Latest / Mic Drop Comedy / Pizzagate_ Are Democrats Harvesting Children_s Blood_ - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy

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Pizzagate_ Are Democrats Harvesting Children_s Blood_ - Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy · Mic Drop Comedy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Blood. It's everywhere.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: On children at Halloween, in test tubes at the doctor's office,
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: in the very title of the 2007 drama, There Will
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Be Blood. And it's even inside you right now. Which
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: means you're part of this story, so buckle up. This
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: is Jordan Klepper Fingers, The Conspiracy. If you're listening to
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: this podcast, you probably already know a little bit about Pizzagate.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: And we'll get into that shortly. But this extremely weird
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: idea that pedophiles are using secret symbols is rooted in
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: the belief that elitist cabals, it's always a cabal, are
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: rounding up babies to steal their adrenaline by consuming their blood.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: There are Republicans in Congress who believe this. You might
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: have also seen it in the Netflix show The Watcher.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: It's a conspiracy theory that goes way back before Hillary
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Clinton and Comet Ping Pong in 2016. It goes back
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: 900 years to when Joe Biden was born. Let's get
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: into it, as Chris Cuomo would say.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: Let's bring in our own little blood cabal. I have
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: two guests today. First, we have Dr. Elise Wong, a
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: professor at California State Fullerton who studies conspiracy narratives going
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: back to medieval England.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Elise, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: And my next guest is Matt Gertz, a senior fellow
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: at Media Matters for America and extensively covers the relationship
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: between Fox News, Donald Trump, and Trump supporters.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Matt, thank you for being here.
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: Great to be here.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Guys, you guys ready to talk cabals?
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: So ready.
• 1:31
  Speaker 4: It's always an elite cabal.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: It's always elite. Yeah.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: Is there any lower level cabals of just like guys
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: just trying to get through it who have like a
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: high school education?
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: It's always elite, right?
• 1:44
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: That's the point.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: That's the point of cabals.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: If you're in a cabal, you have to be elite.
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: It's no fun to be in a like mediocre cabal.
• 1:52
  Speaker 4: The state school of cabals.
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: I mean. Yeah.
• 1:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: Whoa, whoa with the state school thing.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: I think this podcast is going to start selling T-shirts
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: that says state school cabal on it.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: There really is.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: It's always elite cabals and the Illuminati also very elite.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: They need to be more encompassing. We need to have
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: our state school Illuminati and cabals. We'll sell the T-shirts.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: Go to dailyshow.com, everybody.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: I will wear that at my state school.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: Elise, I want to start with you.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Let's break down adrenochrome because it feels like the base
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: for a lot of theories we're going to dive into
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: in this podcast. First of all, is adrenochrome technically real?
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: It is.
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: Actually, that's a good place to start. It is actually
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: a real thing. It's the oxidation of adrenaline. And this
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: can happen naturally in your body or in a lab.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: It's actually really easy to come by. You can just
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: buy it on the internet. Like, not the dark web internet,
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: just the internet. I think it's something like 25 milligrams
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: for $ 55, $ 58, something like that. I looked it up.
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: So....
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: It's not used for anything, really. There's nothing the FDA
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: has approved it for. It's occasionally used for things like
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: blood clotting. There was some interest in the 1960s for
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: using it to treat schizophrenia, but it really showed no promise,
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: so they dropped it. The history of the adrenogram we're
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: talking about is sort of, it goes back to, I
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: think Aldous Huxley was the first one to talk about
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: it as a drug. He talked about it in Doors
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: of Perception. And then Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: Loathing in Las Vegas is really the one who cemented
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: the myth of adrenochrome as a drug because he turned
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: it into this kind of immortality drug, this thing that
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: you have to get from a live source. I think
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: the line is, a corpse is no good, buddy. And
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: so that and then the subsequent movie, they're like dramatized
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: to the effects of adrenochrome drugs.
• 4:01
  Speaker 4: What is this shit?
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: That stuff makes pure masculine seem like ginger beer, man.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Adrenochrome.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: Adrenochrome? Hmm. That's really where our modern perception of it
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: as a drug comes from. So it's from these fictional sources.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Are we saying it correctly? Adrenochrome?
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, that's how they say it in the 1998 video.
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: And if you go.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: I know you're not supposed to- The video, are we
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: talking about the Terry Gilliam film? That's how Johnny Depp
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: pronounces it. Yes, that's how Johnny- This is where we're
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: getting our information from. Yes, exactly.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: Well, that's where they're getting their information from. I know
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: you're not supposed to go to YouTube comments, but if
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: you go to the YouTube comments on this scene, they
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: are all about how this is real.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: Yes, based on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: I will say, I love that book. Top 10 book
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: in my world. It's a great book, but that is
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: sort of, The central, the beginning, that and Huxley's book
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: is where the first time we actually hear the term adrenochrome.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: He even said afterwards that he just wanted a quote
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: unquote crazy drug. And so he made it up. And
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: so he's drawing on Huxley and then like adding his
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: own little stuff. And the adrenochrome, the way it's become,
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: it is, as you were saying, it connects to all
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: of the different conspiracy theories because it's a grab bag
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: of the greatest hits, right? It's got pedophilia. It's got
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: satanic rituals. It's got blood rituals, immortality. like satanic panic
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: and Hollywood elites. It's got everything.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: It's a good one.
• 5:32
  Speaker 4: It is, yeah.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Let's add some context to it. In this world, the
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: conspiracy theory is.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: Hollywood liberal elites and Hillary Clinton are murdering children in
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: ritual sacrifices, harvesting the chemical compound from human children, drinking
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: their blood to ingest adrenochrome because it has some sort
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: of elixir of life properties.
• 5:55
  Speaker 4: Is that right? Yes, yes. Okay.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: And you're telling me it may not be true.
