00:02:57.460This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
00:03:00.860And I'm Kristen Conger, the host of the podcast Unladylike, and most recently, Conspiracy She Wrote.
00:03:10.360Okay, so that was a great visual description of your corkboard, but why did you make it?
00:03:15.980So I am, maybe ironically for a podcaster, I'm a very visual learner and conspiracy she wrote as a concept kind of started on this cork board because I was trying to map out the red strings of women and gender in kind of contemporary conspiracy.0.50
00:03:45.980theory culture. How do all of these relate to one another? Yes. Yes. I was also trying to
00:03:51.960understand at the time, this was still kind of peak QAnon. And I was trying to understand its
00:04:00.400basics of like, okay, so we've got deep state stuff over here. And then all of this adrenochrome
00:04:10.540child trafficking, blood sacrifice. Oh, turns out that's old school anti-Semitic blood libel
00:04:18.980mythology. There's a lot of nativism that then connects back to American histories of
00:04:29.940white people coming up with all these conspiratorial tales about how Native
00:04:35.320Americans were going to steal away their girls and women. Yeah, just kind of trying to connect
00:04:42.240past and present, but again, through like just absurdity, which are conspiracy theories.
00:04:52.240Melody says that we have to go, we can't chit chat much because we have a lot of really good
00:04:56.240questions. But I do want to ask you before we start, like, what is your favorite conspiracy
00:05:01.300theory and this isn't to trivialize like the various people who are harmed by conspiracy
00:05:06.380theories like all of the different prejudices and that sort of things but like there has to
00:05:11.640be one that you're like yeah that kind of hits me in my pleasure centers of like where I like
00:05:17.540to think conspiratorially oh well okay so my favorite is one that I do not subscribe to it
00:05:24.260whatsoever. But it's the one that kind of blew my mind the most in terms of its intensity. And that
00:05:36.840is Meghan Markle pregnancy truthers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, you're familiar. It's very similar to
00:05:46.000my favorite conspiracy theory, which is that Katie Holmes was pregnant with a Scientology alien.
00:05:52.220i haven't heard that one well that's from that's old school like perez hilton style
00:05:59.120gossip from the 2000s where like part of the way that it perpetuated itself was through people who
00:06:09.640found it like so ridiculous that it was entertaining exactly but then there are people
00:06:14.620who are like no but really what if and maybe it's not an alien right but maybe there is like a larger
00:06:21.080conspiracy to like give tom cruise a biological child like blah blah blah but yes similar so
00:06:30.580like anything that's truther about like fake pregnancies i'm like why would someone do that
00:06:36.780why would they go through that that is just a lot yeah having watched too many youtube videos of0.91
00:06:44.240it's usually women you know alleging that megan markle's children are actually dolls
00:06:50.560Like, it was just such an unexpected world to find myself in.
00:06:56.620But I will quickly mention in terms of one that I like to just mentally engage with because it's kind of fun and way more low stakes than, like, truly people coming for Meghan Markle.1.00
00:12:40.280As soon as you had wire services having to print retractions, that was when it burst way beyond anyone even interested in Royals or William, Kate, like my father, my boomer, white boomer dad, you know, could touch down on that.
00:13:02.620Like that's a baseline for me like that. That's when it really became mainstream news.
00:13:08.620news and then of course you also have a generation of women at this age who grew up like I remember
00:13:15.540where I was when I watched like legit I remember sitting and watching Diana's funeral I still have
00:13:22.160my commemorative People magazine with young Prince William on the cover who I was convinced I would
00:13:27.780marry because he and I are both left-handed Anne and that was really I thought what it would take
00:13:31.920a left-handed wow yeah great we'll all get married together yeah um so it was kind of a perfect storm
00:13:41.320for this thing to go as viral as it did I also think the kind of cultural conditions
00:13:49.520of your true crime uh domestic kind of uh gone girl dramas that have really captivated
00:13:57.940a lot of people just energizing it even more yeah well and i think the backdrop of the success of
00:14:06.500the crown and the idea that women within the monarchy are held do not have control of their
00:14:14.240own destinies right yeah made it easy to map some of these theories onto what was happening so in
00:14:20.780In my mind, you have the information vacuum that is then filled by all of this knowledge
00:14:29.500that we have about how the firm, as it's called, has operated historically, right?
00:14:46.960Although there are similar conspiracy theories around the monarchy in Monaco.
00:14:51.760I don't know where that is right now, but historically there was a lot of like, she was very unhappy.
00:14:56.800Not that she was like disappearing, but just that like she had been wet off outside of her control.
00:15:03.040But yeah, I think that you have that perfect mix of not enough information to satisfy people and then a whole lot of information that people can like plug in to come up with various theories of what is actually happening.
00:15:18.580And also, the other thing I will say is that I think that the reason you had so many people who are not usually conspiratorial minded participating in this is that we have, we are in a nadir of celebrity gossip and celebrity information.
