00:00:49.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:04.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:09:17.100And plus, I mean, I'm, I'm getting my master's degree right now, but like I, I will shit on academia all day. Like they gatekeep, they keep their gates up and like they will use language that nobody understands. They don't understand it. Like it's, it's overly dense. It's very difficult to get a big picture a lot of the times.0.98
00:09:46.300Like, you can't, like, read an article and just take away, like, one big picture in the way that a TikTok can.
00:11:37.920i was yeah we were talking on tinder and i was carrying the conversation no um
00:11:47.680and i was like so like which conspiracy theory like you had to believe in one would you believe
00:11:56.420in and it took us to um we were talking about all the different types of conspiracies and i was like
00:12:02.260this is ridiculous like i'm like it would be so fun to believe in lizard people and like hollow
00:12:07.220earth but i know that they're anti-semitic i was like so i can't and also like there needs to be0.67
00:12:12.980some sort of like there needs to be levels there needs to be an acceptable place at which at which
00:12:20.020you should stop look but like there also needs to be just categorization um and i drew it and i sent
00:12:30.180it to my dad and i sent it to like a couple friends and they liked it and i posted it on
00:12:35.860TikTok and I had a very small account at that point because I had just started a new one
00:12:40.040and it like slowly kind of blew up there. Yeah, I saw it everywhere. Even this morning,
00:12:46.300somebody showed me a Star Wars adaptation of your chart. Someone, yes, they changed it to fit Star
00:12:51.780Wars like fandom beliefs, I think is what it is. And it's gorgeous. Yeah, they did a nice job.
00:13:00.960You know, something that I love about your chart is that it starts with these things that actually
00:13:04.420are grounded in reality. Things that we know actually did happen, like big tobacco lying
00:13:09.120about cigarettes causing cancer, or the NSA spying on American citizens, or the Tuskegee
00:13:13.460experiments. You know, these are situations where people with power actually did abuse
00:13:18.020that power and lie to us. So it's not like people, especially people who are already
00:13:22.340marginalized, don't have a reason to be skeptical. But, you know, just because powerful people
00:13:27.900lie and abuse that power does not give you license to just believe any conspiracy theory
00:13:32.480that's out there on the internet. Why was it important to you to include things that actually
00:13:36.620happened in your chart? First of all, they did happen. I'm not trying to like say that all
00:13:41.960conspiracies as a whole are completely impossible. Conspiracies are a real type of crime. Conspiracy
00:13:48.720theories are usually preposterous. Nobody was looking at Tuskegee and thinking like, I bet it's
00:13:56.800a secret group underground who are like drinking blood like no like people with power abuse their
00:14:03.600power all the time and that should be recognized and those like those fears those anxieties about
00:14:09.620that happening are super super valid um and i think that that's a really good way to show of
00:14:17.860like what it actually looks like when people lie and people abuse their power versus what it looks
00:14:23.960Like, when you imagine your worst enemy of a weird, suspiciously evil super group of Jews, like, those are very different images.
00:14:37.900In 2018, while California was being ravaged by wildfires, Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a Georgia congressional representative, said in a now-deleted Facebook post that the cause could have been laser beams from space controlled by the Rothschild International banking firm.0.87
00:14:53.960Now, this is obviously not true and is so ridiculous, but it's also really messed up.0.89
00:19:42.700And I think I thought of myself as kind of appreciating conspiracy theories kind of ironically.
00:19:47.160And, you know, with your work in conspiracy theory, you seem like someone who is actually sort of interested in conspiracy theories, how they spread, why people get involved in them.
00:19:57.160And I wonder, do you think people get indoctrinated by conspiracy theory by just sort of being interested in them and before they know it, they're actually true believers?
00:20:08.340I think in a lot of ways, it's very similar to like the way we see like these alt-right boys on 4chan experimenting with like testing using hateful language.
00:25:45.080I'm glad that you're, like, definitely there with, like, doing both because I've seen a lot of people who aren't ready to have the discussion at all that these people have been manipulated.
00:25:57.640And that's really – it's difficult because it's a hard discussion to have, right?
00:26:05.700For me, I think like a lot of them are victims of this misinformation.
00:26:16.160They're essentially pawns in like a much bigger game that does not excuse their actions.
00:26:22.340Like they still, if you break the law, like you still have to pay those consequences.
00:26:28.460But as a society, I think focusing on the narrative of like, these specific people are bad is a waste of time because it's like, it's a distraction. It's not focusing on the problem. Do I want to hang out with them? No, like, absolutely not.
00:26:50.220I'm like, if they're arrested, that's probably for the best.
00:29:59.260Whether you're looking for literary deep dives,
00:30:01.180smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much,
00:30:06.820you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app,
00:30:11.440Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.