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: I mean, you should buy it on the internet and
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: find out.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: It's at least worth the dabble. Matt, when did you
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: first become aware of adrenochrome?
• 6:13
  Speaker 4: I think probably around 2015, 2016 as part of the
• 6:18
  Speaker 4: Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory posits that this
• 6:24
  Speaker 4: cabal of global elites who are draining this chemical compound
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: from small children and sexually abusing them is doing so
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor called
• 6:39
  Speaker 4: Comet Ping Pong. This idea spurred in some ways from
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: emails from the John Podesta hack during the 2016 election cycle.
• 6:53
  Speaker 4: And I've been to the pizza parlor and it doesn't
• 6:55
  Speaker 4: have a basement that you can use to abuse children
• 7:00
  Speaker 4: and take their bodily fluids.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Did you ask?
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: I mean, it goes one step beyond asking for a
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: bathroom key because they'll happily give you a bathroom key,
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: but you have to be a little pushy and be like,
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: I need to use the restroom.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I also... would love access to the basement where the
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: children are tied up and I can get the adrenochrome.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: Did you specifically ask?
• 7:23
  Speaker 4: I think there probably was a time that you could
• 7:25
  Speaker 4: have done that. But as the conspiracy theorists seized on this,
• 7:30
  Speaker 4: the pizza parlor started getting bombarded with phone calls from
• 7:35
  Speaker 4: people who wanted to know more about the basement and the,
• 7:39
  Speaker 4: you know, Pizzagate conspiracy theory. And eventually one of the
• 7:44
  Speaker 4: adherents to this conspiracy theory took a gun, went to
• 7:49
  Speaker 4: the pizza parlor looking to save the children, fired it
• 7:53
  Speaker 4: off inside, and was subsequently arrested and spent a couple
• 7:57
  Speaker 4: of years in jail. So, you know, at that point,
• 8:01
  Speaker 4: it becomes a little bit rude, I think, to ask
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: the people who work at the pizza parlor.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: It had real consequences.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: And if this is somewhat new to anybody listening, the
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: Podesta emails get get hacked, WikiLeaks, leak some Podesta emails,
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: and emails between Podesta and Hillary Clinton reference buying cheese pizza, right?
• 8:25
  Speaker 4: I don't think it's him and Hillary Clinton, but it's
• 8:29
  Speaker 4: some sort of email that references pizza that then became
• 8:32
  Speaker 4: a sort of internet meme and brought into the broader
• 8:38
  Speaker 4: conspiracy theory that Elise was talking about.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: And cheese pizza becomes abbreviated to CP, which also stands
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: for child pornography, and Comet Pizza. And so they start
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: to connect those links, and Comet Pizza becomes the place
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: to go in a.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Nutshell, right?
• 8:58
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's about it.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: On the road, I somewhat recently talked to somebody who
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: was sort of discussing this theory, and it is amazing
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: the symbols they see not only in.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: The Comet Pizza.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: a background in the symbolism there, but I asked them, like,
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: what do you need to look at? They're like, well,
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: in the pizza chain, there's a lot of symbols that
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: you have to stay focused on. I was like, what
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: do these symbols look like? And they're like, well, they're
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: predominantly circles and triangles.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: There's a huge push for normalizing pedophilia. How do they
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: normalize it? Are they making pedophiles look cool?
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: Well, if you go online, there's a whole list of
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: pedophile symbols.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: They're like circular symbols.
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: There's a lot of triangles.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: There's colors.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: A lot of them are in pizza.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: Which, if you're at all into purchasing pizza, that tends
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: to be all of the symbols you see at any
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: kind of pizza chain. So from their perspective, they're holding
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: a hammer and there's just nails everywhere.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: Well, I think watching Pizzagate happen and then from my
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: end watching the chat rooms and message boards and all
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: of these things, both before and afterwards, there's that aspect
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: of it, like the people who really get into the
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: game of it. Like, let's find the numerology and all
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: of the special symbols and And then there's the people
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: who are actually mobilized around this. And that's what really
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: struck me about Pizzagate. It was the first time that
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: I really saw this where you could see there was
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: already this theory about a pedophile ring being run by
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: the Clintons. And it was kind of a theory in
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: need of specifics. And so they went out seeking specifics
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: and they decided basically randomly that Comet Ping Pong was
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: going to be the place. And then... It started this
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: sort of multimedia propaganda campaign where they got people to
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: call and harass, as Matt was saying. They got people
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: to flood the Yelp reviews and the Google reviews and
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: people to go and harass the proprietor. And then this
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: sort of culminated in the guy who drove up from
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: North Carolina to self-investigate. But that wasn't really the story.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: The story was that then people talked about it, that
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: then it was in the national media. for like 48 hours,
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: like a whole week. And it was not only in
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: the media, their theory was in the media. And I
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: went back to the message boards afterwards and they were
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: just beside themselves with joy over this. Like it was not,
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: it was not a, it's not at all about, oh,
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: our guy was arrested. Whoops. Or, huh, he didn't really
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: seem to find anything. It was not about that. It
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: was about the media exposure. And then there were sort
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: of further suggestions. Well, how can we get them to
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: keep denying it so they keep saying it so people
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: keep Googling it? And when I was seeing that, I
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: was like, oh, this is something else. This is a
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: kind of savvy media campaign that I think most of
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: us at that point were not totally familiar with. Now
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: we know if you mention something, you have to be
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: very careful what what sort of buzzwords you mention because
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: it will sort of feed the conspiracy theory monster.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: I'm curious, in hearing that, what do you think the
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: end goal was? How was that a success?
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: Was it, you know, a lot of that online culture does,
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: you know, traffic and trolling and the successes of trolling
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: often is a large reaction. Is it that that made
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: it the win? Is it the fact that their conversations
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: became mainstream news that was the win? Is there still
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: a connection to the veracity of this theory and that
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: because it's being talked about that that adds some credibility
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: to it or is just we like shine and we
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: got some shine?