00:15:36.240And there are very few celebrities who feel like global or even national touchstones, right?
00:15:43.420and so instead like she what was happening felt like something to talk about this was also we
00:15:52.320have to remember this is like the depth of winter right nothing else is going on and i don't think
00:15:58.240that you can discount the ways that conspiracy theories explode when there is not either during
00:16:04.920moments of anxiety certainly but also moments of like tedium and boredom okay correction not the
00:16:11.380depth of winter the worst part of winter the Ides of March was when a lot of this went down
00:16:16.960okay another piece of this too that also jives with just kind of conspiracy templates because
00:16:26.540a lot of conspiracy theories as kind of wild as the details are they're often you know hue to
00:16:32.320particular kinds of formats and genres and on the other side now of the Kate Middleton you know PR
00:16:42.480fiasco where now we know where she was and we know that she was away taking care of her health
00:16:47.400yeah celebrities kind of disappearing from public eye um and you know and there's a ton more that0.99
00:16:55.440we could say just about like female public celebrities disappearing from public eye
00:16:59.640And that's often a space, too, when, you know, just random celebrities will constantly get death hoaxed if they just aren't seen regularly enough.
00:17:10.620So Avril Lavigne, I think, you know, the the fandom conspiracy theory about her that she has had to live down now since the early 2000s is that she died and was replaced while she was recording her second album.
00:17:29.320and it kept recirculating every few years and kind of the worst time that it really spiraled
00:17:41.080out of control was when she had taken off a significant amount of time because come to find
00:17:47.260out she was treating like chronic Lyme disease right and like had to be away but imagine you
00:17:55.540were taking some time for yourself. You are seeking medical treatment, taking care of your
00:18:01.200health. And at the same time, your most committed diehard stans have started a change.org petition
00:18:09.940to get a proof of life from you to prove that you, Avril Lavigne, are not actually
00:18:16.980a lookalike named Melissa Vandella. Like, that's where it starts to get so wild.
00:18:25.540Yeah. It's like these narratives fill that vacuum. Exactly. Because she wasn't giving information about what was happening. Right. And there is this expectation now for celebrity transparency.
00:18:34.940And we still haven't gotten a ton of information. But I do think it's notable that once she published the video, Kate Middleton, it really shut things down. I mean, of course, there are still people like the top comment last time I looked at that video on X.
00:18:52.280the very first comment is, is this AI? It's both new and not new.
00:18:59.420Okay, next question is about your sweet spot, and it comes from Anna.1.00
00:19:03.920Why do conspiracy theories seem to flourish more among communities of women than among men?
00:19:08.800I've personally wondered if it begins when women first become mothers and fear drives them to buy
00:19:13.780not just every safety lock, but to obsessively read product labels and then from there enter
00:19:19.200the world of conspiracy theories by way of non-toxic, anti-vax, anti-big pharma, social
00:19:24.320accounts, businesses, and the like. Is it more than that, or is it less? Because fact remains,
00:19:30.560men can be conspiracy theorists too. Take, for example, professional conspiracy theorist Alex
00:19:36.200Jones, who has profited off of women and men with his hyper-masculine marketing of very sketchy
00:19:42.160supplements and survival kits. All right, I have a theory, but I want to hear yours first.
00:19:46.540So I want to clarify that it's not that conspiracy theories flourish more among women. They flourish differently. And I think up until quite recently have gone very much overlooked.0.99
00:20:02.580Whereas, yes, in the conspiracy space, the people who have, you know, been monetizing it for, you know, since the 90s, really, are your Alex Joneses, your David Ix, I think is how you pronounce his last name.
00:20:19.260Like it is a very Joe Rogan, you know. Yeah. These are very can be very male dominated spaces, but there's also kind of the whole wellness, conspirituality space where there are you tend to find a lot more women.
00:20:38.560And yes, anything that is attached to motherhood and parenting is understandably appealing to plenty of women.
00:20:51.300I mean, and I think that that's something that Pastel QAnon just really laid bare.
