.
That's usually how the strongman takes power.
He can appeal to the people over the established institutions.
47:26
I think also the Democrats helped feed his outsider image because since he left office their campaigns that they ran against him tended to run on 2 roads.
One was he's not your typical Republican.
We want the old Republican Party back.
Remember Biden many times giving speeches like that, that this guy is outside the mainstream.
47:44
So that reinforces that he's outside the establishment.
And then you had all the court lawsuits.
Now, was he guilty?
Probably, but they're all they're all crooks.
You know, I begin with the assumption they're all guilty until proven.
Anyone who gets that high up in the government.
So I have no doubt he probably was of all the things they said he did.
48:01
But, you know, let's let's dig into their closets.
But the fact that they actually pursued those cases against him reinforced the image that he's under some kind of witch hunt, that he's under some kind of attack and that he's an outsider, even though he's not.
He hobnobs or hobnobbed with all these people, with the Clintons, with with all of them.
48:19
And to mention a conspiracy theory that I don't consider to be in a conspiracy of any kind is Epstein.
Everybody knows the extent to which powerful men were involved in it, including him and others.
And it's like, what's the conspiracy?
The only conspiracy really is there.
48:35
You know, it's like that little kids putting their fingers in their ears and going la, la, la, la, la.
I don't want to hear it.
I don't want to hear it.
It's all out in the.
Air, something you said occurred to me though, because there is a lot of focus on conspiracies being so integral to the MAGA movement.
But one of the ways that the Democrats, because they couldn't defeat Trump politically, they had to make up their own lies and their own conspiracies.
48:58
And so they did that through Russiagate.
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, the MAGA guys promote themselves or see themselves as outsiders or even opponents of the establishment.
And then you have the Democrats who have basically embraced themselves to the idea of being the establishment.
So come the 2016 election, and I think Hillary Clinton thought it was her turn and was just going to be crowned and.
49:20
Surprise, surprise, here comes the young upshark, Donald Trump.
Yeah, and not only.
Did she lose it?
Was it?
Really was an underdog the way he did it.
And so the Democrats couldn't and wouldn't and would never turn around and say, well, we need to examine what we did wrong that so many people didn't vote for us.
49:39
No, they're like clinically incapable of self reflection.
Yeah, so they came up with this concocted story of Russia manipulating the election, and that story kept changing.
The story kept changing from Russia directly actually hacking things to Russia influencing which is 1 hell of a word because what does influencing mean?
49:57
And then we need they issued some reports about it became like Russia spent $150,000 on ads on.
Facebook, the funny, which is like, yeah.
And the funniest ones were like, Russia backed these ads about racial division because no one thinks that there's racism in society except when Russia intervenes and tells us so.
50:17
No American would do that.
It's absurd and it's an insult to any black person in the country because you're telling them the only reason you who feel any sense of racism is because of the Russians.
I think they really thought that creating the Russian bogeyman was going to be their winning strategy.
50:33
Yeah, the Democrats strategist needs to be like fucking slapped.
And fired.
What is wrong with this?
Person you really they have the worst strategies.
Ever, Lola, you saying that sentence?
I couldn't help but laugh.
Yeah, yeah, Everything they say, they're so fucking dumb, bro.
And it's like Kamala Harris, I didn't have enough time.
50:51
That demonizing Russia is going to win you the vote.
When was the last time ever an American election was decided by foreign policy?
American elections are decided only by your pocketbook.
That's it.
And race, Pocketbook and race.
Those are the two things that decide American elections.
The fact that the Democrats were so eager to jump onto this line, it just shows that both sides are susceptible to this behavior.
51:12
Both sides will use conspiracies when it behooves them.
Conspiracy theories have always existed before the Internet.
They spread slowly through books, word of mouth, you know, family dinners, whatever.
Now they go viral instantly.
They can reach millions through platforms.
51:29
And I think also in the past, like the mainstream media and academia really acted as a gatekeepers of quote UN quote credible information.
And today, anyone can publish anything.
So anyone can look just as legitimate as experts.
And I think that's a mixed bag.
51:44
There's a good reason for that because the media are so bought and paid by corporate America and by the ruling class.
But talk a little bit about how the Internet has kind of supercharged or turbocharged conspiracies.
Yeah, so you talked about a couple of them.
52:00
The pretty obvious ones are the speed and the range.
You know, of course, this information now can spread across a globe.
And in addition to that, the power is really placed into the least responsible players, I'll say, online in many cases.
52:17
So online, we have the benefit of anonymity.
And this anonymity allows people to come on and say that they are doctors or they're some sort of expert in something.
And you don't really know about the credentials of the person whose advice you're taking.
52:32
And because they may not be a professional, they can get online and they can say, if you drink this tea, it will cure your cancer 100% of the time.