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: I think it's a lot of we like shine, but
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: I do think that there was the jubilation of being
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: able to make the social media to mainstream media jump
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: and then I think it was a huge recruitment tool.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: I think people hearing the name would then go Google
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: it and then would find their way to these message boards.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: So I think for them, the coup was really through recruitment.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: Matt, what did you notice the coverage of Pizzagate? What
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: did you first remember seeing it and who was first
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: to jump on that?
• 13:25
  Speaker 4: You know, I think I want to bring in Alex
• 13:27
  Speaker 4: Jones here because I think he has played a key
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: role in conspiracy theories before. for quite some time, but
• 13:36
  Speaker 4: I think really made almost a sort of mainstream jump
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: during this conspiracy theory. He was one of the major propagators,
• 13:48
  Speaker 4: one of the people with the biggest platforms who would
• 13:50
  Speaker 4: talk about Pizzagate and try to encourage people to look
• 13:53
  Speaker 4: into Pizzagate.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: You know, we had.
• 13:56
  Speaker 4: Been following Alex Jones at Media Matters for quite some time.
• 14:01
  Speaker 4: But we always, I think as Elise was alluding to,
• 14:05
  Speaker 4: were very hesitant to bring too much direct attention to
• 14:10
  Speaker 4: his conspiracy theories for fear of just sort of bringing
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: more attention to them. And so when we wrote about
• 14:17
  Speaker 4: Alex Jones in 2010, 2011, We were largely writing about
• 14:22
  Speaker 4: how other people were giving him their support. Fox News
• 14:29
  Speaker 4: personalities who would go on his show, Rand Paul and
• 14:32
  Speaker 4: Ron Paul who would go on his show and use
• 14:36
  Speaker 4: the platform of someone who is one of the chief
• 14:39
  Speaker 4: popularizers of the idea that 9-11 is an inside job,
• 14:44
  Speaker 4: bringing him into political prominence. And Pizzagate, I think, was
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: really a turning point because we saw that someone could
• 14:53
  Speaker 4: use those conspiracy theories, could inflate them, and that there
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: could be a big real-world impact when people who came
• 15:03
  Speaker 4: to believe those conspiracy theories went too far. It was
• 15:07
  Speaker 4: a pretty disturbing time for all of us when we
• 15:13
  Speaker 4: saw that come together.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: I mean, as somebody both with The Daily Show and
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: having done a TV show after that, you know, parodying
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: the Alex Jones talking points and what was happening in
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: that far-right world, that was always a conversation of at
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: what point you don't want to amplify these wild ideas.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: But at the same time, turning a blind eye to
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: something that's already having an effect on culture, it's already
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: being amplified by legitimate politicians, even Donald Trump, legitimizing the
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: points of view there, like, You saw people taking what
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: they would hear from InfoWars and the conversation around that,
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: and it was becoming very real-world news. I want to
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: talk a little bit more about how some of these
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: things spread, but I want to focus one more time
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: on the adrenochrome specifically. Elise, I want to know, if
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: we trace back this specific theory, even the origins of adrenochrome,
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: does it go back before Hunter Thompson? Does it go
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: back before it becomes sort of... pulp in modern culture?
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Is there a history that dates back even earlier?
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: It definitely does. And the way that it dates back
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: is a little bit of sort of associative thinking. So
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: conspiracy theories often work this way. They kind of jump
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: onto things. They have a very lazy logic. They jump
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: onto things that are already fully formed. One of the
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: conspiracy theories that is attached to adrenochrome or that adrenochrome
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: is based basically drawing on and modeling itself on, is
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: blood libel, which is a conspiracy theory dating back to
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: the Middle Ages that Jewish people drink or use the
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: blood of Christian children for their religious rituals, specifically at Passover.
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: For the record, we don't do that.
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: I mean.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Matt. Thank you for context.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: We appreciate it. Thank you for specifying that. And it's
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: designed specifically to incite violence. That is what Blood Libel
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: is for. So there's that kind of thematic connection. But
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: then there's also the fact that the main purveyors of adrenochrome,
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: like Alex Jones, like Liz Croken, say that it's Blood Libel,
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: say that it actually dates back to that. And if
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: you look at these adrenochrome memes... One sort of popular
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: one that goes around has this very obviously medieval image
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: of a baby being drained of blood with people standing
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: around it. And it says at the top, why does
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: this image even exist? And the image is of Simon
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: of Trent, which is the most famous and well-documented blood libel.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: And this particular blood libel started Passover 1475. A father
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: had come to the bishop of Trent and said, my
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: two-year-old son, Simon, is missing. And this bishop already had
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: a story ready to go. He decided it must be
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: the Jewish community, the very small Jewish community in Trent.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: He had a couple reasons for wanting this story to
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: be true. One, he felt like the pope was too
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: soft on the Jewish people. and that he was too
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: cozy with them. So this was his little power grab
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: in opposition to the Pope. And then also if you
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: had a saint, if he could prove that Simon was
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: martyred by the Jews, if you had a saint in
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: your town, that was a huge money-making opportunity. Like you
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: could get people from all around to make pilgrimages to
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: your little altar, and then you would make money basically
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: off of like brand building. And so it was like
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: the brand building opportunity.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: It was like that era's Cheesecake Factory.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: If you had.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: A Cheesecake Factory in town, you know you're going to
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: get people from the suburbs who are going to come in.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: They're going to pay some money. It's going to help
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: the town.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: That's the thing. And he wanted to kind of put
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: Trent on the map. And so even before they start
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: any kind of trial or anything, they round up the
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: Jewish community, the entire Jewish community, and imprison them. And he...