00:20:57.500So my theory is two part. But one is that like you take the like, and we're going to talk a lot more about this, I'm sure over the course of the episode, but like, no longer having trust in public institutions, right, including public health and like parenting institutions, and not necessarily having the sort of like trusted wisdom from your community group, or your parents or whatever it is, means that you are more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking when it comes to
00:21:27.500things that are happening to your kids I think like there's just a big fear so that's part of0.73
00:21:32.380it but my bigger thing with women and conspiracy theories is patriarchy right you're like what are0.97
00:21:39.240all the forces at work that make it so that like the wage gap persists like all of these different0.99
00:21:45.660things right and how do you explain it how do you explain the endurance of the patriarchy you have
00:21:52.060to come up with big wild theories otherwise it's just like oh men think that they're better than
00:21:58.660us like I just you know what I mean like I think that that is like a larger kind of like exploding
00:22:05.940brain theory of it but that's what I think makes us more women in general more susceptible to this
00:22:14.040sort of thinking like how else do you explain it yeah I mean and and they're like relatively early
00:22:19.980on as I started researching, you know, when I was back in my corkboard days. Yeah. I definitely
00:22:26.720had to pause for a minute and think like, wait a second, patriarchy, feminism, hang on. Am I,1.00
00:22:34.080am I a conspiracy theorist? And it's not a coincidence in right-wing political conspiracy
00:22:40.660theories that feminists are often like the go-to target of conspiracy theories. Like we are,1.00
00:22:48.180Of course, like handmaids of the New World Order.1.00
00:22:53.920Well, and this is interesting, right, too, because I think that if you are really engaged in feminist politics, then you can look at the world and think ideologically, oh, the reason things are the way that they are, they feel so intractable, is because of systems like white supremacy or patriarchy.0.78
00:23:10.920But if you're not used to thinking sociologically like that, then you have to have a different paradigm for why the world is the way that it is.0.97
00:23:20.140And a theme that I will probably reiterate in our conversation is that conspiracy theories are all about emotions.
00:23:29.600like the reason we get so invested in them is because yes there is a pleasure aspect of it
00:23:36.100and it's also you know they are kind of inherently emotional spaces we're talking about binary good
00:23:44.040versus evil right versus wrong like it's a very stark kind of worldview um and just to go back to
00:23:52.800Anna's question and the motherhood piece. This is something that Annie Kelly, who is a long time
00:24:00.940like anti-feminism and online extremism researcher, has uncovered, especially around
00:24:08.260pastel QAnon and anti-vax moms. She was talking to me about spending time inside of an anti-vax
00:24:16.500mom Facebook group. And she was surprised to find herself not empathizing with their
00:24:26.780anti-vax stances, but the kinds of stories that women would start sharing about kind of what led
00:24:34.560them to the spaces often had to do with how they were treated during the pregnancy and childbirth
00:24:45.000experience and also feeling like, OK, and as soon as I delivered that baby, no one cared about me
00:24:50.920anymore, you know, and medical gaslighting. I mean, that's on Ladylike, that is a constant
00:24:58.000theme. And that was a light bulb moment for her of saying, OK, we you can't just write everyone off
00:25:06.480as tinfoil hat nuts. Like we have to go back to what the actual kernels of truth
00:25:13.760that are then leading people down these rabbit holes yeah and when people don't believe
00:25:22.160what you are telling them about your own pain your own body your kids pain like
00:25:29.240what there has you have to come up with another framework to explain what's going on there
00:25:35.080because otherwise it's just like like you said medical gaslighting I was just reading this great
00:25:40.200book about the history of the cesarean and there's just all of this trauma amongst women who
00:25:44.720have like felt their cesareans and that doctors like either don't believe them or discount their
00:25:49.160pain and all those sort of thing and like I can see how if you're dealing with the aftermath
00:25:54.560of like this traumatic medical event that you'd be like oh maybe they want me to feel this pain
00:26:00.860or maybe there's a larger like organization at work that is trying to get women to have cesareans
00:26:06.580Right. Like there's just so many different directions you can go when you're trying to grapple with that sort of thing.
00:26:11.280And people aren't taking you seriously. OK, so we should transition to our next question, which comes from Claire.
00:26:17.520My mother has gotten into conspiracy theories just for fun.
00:26:21.600I think it's a slippery slope, but she insists it's just fun to think about aliens building the pyramids.
00:26:27.600Is there a healthy way to indulge in conspiracy thinking?
00:27:28.980Like, I let my, you know, my podcast friends tell me about it in my ears, you know, but I'm not spending a lot of time going down Reddit rabbit holes and things like that.
00:27:39.660Like, it's not the conspiracy theory itself or finding entertainment in that that is unhealthy.
00:27:51.280It's kind of what purpose it's serving for you and then what you choose to do with that information.
00:27:57.900Like, if Claire's mom is just enjoying watching, you know, binging ancient aliens on the weekends, okay.
00:28:06.700But if your mom suddenly is, like, posting on Facebook, because you know it's going to be Facebook, all about those alien pyramids, it's like that's when it starts to kind of, like, take over more than maybe there's cause for concern.
00:28:21.940The more people that I talk to who have been studying conspiracy theories and their kind of media ecosystems and the beliefs in how they work, something that I've heard over and over and over again is basically like, we don't need to be just like afraid of all of this stuff.
00:28:42.180Like, are we living in a very conspiracy-pilled moment?
00:28:51.940It's not this all of a sudden kind of thing. And for me, at least, like, really, once you start to contextualize some of this, it at least takes like the immediate panic level down a smidge.