00:30:21.000Let's get right back into it. It can be really tough in the aftermath of everything that happened
00:30:25.660at the Capitol to really remember that it is not just about these individual people that storm the
00:30:31.000Capitol, but it is really about larger systems and larger forces at play. And having those
00:30:36.020conversations is really critical. If every person who physically stormed the Capitol got locked up,
00:30:40.640we would still have these problems to contend with in our society about how we got there in
00:30:44.400the first place. Yeah. Your information constructs your reality. If you're getting false information,
00:30:53.080your reality is false. When you add in like QAnon specifically, now we have an apocalyptic
00:30:59.500internet religion who believes when they storm that Capitol that the storm will happen in the
00:31:05.660apocalypse. It's apocalyptic. Like they don't, they did not necessarily think about what would
00:31:11.280happen. Again, not an excuse for their actions, but something that like makes it a little bit
00:31:19.400easier, I think, to try and think about the big picture. So I know somebody who is involved in
00:31:25.400QAnon. Her flavor of QAnon is definitely the kind of save the children heavy scare quotes around
00:31:31.260that vibe where she genuinely believes that this kind of thinking is in opposition to this, you
00:31:38.100know, network of evil people who are exploiting and abusing children. Obviously, that is untrue,
00:31:44.320but that is what she clearly believes. And so I think for her, you know, there's not really a way
00:31:49.620to say this where I don't sound like an asshole, but she's not someone who I would describe as0.93
00:31:53.900having a lot in her life to make her life feel meaningfully full. And thinking of it from her0.96
00:32:00.360perspective, I can imagine that when she posts these things about like not believing the media
00:32:04.780and not being a sheep and, you know, not just believing what they say on CNN, she's probably
00:32:09.860being validated. She probably feels like people are agreeing with her. When people don't agree
00:32:15.280with her, she probably thinks she probably feels that probably makes her feel even more validated.
00:32:19.260And so I feel like one aspect of this that we don't often talk about is that for a lot of these people, I almost feel like it offers a kind of community where there was not community for them before.
00:32:31.380And for her, I do feel like it's given her life a new kind of meaning that it didn't have before.
00:32:37.700Unfortunately, that cause and that meaning just happens to be disgusting and abhorrent and dangerous.
00:32:49.260Uh, yeah, no, I mean, what, like, you've just nailed it. Like, that is one of, that is essentially how most people get into this. It's, it's, if you don't necessarily have, like, a strong sense of self, or you're, especially if you're in the middle of a crisis, right?
00:33:08.100So a lot of people who fall into conspiracy thinking in general and, like, go down the rabbit hole, that'll happen when they're at a crisis point or when there's, like, been a dramatic shift in their life.
00:33:59.240And now like here's something very specific that you can do to fix the world.
00:34:05.340um never mind the fact that it's making it worse and everybody is begging you to stop everybody
00:34:12.640everybody in the in the in the trafficking world is begging you to stop um but yeah it gives you
00:34:21.660that sense of purpose which is why if you're trying to help somebody get out um one of the
00:34:27.240best things you can do is try and help them refine their purpose outside of that narrative
00:34:33.360Yeah, I mean, another good point there is that people who do anti-sex trafficking work, universally they talk about how QAnon and Save the Children and all that stuff is making their jobs that much harder.
00:34:45.160So if you actually genuinely cared about protecting children, getting involved in QAnon and this kind of stuff is actually doing the opposite of that because you're making the jobs of people who actually prevent that kind of thing that much harder.
00:34:56.820There are ways to be active in that work, but choosing to do so in a way where you're suggesting that it's more likely that there's this huge global network of people drinking blood and shipping babies overseas through websites and all of that, as opposed to the fact that children are more likely to be exploited by someone they know, a family member.
00:35:16.360It just denies reality in service of focusing on this horrible fantasy they've created.
00:35:20.360yeah because it's it's a story it's a game like they it's it's so much more fun right to be like
00:35:29.400oh yeah no they're sending the children around in cabinets than it is to be like yeah you're
00:35:35.820statistically more likely to be abused in your house than anywhere else like that's a way
00:35:42.040better evil to try and cope with of like our way easier evil is like oh it's not it's not the
00:35:50.780people I know and like you know years of trauma and abuse cycles carrying out and like an oppressive
00:36:01.400heteronormative society and like a church that like that like is also heteronormative and
00:36:09.420oppressive and like, you know, all of these things. Or it could be them. Yeah. I mean,
00:36:16.640who wants to read a bunch of boring ass books about unpacking your trauma or like go to therapy1.00
00:36:21.100when you can just blame the Jews or the blacks or the gays?1.00
00:36:24.560Oh, it's easier. Like, it's just, ah, like, why would you look at the intersectional complex0.97
00:36:31.740like narrative of reality when it could be a nightmare?
00:36:37.240So what are some other ways to help folks offboard off of this kind of ideology?