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: hires a physician to write this very inflammatory autopsy that
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: talks less about Simon's body and more about the, I
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: think the phrase is, dry-throated Jews howling for Christian blood,
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: like this really over-the-top kind of autopsy. And then he
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: takes this autopsy.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: That was the doctor? That was the doctor. That was
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: the doctor. That's a really high end literary anti-Semitism.
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: And well, it gets more high end because then he
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: takes this and he sends it around to poets and
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: to artists and is like, make stuff from this. And
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: they do. Like the poets start writing poems about Simon
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: of Trent. And the woodcutters start making images. And that's
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: the image that shows up in that adrenochrome meme is
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: this sort of propaganda campaign by this Italian bishop who
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: decided he really wanted his own little ritual cult.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Those f * * * ing woodcutters.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: They just will take money, whoever puts it out. Where's
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: the artistic integrity in 15th century woodcutters?
• 20:34
  Speaker 4: I know.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: I hold them in such high regard. I love them.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: I think it's the best century for woodcutters. And yet
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: they are so willing to turn a blind eye to
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: the social responsibility of being a woodcutter in that time.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: They're taking dirty money to put out anti-Semitic propaganda.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Shame, shame on them.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: I'm never buying 15th century woodcutter art again.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: Shame. I feel like the parts of this that are
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: really useful, though, It's kind of that, that it was
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: the propaganda campaign that really made this take off. It
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: wasn't like this was kind of a grassroots rumor that
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: was rooted in sort of general anti-Semitism. I mean, that's
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: why it took off, was sort of latching onto generalized anti-Semitism.
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: But the actual formation of the blood libel was very
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: intentionally crafted for a political end by someone who was powerful.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: I had never heard of that.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: I think it's so easy to to look at those
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: in power and also the religious heresy at the time
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: and the institutions at the time and the point of
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: view they wanted to get out, but the fact that
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: they were using artists to spread that message to affect culture.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: I mean, you see obvious comparisons to what happens today,
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: but that even then it was still important. You want
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: this thing to stick, culture needs to stick. And the
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: fact that we're using those images yet today as proof,
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: of what Hillary Clinton is doing is bonkers. I want
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: to take a short ad break. When we come back,
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: we're going to talk more about how adrenochrome spread as
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: an idea even before the internet was even around.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Welcome back to Jordan's Upper Fingers,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: The Conspiracy.
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, I didn't actually plan to work on conspiracy theories. Like,
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: I'm a medievalist. I'm like a huge nerd.
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: I like books.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: And this was not the way I saw my studies going.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: But here.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: We are. What was it?
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: You basically stumbled on it and were like, here we go. Also,
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: is that something was in the ether, the modern ether,
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: that you saw a connection between the two?
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was basically in 2015 I started, I mean, like,
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: like all of us, I think I was a little
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: bit concerned and uneasy about the fake news phenomenon. And
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: in particular, this epistemology aspect, this you can't trust anything
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: that you see. And I started hearing echoes with the
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: stuff that I study. And speech patterns like, that's what
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: they want you to think, do your own research. I've
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: heard or people are saying these kinds of gestures towards sources.
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: I started seeing those things. I was like, oh, that
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: doesn't that doesn't sound good. That sounds familiar and not good.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: And I just sort of started following that. And now
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: my autocorrect knows adrenochrome. So here we are.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: In the case of these historical conspiracy theories and the
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: beginnings of blood libel, how do you see these theories
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: spread before modern news and communication and memes and 4chan
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: and 8chan and parlor and true social and should I
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: keep going?
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to keep going.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: Well, they spread remarkably well. I think that the essential
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: shape of blood libel was a very compelling shape. It was,
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: you know, there are evil forces that are out to
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: get Christian children. And there was also the fact that
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: it was pretty common for medieval children to die in
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: accidents or disappear or fall into a river. Like child
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: death was quite common. And so it became kind of
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: a predictable thing that if a child died in a
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: Christian community, that pretty soon suspicion would fall on the
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: Jewish community. And it did spread by word of mouth,
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: but it also spread by all of these sort of
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: cultural productions. It spread by these woodcuts. It spread by Um,
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: these poems that were written in honor of Simon and
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: it also spread because these stories got baked into the
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: official histories. These historians think of themselves as, you know, responsible, reliable, um,
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: and they go back to the local histories and they
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: just sort of draw from whatever the local history is.
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: And so these blood libels get baked into sort of
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: accepted history as fact. And then anyone who reads that,
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: that will be their primary interaction, basically, with the Jewish
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: community for a lot of places because these pogroms have
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: already taken place. Magda Tater has done a really great job.
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: She studies blood libel and she's done a really great
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: job of showing how actually before the printing press, word
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: of mouth didn't work that great. It really needed to
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: be written down. And that also shows that it was
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: mostly educated people, mostly higher class people who were spreading
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: blood libel. It wasn't a low class theory. It was
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: a kind of upper class theory.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: And that's interesting. And I mean, there's a great book
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that talks a
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: lot about how the mediums affect the message. The invention
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: of the protein press affected not only the way information
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: was spread, but the way we think about information, the
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: way we process information. And then you suddenly have television.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: come out, and now it's the way in which we
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: communicate and the way we process information is very different
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: than the way we used to with the printing press.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: I think it's fascinating to.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: Think of that in terms of who is spreading information
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: and that it was an elitist thing. You had to
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: be able to speak that language then, but now that
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: we see information changing, the technology changing, Matt, I want
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: to bring you in here. How are you seeing conspiracy
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: theories like Pizzagate and other Q theories spread given the
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: new technology that we have?