00:29:10.060Yeah, I agree. I think like, seeing, okay, so what do they like, is this entertainment value? Like, is it actually something that they're like, this is funny? Like, this is interesting for me to think about? Or is it something that is affecting the way that I view the world and the way that I trust public institutions? Like, how does the how doesn't believing that like the, I don't know, the moon landing was staged, transform into the election was stolen?
00:29:39.320like those are the ways that you have to think about like have we reached that point or is it
00:29:43.740still like i kind of don't trust the government which it's it's healthy to have a moderate
00:29:48.880distrust of the government i think yes but yeah um okay i that those words came out of my mouth
00:29:57.060and i was like i do believe that like i i was like i you know is that controversial i was like
00:30:03.340but i do believe that i believe that like it's we should be questioning and interrogating the
00:30:07.180way that the government works. All right. So next question is about, again, about the appropriate
00:30:12.680ways to engage in conspiracy theories. This is another question from Anna, who submitted two
00:30:17.740really good questions. This is very rare. But you know, when you do a really good question,
00:30:21.460they can do it. In today's climate, calling somebody a conspiracy theorist is a top tier
00:30:26.640takedown, especially when in reference to a public figure. With it being such a loaded label,
00:30:32.580how can we balance questioning status quos and being curious or open-minded with reason?
00:30:38.440In other words, can we be curious or fringe without being a conspiracy theorist?
00:30:43.520And is there a chance that openness to hearing out people's theories
00:30:46.760might make conspiracy theorists' tribes less powerful
00:30:49.940because there might be less social rejection driving people into their arms?
00:30:56.360And also, I teed that up really well without even realizing it.
00:30:59.320So, Kristen, what do you think of this question?
00:31:01.180OK, so how can we balance questioning status quos and being curious? I mean, this kind of goes back to what I'm saying about like we don't we don't have to be afraid of these things necessarily.
00:31:17.940Being called a conspiracy theorist is, you know, absolutely a pejorative. But the fact of the matter is we can still operate and ask questions from like a grounded, connected to reality kind of place.
00:31:37.140Right. So give me an example of like what that looks like.
00:31:39.520okay let's go to where is Kate yeah I think that it's acceptable and not at all
00:31:47.780fringe to look at an institution like the monarchy the firm understanding it's you know
00:31:58.160kind of general machinations in terms of the image that it needs to present uh versus like
00:32:06.500whatever might be happening behind the scenes, it's perfectly rational to look at that and say,
00:32:12.460hmm, maybe what Kensington Palace or Buckingham Palace, whatever palace it might be,
00:32:19.900maybe the palace is not exactly saying what's going on. And I don't think that that's a fringe
00:32:28.160space to go. I think once you start questioning everything, going back to those three key
00:32:36.880ingredients of, you know, accidents don't happen. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected.
00:32:44.200When it's the entire worldview is starting to look, you know, uncanny valley, I think that's
00:32:51.220when it starts getting into the fringe. A moment that I experienced recently where I caught myself
00:32:58.560in that, you know, three ingredient conspiracy thinking soup was the day that the attempted
00:33:07.720Trump assassination happened. Oh, right. Right. I was out to dinner with my husband and a couple
00:33:14.500folks and we got back in our cars after dinner and like checked our phones and like oh and I just
00:33:22.120saw the photo first the fist up photo and my immediate thought was oh well this looks staged
00:33:32.860I went there like that was my immediate place of like oh well because Trump is a liar who lies
00:33:40.060about everything yes yes so that is not like an unsubstantiated theory yes and and the optics
00:33:48.400of it like it just seemed and the timing the timing is too perfect it's all too too good to
00:33:54.820be true for him and I realized I was doing the thing that that I've been researching you know
00:34:04.840for, for years now. And that's when I remembered, okay, wait, Occam's razor, very helpful to shave
00:34:12.940with in those kinds of moments, because it's like, all right, so either there was some kind
00:34:19.300of setup where this random kid was on a roof at a rally and managed to just shave, you know,
00:34:25.220just nick an ear. Trump was willing to get shot, but, but not too shot, you know, like,
00:34:32.540is it either not two shot yes either this whole scenario with all these individual players and
00:34:42.740parts like everything had to work out exactly as planned or what is far likelier in a country
00:34:52.020where we have way too many guns and young white men committing way too many mass shootings like
00:34:59.740what the news is telling me happened probably happened at the same time i also want to
00:35:06.300legitimize our immediate reaction to thinking maybe this was in part staged because of what
00:35:13.980we know about him and his campaign and everyone that he surrounds himself with right but when
00:35:19.660then many journalistic sources are reporting that this is not the case then i think that that's
00:35:27.780where you can be like, oh, okay, I understand why my mind went the way that it did. But I will say
00:35:33.060that one thing that I find really interesting about my own reaction to things is because I've