Whereas somebody who actually has a medical license can come on and say, like, OK, this type of chemotherapy will work for this type of cancer 80% of the time.
52:49
And if they misrepresent those numbers, there's accountability for that.
So people who are working outside of institutions have a lot more power to make big claims, to make the kind of claims that really draw people in, to make the kind of claims that make people emotional.
So they take up a lot of the space on the Internet and they can produce their information a lot quicker, of course, because if you're a scientist, the doctor, a researcher, you're spending a lot of time fact checking, you're spending a lot of time cross referencing, and you're very careful about the kind of information you put out.
53:20
But people who are not experts and whose intentions may be to make money or they're not there with the same level of integrity as other players who are less careful about the kind of information they put up.
They can put up 40 videos a day.
Whereas somebody creating a peer reviewed paper like that takes time.
53:38
Another thing that's really affecting this conversation is the way that people view Main stream news and they're relying much more on like influencers and on the ground people, people who are living in the places, in the situations and reporting first hand.
So there's this kind of blurring about what is an expert?
53:54
What does it mean to be an expert within the new digital media landscape?
Yeah, When you were talking before about experts, I wanted to challenge that because I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think the main gauge that people have right now is authenticity.
And most investigative journalists and the journalists who actually are dedicated to doing authentic reporting on the ground have been removed from mainstream sites and are now on sub stack or doing their own thing.
54:22
And so you follow the people that you believe, you follow the people that you trust, and sometimes you trust people who are just on the street who have what you believe is reputable content.
So I think there is a blurring of the line, but I don't believe anything I see from mainstream media.
54:40
But I would say that I'm equally as distrustful on social media.
I always Fact Check everything.
That's just what I what I do.
I always look for other sources.
I'm just saying that what has changed within the last 30 years is there was a time where if you would see somebody sitting on their living room couch with a camera pointed at them with a T-shirt, you would immediately dismiss them as like, oh, this person is not a real professional.
55:04
And now it's the opposite.
People see high production somebody in a suit and tie and they're like, I should not trust what this person says.
And I'm not saying that's the way everybody thinks.
I'm just saying that's a shift that's been occurring with a large percentage of the population.
55:20
I guess I was thinking more about like how specifically people turn to conspiracies not only because of the distrust, but because of that sense of powerlessness over their lives.
And it's a way of basically re establishing some sort of power.
55:37
If we look at the big picture, over time, conservatives have kind of been pushed into anxiety.
Over the 20th century, some of the major changes that have happened, prayer was removed from school, desegregation happened, Roe V Wade happened.
So over the 20th century, there's been this move towards progressivism slowly, and those losses obviously create a lot of anxiety.
55:59
I think it's the conservative fear, like it's about people who are like church people.
They want prayer, they want Bible, they want family and.
They want the old racist social order.
Yeah, exactly.
So to watch that be challenged chipped away at.
56:14
Okay, so in my mind, if you look at something like the Great Replacement conspiracy, why does that get credence in America now on the face of, you could say, well, you know, there are more minorities in the US than there used to be, and that's undeniable, and there's just a racist backlash against that.
56:29
But I also think there's something else going on that's a little bit deeper.
These people that are attracted to this stuff, just specifically Great Replacement, are people who have a keen sense that they are living worse off than their parents and their grandparents.
The heyday of American power was the 1950s, coming off the Second World War, the American Century, jobs popping out everywhere.
56:51
If you were white, getting a house was very doable.
Getting a car was very doable.
Having a one income household was very doable.
And so that was then and then you look now you're living in the polar opposite world.
The proponents of these reactionary conspiracy theories, what they're very good at is taking that thread and saying, well, what was different?
57:10
What was different back then is the white man ruled.
What was different back then is women knew their place, blacks knew their place.
You didn't have immigrants.
And so it becomes in your mind.
There were always immigrants.
You didn't have brown immigrants.
Just be blunt about it.
57:26
You didn't have brown immigrants.
Your immigrants tended to be white.
You had some, I'm not saying you didn't have any, but they also knew their place.
And so you have a nostalgia for something of the past that you didn't live in.
And then it's connected for you with basically racist ideology that you may have been very open to, to begin with.
57:43
If I could just interrupt you for a second, that's one of the interesting things I found about this is that there are so many people who are slowly radicalized online.
People who voted for Obama and were excited about it and then went down this rabbit hole by like watching YouTube video after YouTube video after YouTube video that slowly escalated into the kind of propaganda that Ezra is talking about here.
58:03
The great replacement theory.
The people who didn't consider themselves to be racist but just absorb this ideology after time and became indoctrinated.
I don't doubt that.
All I actually think that's the most common version of it is, you know, most people don't just get up and say today I'm going to be racist, you know, and I hate this.