• 26:31
  Speaker 4: Well, the core benefit that social media companies will say
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: that they provide to their customers and that internet companies
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: say they provide to their customers is the idea of
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: bringing the world together and giving people an opportunity to
• 26:47
  Speaker 4: find communities, to communicate with people across the globe and
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: to sort of find a common purpose together and I mean,
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: there's a dark side to that. It also has made
• 26:59
  Speaker 4: it much, much easier to find a community of conspiracy
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: theorists to share your ideas about the dark, hidden messages
• 27:12
  Speaker 4: in the world's events, to share your views about the
• 27:17
  Speaker 4: Illuminati or whoever else is manipulating what's going on around you.
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: And that's just an incredibly powerful force. The barrier to
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: entry for producing one of these conspiracy theories is much lower.
• 27:35
  Speaker 4: The JFK conspiracy theories, you had to write letters to
• 27:40
  Speaker 4: people later on as Xeroxes and faxes and so on
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: and so forth. It's just very easy now.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: It shows you just how lazy conspiracy theorists are now.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: Can you imagine if you had to write letters to
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: spread just some BS you read on Twitter, you're like, oh,
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: I want to put that out. Elon Musk, he would
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: not be pushing conspiracy theories if he had to write
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: a letter to get that thing going.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Do you also look at places like Fox?
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: We look at what's happening with social media, but more
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: of the mainstream media outlets. How are you seeing that
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: affect this conversation, specifically with something like Pizza Game?
• 28:14
  Speaker 4: Sure. So, I mean, the reality is that we live
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: in a bifurcated news environment. There is one set of
• 28:22
  Speaker 4: sources of information that is generally used by people in
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: the left, on the center, just sort of mainstream news outlets.
• 28:32
  Speaker 4: And then you have this entirely separate realm of right-wing
• 28:38
  Speaker 4: media outlets that speak very clearly and directly to a
• 28:44
  Speaker 4: right-wing audience. The way we see conspiracy theories moving these
• 28:50
  Speaker 4: days is they'll start at the sort of message board
• 28:53
  Speaker 4: and social media platform level with a sort of army
• 28:57
  Speaker 4: of individuals who are coming up with their own spin
• 29:01
  Speaker 4: on what's happening on a particular event. It will spread
• 29:05
  Speaker 4: from there through a network of hyper-partisan news sites, places
• 29:10
  Speaker 4: like Gateway Pundit that do not have standards of any sort,
• 29:15
  Speaker 4: that are not interested in the basic rules of journalism,
• 29:19
  Speaker 4: but that want to have political impact and make money
• 29:23
  Speaker 4: off of advertising. And from there, you can see them
• 29:27
  Speaker 4: sort of get woven into the broader debate. The reality
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: is that the right-wing media figures at the sort of
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: higher level, your Fox News, are not interested in batting
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: down those sorts of conspiracies. They're not interested in challenging
• 29:49
  Speaker 4: their audiences and telling them that what they might have
• 29:52
  Speaker 4: heard is incorrect. Instead, you'll see either them ignoring it
• 29:57
  Speaker 4: altogether or providing a sort of wink and a nod
• 30:01
  Speaker 4: at the conspiracy theory or telling their viewers that it's okay,
• 30:07
  Speaker 4: more or less, that there are reasons to be skeptical
• 30:10
  Speaker 4: of things that are happening around you, that the elites
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: want to keep you from talking about QAnon or what
• 30:19
  Speaker 4: have you, and that You know, whether or not that's true,
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: it's not a danger the way, you know, other other
• 30:30
  Speaker 4: people will tell you.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, if this is an issue with right wing media,
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: they have this weird rhetoric that is politicizing children in
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: the name of protecting them. Anything from disturbing conspiracy theories
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: to don't say gay bills, anti-trans bills, etc.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Do you see a connection there?
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these conspiracy
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: theories get rolled up together. There was a big push
• 30:56
  Speaker 4: over the last year and a half or so on
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: the right throughout the entire ecosystem to talk about the
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: idea of groomers.
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: Save the children.
• 31:07
  Speaker 4: Save the children, absolutely. Basically that teachers are trying to
• 31:12
  Speaker 4: turn your kids gay, turn your kids trans, possibly molest them.
• 31:17
  Speaker 4: It all kind of gets wound up together. There aren't
• 31:20
  Speaker 4: really firm barriers to a lot of these conspiracy theories.
• 31:24
  Speaker 4: People who start to believe one of them tend to
• 31:28
  Speaker 4: start adopting others as well.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Elise, historically, has there ever been a way to get
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: people to stop believing conspiracy theories?
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's a complicated question, right? It depends on
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: who you're talking about. Like, I don't... Johannes von Hinderbach,
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: the bishop of Trent... I don't know that he actually
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: believed that Simon was killed by the Jews. That was
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: sort of beside the point. I think he believed that
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: Jewish people are evil and he wanted to drive them out.
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: And this was a convenient way to do it, plus
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: a bunch of other political benefits. I don't know that
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: he actually believed it. So if you're talking about these
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: sort of cynical purveyors of it who use it for
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: radicalization and use it for their own sort of economic
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: and political gain... I think you just have to take
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: away the gain and then that will kind of kill it.
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: For everybody else, I think it is a complicated question
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: because the thing about conspiracy theories is they're not about
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: the details. They're not about the story. I mean, I
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: feel like your segments, Jordan, have really shown this well.
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: As soon as you ask them a question, that's the end.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: It doesn't go anywhere. You can't actually have a conversation anymore.
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: about conspiracy theories. I don't even think that conspiracy theorists
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: could have a conversation with each other about it because
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: it's fundamentally not discursive. It's not something you can have
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: a discussion about. It is just an attempt to make
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: this sort of core story about yourself match up with
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: the world. And every conspiracy theory has this same core story,
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: and that's why it's so powerful. It's the story that
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: the theorist holds on to and then sort of tries
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: to match up with the world in a kind of
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: messy way. And the story is basically once upon a time,
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: we were happy and everything was good and we were
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: in charge and we were safe. And then the monsters
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: took hold, but no one knew that they had. And
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: these monsters are not of the sort of vaguely threatening variety.