00:35:39.080studied the history of stardom for so long. Anytime I see things happening around a public
00:35:47.480figure or a celebrity, I immediately interrogate. I'm like, okay, so what was going on with their
00:35:53.680publicist? How do they think about this? You know, what images are they releasing? And how did they
00:35:58.840think about the staging of these images? What paparazzi did they tip off? Like, what we see of
00:36:04.320a celebrity, or a politician is always the tip of the iceberg. And so sometimes it's interesting
00:36:10.620to approach public events from that, from that viewpoint of being like, well, there was a whole
00:36:17.060lot else going on that we didn't see, or even like, Biden dropping out of the race, we can all
00:36:23.060understand that there was a lot of things happening behind closed doors that we may or may not ever
00:36:28.220know and not think that it's a conspiracy like there's a fine line right between like
00:36:33.500understanding that there is organizational scheming yes and that that's different than
00:36:39.740everything we can't trust anything right and that it's some kind of nefarious plot
00:36:46.260right and with like when I think about it was stars like yes a lot of it is manufactured and
00:36:51.860a lot of gossip is placed and a lot of paparazzi is staged but then you still have the authentic
00:36:56.900star who is at the core of it so even if like some of their hobbies might be made up or like
00:37:02.600you know they were told what to say in an interview or they're faking a romance all things
00:37:07.060that have happened in the past and continue into the present they're still ultimately a person
00:37:12.720and like you can't totally fake a personality and i think too that you know with the with the
00:37:19.280trump example yes my my mind was spinning for a hot minute but i wasn't i wasn't hopping on and
00:37:27.520like i did not then broadcast all of my you know hot takes in that in that moment because i knew
00:37:34.760it was unnecessary okay so our next two questions are about the forces at work and conspiracy
00:37:41.120theories and this first question comes from erin i work for a 178 year old educational and research
00:37:48.000institution. There are some really yucky conspiracy theories about what we're supposedly hiding in
00:37:54.360our vaults. People like to yell at us on social media to finally reveal the truth, and it seems
00:37:59.740to flare up worse around election time. Is there some entity intentionally pushing harder on these
00:38:05.240conspiracies ahead of election day? How and why? Is it the conspiracists' anxiety flaring up?
00:38:12.500This is like a conspiracy theory around conspiracy theories. What do you think is going on here?
00:38:18.000I think that I'm not surprised to hear that it intensifies around elections, conspiracy theories, and any kind of conflicted event, which I think a very intense presidential election like this one counts.
00:38:34.900Any kind of major event like that is going to gin up conspiracy theories.
00:38:43.300As far as unentity, no, I don't think that there is like one entity. It's a bunch of them because there is a whole kind of MAGA right wing media ecosystem that has made partly like a business out of perpetuating this kind of stuff.
00:39:03.440And it also makes me curious about like what kinds of platforms you're talking about specifically, because now it's like if you're on X, like if we're talking about a conspiracy theory on X, it's so like dark web, MAGA, conspiracy pilled over there that it's kind of another world.
00:39:21.980And I think that there might be concerted efforts in the sense of like trolls maybe coming more en masse.
00:39:30.460But I just think that if you are if you are an institution like this, that is constantly like for years and years, decades, has been the subject of conspiracy theories.
00:39:43.100Like these things just get recycled over and over again.
00:39:46.800So unfortunately, like, if you're there, the conspiracy theories will inevitably come.
00:39:54.380Well, and this is why I also think that more and more institutions are either like significantly moderating or turning off comments on places like Facebook because they want to publicize like, oh, here's what we have in our archive.
00:40:05.880Like, you know, like publicizing the archive is something that is like a really important and cool thing to do.
00:40:12.080But at the same time, you are also creating a venue for those conspiracy theories to be publicized.
00:40:18.640Right. Like maybe someone never heard that that was even something that you could think about what was in the vault until they read it in a comment on a random Facebook page that surfaced on their page because like they follow some other local historical organization.
00:40:33.720so it's worth thinking about how these theories are disseminated to like just like the visibility
00:40:42.120whereas before it was like you know old like pamphlets that would circulate right thing or
00:40:47.760like talk radio things that were not part of the the record in how we think about like oh here's
00:40:54.620a facebook page where i see this theory surface every single time we post something and that's
00:40:59.260Why, you know, concern about, oh, my God, are we all conspiracy theorists now?
00:41:05.840Like, what has happened to our society?
00:41:07.800That kind of fear also makes a lot of sense because the basis of a lot of it is not new at all.
00:41:17.780But the speed at which things spread and can be created and can be ingested is just that's kind of what's what's out of control and makes it feel as if it's overtaken everything.
00:41:54.660Women are essential to that particular history.1.00
00:42:00.520And this is something that I unpack in the first episode of Conspiracy She Wrote.