58:18
But the racism tends to be latent.
It's there, but it tends to be latent.
What usually happens, You voted for Obama.
Obama promised to a bunch of really good things.
He sold you a bill of goods and it never got cashed.
In the eight years under Obama, your life got worse.
And then they got really bad under Biden, by the way, because you had the massive inflation and COVID and all this stuff.
58:38
And meanwhile you have these people propagating the shit at you and something is clicking.
That thing that's clicking is the connection of the racist attitudes and the sexist attitude towards a nostalgia for a time when you weren't alive, but you know that life, you know, standard of living was better.
58:54
Yes, the algorithm tends to favor and push and things like that, but it works because there's fertile ground for it, that fertile ground being driven by the economic dislocation that has become basically the norm in this country.
It also is effective tool because it distracts people from who the actual enemy is and who the actual culprit is.
59:12
So it shifts the blame from the ruling class.
And you can believe all these things, but it's not used to become more radical against the actual system or to understand the social fabric of capitalism and who you're exploiting.
Yeah, so like instead of being mad at the actual ruling class, you're mad at lizard people.
59:30
Or brown immigrants.
You got to be one or the other, the reptilians or the Mexicans.
My one real political point about all this is a lot of people who buy into conspiracy theories.
And again, I'm talking about the big political stuff, conspiracy theories, they see themselves as particularly radical.
59:46
I don't think they are, because I think what this stuff does is it lets the ruling class off the hook.
It creates a whole complex web of intricacies, as though there's a mystery here.
It's not mysterious.
They're telling you who they are.
Even though a section of the ruling class will always complain about conspiracy theories, they are a godsend for them and that's why a section promotes them.
1:00:07
It's just they promote the ones that are good for them, whether it's Russiagate for the Democrats or replacement theory for the ban and Republicans and other Republicans or the stolen election, all of those things.
They are as much promoters of conspiracy theories as all the people they decry about.
Because what it does is for all the pretensions to radicalism that a lot of the people who believe in conspiracy theories have, it's actually very conservative.
1:00:30
What is radical is to recognize who is actually in charge and do something about that.
Yeah, there's a lot of reasons that you shouldn't trust your government and a lot of reasons you should be suspicious.
And if you look at the track record of the American government, you will see there are many times they have lied to the public.
1:00:46
There are many times they have hurt the public.
One case is MK Ultra, these crazy experiments that the CIA was doing for years after World War 2.
And going into the Cold War, the US was experimenting with psychological warfare, so trying to control people's minds and brainwash them and erase their memories and create Manchurian candidates.
1:01:07
So while they were trying to figure out how to manipulate people's minds, they were giving people psychedelic drugs without their knowledge.
So they were going into prisons and they were giving prisoners LSD for months at a time.
And there are written accounts of these prisoners struggles as they go through these trials.
1:01:24
This is all released and documented, something that the US government has admitted to.
And these were civilians who were victims of this project, Native American populations, just people who were vulnerable and unable to advocate for themselves or generally used for these kinds of practices.
Yeah, most of the stuff that seems too crazy to be true has actually happened.
1:01:44
I think the craziest one was Project Sunshine.
Oh yeah, Project Sunshine.
So after the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, they wanted to know what the long term effects of radiation would be.
So they started getting dead bodies so they can test them.
1:01:59
And they specifically wanted the bodies of children and babies, so they resource them from all over the the world.
In the US, they actually stole babies like it was an illegal program.
They would take them from poor people who had lost their children or other vulnerable populations.
1:02:15
That was literally called the Dead Baby Project.
That's what it was.
So what conspiracy are you most excited to propagate next?
I don't know, I can't think of something.
Will you actually ChatGPT?
OK, my conspiracy theory is that cats are not just pets, but that they are comrades in a long running global plan to dismantle capitalism and we are all part of the Feline Liberation Front.
1:02:38
That's not even that far fetched.
That kind of feels right.
I think this conspiracy theory has some legs.
Every time a cat walks across your keyboard, it's an attempt to interrupt the system.
Because you remember when the viral cat videos were like, really big?
Forever since the Internet was invented, you mean.
1:02:55
Isn't that why DARPA developed the Internet?
There was some defense thing, but.
That's all like psyops stuff I see.
Yeah, I see.
All right, Yeah, well, I'm going to go line my windows with aluminum foil.
We don't love anybody who doesn't love.
1:03:16
Us, thanks for listening.
Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe and check out our website at unwatchedun-ruly.com.
Unless, of course, the government already wiped your memory, in which case, welcome back.
1:03:43
My Wi-Fi has 12 characters.
Jesus had 12 disciples.
Wi-Fi connects us all.
Jesus connects us all.
Our routers are holy.
Well done.
Well done, Sir.