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: They have to be absolutely gigantic, demonic, sort of the
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: most hyperbolic thing you can think of, go another step.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: So It's always children, Satan, mutilation and torture, pedophilia. And
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: the story goes that everything seemed fine because the monsters
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: made sure this was all kept secret. So the monsters control.
• 33:56
  Speaker 4: What you know.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: And only the heroes of the story knew the truth,
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: and then they arrived to save the world. And that's
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: the benefit that you get from it. You get that
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: worldview about yourself, that you are a continuously just sort
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: of horrifically embattled hero of the story. And you can't
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: really give up on this self, like the self image
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: of embattled heroism. It's very difficult to give up on.
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: It's not just the high of thinking of yourself as
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: a hero. It's also that you convince yourself that you
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: are in this battle of absolute good and absolute evil.
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: And so then you get to issues of like, if
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: you ask about democracy or fair play, What are you, nuts?
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: This is about the end of the world. So it
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: makes it impossible to sort of dial back to issues
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: of fairness or accuracy. It's actually not about that. And
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: I feel like you can kind of hear that when
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: you're talking to these QAnon followers. When they try to
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: answer your questions, they aren't actually trying to say, like
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: you say, so what did actually happen on January 6th?
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: They'll say FBI, CIA, Clintons, just sort of a grab bag.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: But what they're actually trying to tell you is this
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: story that the monsters are out to get us and
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to save us. There's kind of no other
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: point to it. That's the whole ballgame.
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: And when the monsters, when there's a partisan overlay on that,
• 35:33
  Speaker 4: when the monsters are one party and the people... who
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: are trying to save you are Donald Trump. I mean,
• 35:41
  Speaker 4: there's no room for debate at that point, right? There's
• 35:43
  Speaker 4: no room to talk about it's important to respect electoral defeats, right?
• 35:50
  Speaker 4: Because if the people who you are losing elections to
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: are monsters who are abusing children, then you have a
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: moral responsibility to go try to subvert.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: Those election results.
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: And the resistance is kind of like baked into the
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: story because the story is that the monsters came and
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: took over and they covered it up. They kept everybody
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: from knowing. So any information that you get in from
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: the outside is suspect, even information that you might get
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: from sympathetic sources. So the only thing then you're left
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: with is kind of like going with your gut and
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: what feels true. It feels true that I am a
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: victim and it feels true that I'm the hero of
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: the story. And so let's just go with that.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: So you're telling me I shouldn't read this story to
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: my son every night before going to bed.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: He loves it.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: It's a dark Eric Carle story, but I like it
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: so much better than that hungry caterpillar.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: You might be unhappy with the results of raising your
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: child this way.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: I tell you, all of his peers are reading it.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: They seem to really be into it. That hero's journey.
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: Uh.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: after the break we're going to talk about how the
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: adrenochrome conspiracy theory is related to the attack in nancy
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: pelosi's house it seriously is this is jordan klepper figures.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: The conspiracy we'll be right back.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to jordan klepper figures the conspiracy i'm here
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: with dr elise wong and matt gertz two experts who
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: follow conspiracy theories and we're talking about adrenochrome how democrats
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: are drinking babies blood allegedly allegedly and what that means
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: for american politics now Recently, Nancy Pelosi's house was broken
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: into by a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He was looking for
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: Pelosi and ended up attacking her husband with a hammer.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: But Matt, you've written about how the conspiracy theories this
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: attacker specifically believed and how he was radicalized in the.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: Ecosystem of right-wing misinformation. How does this all connect?
• 37:49
  Speaker 4: Well, the alleged assailant had a substantial internet paper trail. He...
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: had a couple of blogs, various other social media platforms,
• 38:03
  Speaker 4: and what he posted on those sites was very much
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: the kind of textbook online right-wing conspiracy theory radicalization pattern
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: that we've been seeing for years now. His social media
• 38:19
  Speaker 4: and blogs are filled with references to QAnon, to Adrenochrome,
• 38:25
  Speaker 4: to Pizzagate, to Gamergate, as well as a sort of
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: grab bag of bigotries related to black people and women
• 38:35
  Speaker 4: and Jews and gay people and trans people. Um, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's,
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: it's the, it's the, it's the greatest hits. Honestly, I
• 38:45
  Speaker 4: spent some time, uh, looking through these websites on Friday
• 38:49
  Speaker 4: and I was like, oh, it's just, it's, it's all
• 38:51
  Speaker 4: of it from there. And this happened very, very quickly. Uh,
• 38:56
  Speaker 4: you did not see, uh, people on the right saying,
• 38:59
  Speaker 4: oh my God. The, uh, things that people on the
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: right are saying are, are, uh, leading to political violence. Instead,
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: a story about political violence committed by someone who believed
• 39:14
  Speaker 4: right-wing conspiracy theories about how Democrats are depraved, it was
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: turned into another right-wing conspiracy theory about how Democrats are depraved.
• 39:28
  Speaker 4: The story that developed over the following hours was that
• 39:34
  Speaker 4: the assailant had not broken into the house, but in
• 39:37
  Speaker 4: fact he'd been invited in by Paul Pelosi because they
• 39:40
  Speaker 4: were gay lovers, and that the violent attack on Pelosi
• 39:47
  Speaker 4: was in fact some sort of gay lover's spree. That's
• 39:50
  Speaker 4: what they came up with, and that spread remarkably quickly,
• 39:54
  Speaker 4: as it tends to do through this right-wing information ecosystem,
• 39:59
  Speaker 4: until you had Elon Musk tweeting out a link to
• 40:04
  Speaker 4: a hyper-partisan fake news website on Sunday morning. 72 hours,
• 40:12
  Speaker 4: 48 hours from the assault becoming known to the conspiracy
• 40:20
  Speaker 4: theory reaching the wealthiest man on earth.