00:42:07.120And it is specifically, it focuses in on this woman named Nesta Webster who was a trailblazer in a way who deserves no celebrating because this is almost exactly 100 years ago after World War I.0.89
00:42:28.060in the lead up to world war ii this woman nesta webster is a british aristocrat who
00:42:35.800is like mildly interested in women's suffrage but she she's also smart enough to know that like
00:42:44.580women only getting the vote is not going to do like all that much you know to really like level1.00
00:42:50.960the playing field um she didn't want to get married initially so she like went on an eat1.00
00:42:56.820pray love trip around the world. Like in some ways, she almost could have been like taking
00:43:02.280another path and become, you know, like a gender studies professor. Not that those existed back
00:43:06.900then. But what then ends up happening is she gets married to a rich dude. She has some kids and she
00:43:18.740begins a writing career as a historian focused in really around the French Revolution.
00:43:26.820And she publishes a couple of books and they're very well received. She has, I mean, the books are like reprinted. It's all fine, well and good. Nesta, though, long story short, gets her hands on some old school Illuminati conspiracy theory literature.
00:43:49.340And the whole Illuminati lore began post-French Revolution when the aristocracy is like looking at the ruins and saying like, how could this happen? All of these nobodies rising up and taking over. There must have been someone helping a secret cabal, if you will.
00:44:10.080And that is where secret societies and the Illuminati specifically first become conspiracy theorized.
00:44:20.300Nesta gets her hands on this because she's obsessed with the French Revolution from a historical perspective.
00:44:25.860But then things take a turn and she starts to believe that she's a reincarnation of a French aristocrat who lived through the revolution, really strongly identifies with this.
00:44:37.680And her next book is basically about that. She starts to write about how she has discovered that everything written in history books is false and come to find out there has been this whole Illuminati plot that has been puppet mastering history as we know it.
00:45:01.220And what's fascinating is, well, one, what she brings into the Illuminati mix at that point is protocols of the elders of Zion and anti-Semitism.
00:45:13.080So she shifts it from, you know, the secret society that's really just kind of interested in more enlightenment intellectualism and adds to that.
00:45:25.120Right. Which was rampant in that section of society at that time.
00:45:27.720Absolutely. And some of it also was spread through like women's salons and, you know, these groups, you know, kind of word of mouth. And the book that she publishes about this ends her reputation.
00:45:44.080She loses all public credibility. And this is something that we've seen before. It reminds me of Naomi Wolf and her pivot because Nesta Webster becomes so outraged that people don't respect her like anti-Semitic Illuminati mongering that she just digs in further.
00:46:02.120And she's just a full blown fascist. And the book that she writes ends up, you know, infiltrating right wing American politics, evangelical Christian fundamentalism, like all of this stuff that would then bubble up in the wake of the Cold War in the U.S.0.97
00:46:20.660So we have like, I mean, it's really the anti-Semitic stuff is baked in from the jump. And I was just fascinated to learn that, oh, my God. And it was this woman cooking up some of this stuff with help from some other women who were just, you know, connecting all kinds of dots because they didn't have jobs.
00:46:44.260They had the time, but it took them years to do this, whereas, you know, if they were just online today, like, they'd probably have, honestly, like a sub-stack empire, let's be honest.1.00
00:46:59.680Within a couple of weeks, they'd be right at home.
00:47:03.200It does. I mean, but what I wonder, though, too, like, why? Why is it that if you scratch any conspiracy theory, like if you just go a little bit deeper, then the anti-Semitism emerges? Like, why is that like the epidermal layer of all of these? Do you know what I mean?
00:47:22.200Yes, I think I think because it is baked in to Illuminati conspiracy theories, because Illuminati is really just like one term for this idea of, you know, New World Order or elite cabals, the Hollywood cabal.
00:47:41.440Like it's all roads eventually lead back to the same same stuff, these same dots that people have been attempting to connect for a century plus.
00:47:56.940Which is rooted in all of like the old tropes of anti-Semitism about like money and it's baked into all of it.
00:48:04.320Yeah. And that's where and that is where it starts to get slippery slope of like, I think it is helpful for people eyes wide open to understand, you know, even if we're talking about like Illuminati, you know, celebrity rumors that seem very trivial.
00:48:23.840We still got to know where that stuff is eventually going to take you.
00:48:26.800Right. Okay, to wrap it up, we're gonna we're gonna talk a little bit about a conspiracy theory that has swept through, as you said, like pastel QAnon, like a lot of different Facebook groups that I know people are part of, like, it's just everywhere. So this specific theory comes from a different listener named Anna, and Melanie is going to read it.
00:48:48.840What is the deal with the fixation on sex trafficking by conservatives and suburban
00:48:53.840dwellers? As a white woman in the suburbs of a red state, I am flabbergasted by how often I am
00:48:59.600fed stories of child abductions in parking lots or bigger sex trafficking networks. I see it
00:49:05.180covered often by my conservative friends. I am in no way minimizing the horrific nature of sex
00:49:10.800trafficking, but it seems disproportionately reported and focused on by the ultra conservative
00:49:16.060and evangelical groups well and there's also all of this like symbolism like oh if you see one of
00:49:22.480my favorite tiktoks is like this woman who walks out of her house and like points at a car with
00:49:26.760a bumper sticker for like i don't know taylor swift or like a school baseball team and it's0.90
00:49:31.880like sex trafficking right like so you somehow you see the signs everywhere once you start to
00:49:37.880look for it and okay i think that there's that jeffrey epstein of it all combined with q anon
00:49:45.140combined with like incredible fears about the future of children that probably have a lot more
00:49:50.380to do with climate change and public health and mass shootings than anything to do with child
00:49:57.360sex trafficking. But like they consolidate onto the idea of like, what if my kid gets abducted and
00:50:03.680in sex trafficked? That's my that's my constellation. I also think, you know, in the
00:50:09.420context of epstein and q anon i think that there's also a piece too of the me too movement kind of
00:50:16.500being warped and weaponized to to feed it as well but the thing with the sex trafficking and pedo
00:50:25.960panic like i honestly could do a whole separate season just on that because it runs so deep and
00:50:34.520has been relied on for ages now by like reactionary right wingers and more like evangelical groups
00:50:43.540to essentially like make people afraid yes and it's just it is an age-old way of getting people
00:50:51.700scared about the other who is waiting yes you are in danger and there is still like the animating
00:51:02.840force of white women's purity and like sexual safety all of that is still extremely potent
00:51:14.980and if we look back in history going back all the way you know to the 1830s there was massive like
00:51:24.920anti-catholic conspiracism in the united states because you had a lot of immigration
00:51:31.300from Ireland at the time, a lot of Catholicism coming into the U.S., and Protestants were
00:51:38.100working overtime to spin that into some kind of plot that basically the Pope was, you know,
00:51:44.380trying to take over. And one example of this that to me resonates a lot with, you know,
00:51:51.520the same kind of sex trafficking conspiracism today is a book called The Awful Disclosures
00:51:59.320of Maria Monk that came out in 1836. Don't read it. It's the total fabrication. But
00:52:09.920this book was kind of the alleged story of this woman, a real woman who was, as they put it back
00:52:20.100in the day, an unwed mother. And she was pregnant because, according to this book, she had been
00:52:25.780sent away to a convent. And all of the priests, it turns out it was like, you know, kind of like
00:52:32.500a QAnon hellscape of all of these priests and sexual abuse and awful things happening at
00:52:38.640nunneries. There was, in fact, like a convent, like girls school outside of Boston that was
00:52:45.380burned down around then because people were convinced, almost Pizzagate style, that like
00:52:53.520that nunneries were, you know, defiling all of these young women. And that book,
00:53:02.100Obscure as it is today, was, I think, bestseller on the level of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
00:53:09.800And fast forwarding to like the progressive era, we get the passage of the Mann Act and this whole
00:53:15.520obsession with so-called white slavery. And anytime you have these moments of like mass
00:53:22.240immigration you know in these like nativist fears coming up you often have with that
00:53:29.000some version of white women focused sex trafficking because also i'm not exactly sure
00:53:37.560oh yes in anna's question she does specify oh no she specifies she's a white woman but i feel like
00:53:43.000a lot of this kind of sex trafficking panic she's talking about is very targeted yes targeted at
00:53:49.740white women, which isn't new at all and often, I think, is in service of reinforcing patriarchal
00:53:57.740masculinity, whether that is through laws or through men needing to be men to protect their1.00
00:54:06.080trad wives. Right. And yeah, you have to like you need the safety of a man in order to survive.
00:54:12.080So you need to be within the family union and you need to submit to your husband who will protect
00:54:16.060you and all of those different things we could do like 17 episodes just unpacking everything that
00:54:23.840is happening here i just made your description of that book makes me think of go ask alice which1.00
00:54:29.500was also like a manufactured narrative to like scare kids straight because women had more like
00:54:36.860sexual freedom and latitude than any other point in american history so it's like oh what should0.99
00:54:41.580we do? We should publish this book that, like, I still read it. I devoured it years after it came
00:54:48.260out. Like, everyone I knew had read it. Anna's also spot on with the ultra-conservative and
00:54:53.600evangelical groups, because I think it also, it ties in so perfectly with the purity culture
00:55:01.680and just, like, straight up, like, fear of female sexuality and the power that it has over
00:55:10.840cisgender men just like all of those kinds of toxic messages um yeah and it's also another
00:55:17.240potent space too where you can also get these kinds of uncanny alliances between you know an
00:55:25.000ultra conservative evangelical group and you know more like a mainstream feminist group because
00:55:31.480who doesn't want to protect women and girls you know it's kind of that whole thing i always think
00:55:39.460like because there's the overlap between isn't it there's an organization that is very legitimate
00:55:45.080called save the children yes yeah that like jennifer garner is very involved in right and
00:55:51.940then there's another one that's like an anti-sex trafficking like q anon situation that had marches
00:55:58.080and that sort of thing that is not that and but that that that speaks to the overlap that you get
00:56:05.720Right. Between someone who just likes Jennifer Garner and someone who is suddenly like looking for signs of sex traffickers in their suburban mall parking lot.