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: Elise, something like this pops up. Is this how you
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: imagine it playing out this quickly and evolving or devolving
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: in this similar manner?
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me. I do think the speed
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: is different from sort of the history that I studied
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: But the manner in which things spread is really not.
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: And I think a few things are key that the
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: platform matters. It depends on who is picking this up
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: and who is running with it. And then there's also
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: a durability to conspiracy theories that because they have this
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: sort of epistemological challenge built into them, by that I
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: mean they challenge how you know what you know. And
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: they say these things that you think you know, you
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: don't know. but it doesn't replace it with anything. So
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: it's just sort of epistemic destabilization. So you just don't
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: have anything to stand on. And that creates an environment
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: in which conspiracy theories really thrive because once you can't
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: trust anything, then the only thing you can trust is
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: your own sense of the story that you like or
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: the one that sounds good to you. This was definitely
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: true in sort of the medieval and early modern period
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: of blood libel. There were often people who have, powerful
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: people who opposed blood libel. For Simon of Trent, the
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: reason why we have so many documents on it is
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: the Pope tried to intervene in this. He tried to
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: put a stop to it. And then the very first
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: blood libel in the 12th century, this was a boy
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: named William of Norwich. The Norwich sheriff actually got involved
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: and protected the Jewish community. So there's always been pushback
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: from kind of mainstream sources. And yet these conspiracy theories
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: just thrive if there's already a kind of destabilized trust
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: in the regular sources of knowledge. So I think the
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: modern speed, that is new, how quickly that happens. But
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: you would have a blood libel come out and the
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: next week all of the Jews in town would be
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: arrested and tortured. And it was pretty fast. It happened
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: pretty fast.
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: Well, we mentioned the platform here, and Matt, you brought
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: up Elon Musk and the tweet that he had. Adding
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: to this confusion, he referenced a website that claimed Hillary
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: Clinton died in 2016 and was replaced with a clone.
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: So what does this say now in this new era
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: of Elon's Twitter? What is that going to do to
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: these conversations?
• 42:57
  Speaker 4: I mean, I think it's going to continue to accelerate them.
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: I think there has been... some effort by the social
• 43:06
  Speaker 4: media platforms some of the time to try to rein
• 43:09
  Speaker 4: in the most extreme and dangerous forms of misinformation. It's
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: been haphazard. It's been imperfect. But Elon Musk's Twitter is
• 43:17
  Speaker 4: going to do is kind of toss that aside. He
• 43:20
  Speaker 4: himself is quite obviously a bit of a conspiracy theorist,
• 43:25
  Speaker 4: someone who has accused people of being pedos. That's just
• 43:32
  Speaker 4: sort of sort of his wheelhouse, so to speak. And
• 43:37
  Speaker 4: it's difficult to imagine Twitter being interested in throttling conspiracy
• 43:44
  Speaker 4: theories that its own owner is spreading. That's just not
• 43:48
  Speaker 4: going to happen. And so, you know, I think that
• 43:53
  Speaker 4: platform is going to become less stable. It's going to
• 43:55
  Speaker 4: become a less valuable source for credible information because of that.
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: Elise, I'm curious about Can you talk about the progression
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: of belief into action? Like what takes somebody from Pizzagate
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: to an actual act of political violence in 2022?
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: I mean, this is what scholars of radicalization study, right?
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: How do you come from an idea into actual action?
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: Radicalization online is part of the story. It's not the
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: whole story, but it's certainly... directs any sort of anger
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: or dissatisfaction you already have. It validates it and it
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: amps it up and it focuses it on a target.
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: So it's a little bit like pointing a loaded gun
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: at a specific target. And can I go back to
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: the Elon thing for just a sec?
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: Yes, please.
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: The whole verification thing really struck me because I think...
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: you know, it's clear the money of it doesn't actually matter.
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: Like he's like $ 20, $ 8, whatever to sell, sell verification, right?
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: That's his new thing. He's going to sell verification on Twitter.
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: What really struck me is that this is not an
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: attempt to get the money. It's an attempt to devalue
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: verification in general, because verification is meant to show you
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: which sources are trustworthy, right? It was meant to sort
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: of identify members of the media and corporations and so
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: that you knew that it was actually coming from that
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: source and you knew that you could trust it. It
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: was not a sort of celebrity thing originally. That was
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: not the purpose of verification. And by turning it into
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: something that you can buy, it just completely devalues verification
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: and it gets rid of that layer of validation so
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: that you know what you can trust, which sources you
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: can trust. It gets rid of that sort of, it's
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: destabilizing the way we know what we know. And that
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: seems to me to be the point of the whole
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: verification thing.
• 46:10
  Speaker 4: In fact, because Musk is so polarizing, we could see
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: a situation where his supporters who are largely on the
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: right are much more willing to actually shell out the
• 46:22
  Speaker 4: money than more credible mainstream journalists are. Those less credible
• 46:30
  Speaker 4: sources will get sort of algorithmically accelerated more than everybody
• 46:36
  Speaker 4: else and become a bigger part of the conversation.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: I'm curious what advice you would have to consumers, specifically
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: of Twitter. I think a lot of people are looking
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: at this. they see these issues, see the problem, and
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: are asking themselves the question, do I divorce myself from
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: this platform? I don't know if the answer is to
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: step away from it and not be a part of
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: the conversation or understand the conversation, but are you complicit
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: in what is becoming a less and less trustworthy place?
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: So I think part of the issue here is I
• 47:06
  Speaker 4: don't really view it as a place for conversation. I mean,
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: I I use Twitter.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: Tweet at me, man. I got a lot of interesting
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: things to say. Come at me. We'll go back and forth.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: It's fun. We'll be playful. I got some gifts I'll
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: send your way. It's a really fun chat.