00:56:14.260And I think if anything, what it what it reflects, again, is that there is something from my observations.
00:56:22.020I just think that there is a lot of like just gendered stuff baked into these kinds of conspiratorial spaces today where it's really playing into whether it is like motherhood role or, you know, protecting women or men being the mama bears.
00:56:44.260Yes. So that's that's got to me making a podcast because I just I want to understand it.
00:56:55.000I'm like making the inverse of unladylike.
00:56:58.560No, and that's that's a fantastic place for us to actually segue into our ask and anything part of the show.
00:57:05.080So for this ask and anything part, we're going to actually try to be helpful to people.
00:57:08.640I think we've been helpful in contextualizing, but this is going to be a specific advice question.
00:57:15.520And this is from Michelle. I'm often struck by my lack of ability to respond to conspiracy theories,
00:57:22.220whether it's about medical issues or political misinformation. There's something inside me that
00:57:27.020was taught to be polite and not challenged when people say things that are completely out of
00:57:31.260pocket. I find myself doing the same thing when confronted by any dogma, including religious
00:57:36.660beliefs. I'm wondering if this is a common experience that has allowed conspiracy theories
00:57:41.440to flourish. What's an approach that would be appropriate for someone who comes at me with
00:57:45.960their research? Oh, I don't have the answer to this one, but I would love to hear your thoughts.
00:57:53.760I very much relate to this, because truth be told, conspiracy she wrote started because
00:58:01.680a not super close friend but someone who I've like known long enough presented me with a
00:58:09.680conspiracy theory and I was a gog and like I think I truly just I asked her if she was a QAnon or
00:58:19.680like I tried to kind of play it off as a joke she wasn't joking and I like found an exit I didn't
00:58:26.420know what to say because it wasn't a space of like I had so many questions I had no idea what
00:58:34.260she was talking about either and I think that it is okay to not engage it if you don't need to I
00:58:45.040mean I think it depends on the the closeness of the friend yes right yes or the family member
00:58:52.200And if it's someone that's like, yeah, if it's like a mom that, you know, from preschool, you know, it's like trying to talk to them about politics or like convincing them to change their political persuasion.
00:59:03.160Like that's not you need intimacy in order to like have a real talk about that.
00:59:07.040And I think that one one thing that's really, really helpful to remember is that attempting to debunk conspiracy theories is a wasted effort, not because facts are meaningless, but because conspiracy theories by their nature resist any kind of resolution.
00:59:30.840yeah so any kind of counter evidence or you know anything to the contrary of what
00:59:39.660someone is presenting you can then just be twisted into either proof of a cover-up or
00:59:46.600you know what i mean like it's it's you're setting yourself up kind of to fail it's the
00:59:51.900brilliance of conspiracy theories is that they can accommodate anyone's counter argument they're
00:59:58.440like yeah of course you would say that right right right of course or like of course you believe that
01:00:04.160because this is what they want you to believe there is space for that argument that counter
01:00:08.960argument and i think that like listening to what it is and then having conversations that aren't
01:00:14.980like well let me send you these five rebuttals or like let me send you this washington post article
01:00:20.960about like five truths about vaccines that sort of thing that's not going to work it's more have
01:00:27.880But, like, I think thinking about, okay, what maybe made this person think in a conspiratorial way?
01:00:47.020It requires a lot more work and it is probably not your responsibility to do that work because just, again, by the nature of conspiracy theories,
01:00:57.640It's often something that people kind of have to, like, work out for themselves.
01:01:05.080Well, and a lot of things have had to happen in their lives and in their experience of the world to make them susceptible to this world belief.
01:03:55.200I feel it's essential, especially for this podcast.
01:03:58.080You can find all of that information if you want to go deeper at conspiracyshewrote.com.
01:04:03.520And you can also listen to the podcast on Ladylike if you don't want to hear about conspiracy theories.
01:04:12.460They've listened all the way through the app and they're like, no, no conspiracy theories for me, but I'll take on Ladylike.
01:04:19.560And as far as an episode to start with, episode three, Taylor Swift's PsyOps, is a pretty rich text because we go into Taylor Swift's, like, weaponizing her into, like, a Nazi meme all the way into, and yes, I will say it out loud, Gaylor.