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: The way I use Twitter, I use it as a
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: broadcast medium, right? It's a way for me to get
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: my views and my work out into the public. It's
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: a way for me to hear views from people who
• 47:32
  Speaker 4: might have interesting ideas or thoughts. But I don't do
• 47:37
  Speaker 4: that much interaction with it because I think it's a
• 47:40
  Speaker 4: actually a really bad medium for having debates of any kind.
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: If I want to have a conversation with someone, I
• 47:48
  Speaker 4: will try to follow up with them and start an
• 47:50
  Speaker 4: email conversation or phone or what have you. It's hard
• 47:53
  Speaker 4: to have a substantive discussion with the rest of the
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: world trying to involve itself in that. I will use
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: Twitter less if that becomes less feasible. If I think
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: that my tweets aren't getting read or if I think
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: that I am not able to easily find credible information
• 48:13
  Speaker 4: that I wanna be reading, that's when the value proposition
• 48:17
  Speaker 4: will fall to basically nothing.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: I feel like this is where our disciplines come into
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: play because you're in media, I'm in medieval studies. So
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: I have a very, my, my following, you will be
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: shocked to hear is tiny. I'm also, I'm also locked.
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: So I, I really just use it for conversation. Like
• 48:41
  Speaker 3: I really just use it to connect with other, other
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: people in my field or who study the same things
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: that I do. And I think one of the really
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: One of the reasons a lot of people are mourning
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: this is it has been an incredible tool for people
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: to connect within their own tiny little subfield. Like I
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: feel more connected to other medievalists of color on Twitter
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: because we have kind of created our own little ecosystem
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: than anywhere else. And I wouldn't get that anywhere else.
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: I would miss it for that. And obviously, again, like
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: you said, if that becomes impossible, then I'm not going
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: to use it anymore. But I also think this whole
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: question of, so do you stay? Do you go? Do
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: you pay the $ 8, $ 20, whatever it ends up being?
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: I feel like that's a very American question. Like, how
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: can we make this the individual responsibility to decide what
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: to do? This is the robber baron has screwed up
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: the system and now we are responsible for fixing it. And,
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: you know, my recycling or not recycling my water bottle
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: is really what's leading.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: To climate change.
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: Like that's really the thing, this sort of individual responsibility
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: for these things. And I think that's kind of what
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: gets us into trouble with conspiracy theories today. to begin with, right?
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: Do your own research. Find out for yourself. The thing is,
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: with huge platforms and huge areas of knowledge, you just
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: can't do it yourself. I mean, as we all discovered
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: in the pandemic when we all became amateur epidemiologists, right?
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: We're not very good at this. I don't remember high
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: school biology very well. I'm not going to be good
• 50:30
  Speaker 3: at making choices, personal choices, about my own level of
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: risk and my kid's level of risk. And, you know,
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: I am not a good person to put that decision on.
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: And that's kind of how we've offloaded it. And so
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: I feel like that's maybe not, I know that it's
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: sort of going to be personally difficult for a lot
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: of people to figure out what to do about Twitter.
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: But I don't really feel like that's where the change
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: comes from.
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: I want to wrap this up kind of looking specifically
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: at what happened with Nancy Pelosi's husband and what we've
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: sort of been discussing here, but sort of to zoom
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: out as well, how do politicians like Nancy Pelosi try
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: and convince people that they don't partake in ritual children sacrifices?
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: At a rally weeks ago, and a man was convinced
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: that Nancy Pelosi is a vampire and drinks children's blood.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: He was convinced. I followed up and I asked, you
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: said literally, did you mean literally? He said, literally. You
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: see Republicans on one side and.
• 51:43
  Speaker 4: The devil on the other.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: Are we talking metaphorical devil, like, oh, they do bad stuff?
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: No, literally, you know, vampires drinking blood.
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: I don't want to nitpick here, but vampires tend to
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: be eternally youthful. And I look at Nancy Pelosi and
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: she's a lot of things, but I guess I don't
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: think vampire.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: Somebody in her party definitely drinks blood.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: How does someone like that attempt... to knock down this issue?
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: And with those difficulties, what does that say about where
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: we're at politically if we struggle to even do that?
• 52:14
  Speaker 4: Matt? I don't know, honestly. I mean, it's very difficult
• 52:19
  Speaker 4: to reach someone who believes that you drink the blood
• 52:25
  Speaker 4: of children. You know, I think that It's just a
• 52:34
  Speaker 4: hard problem. And so we end up talking around it, right?
• 52:37
  Speaker 4: We end up talking about what are the ways that
• 52:40
  Speaker 4: policy can weaken the structures that are in place that
• 52:47
  Speaker 4: allow these conspiracy theories to flourish. Because as Elise says,
• 52:54
  Speaker 4: these conspiracy theories have always been with us. but it
• 52:57
  Speaker 4: has become easier for them to propagate and easier for
• 53:03
  Speaker 4: people to come to accept them. And I think that's
• 53:06
  Speaker 4: really the available chattel.
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: Elise, is there any advice you have for Nancy Pelosi
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: or anybody else who looks at this, is pulling out
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: their hair, just attempting to try to knock down what
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: seems like to be the inconceivable?
• 53:29
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think there's sort of the media answer,
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: and then there's the personal answer about approaching this person personally.
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: So the media answer, like, I don't, I'm not a
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: media expert. And so I wouldn't know exactly how to
• 53:45
  Speaker 3: do this. But I think that platforms really are the key,
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: the platforms that we give people to propagate these ideas.
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: I think that, you know, when Alex Jones got involved,
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: things really took off. And when Alex Jones was taken
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: off of Twitter and sort of deplatformed from a bunch
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: of places, his influence really did die down for a
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: little while. Like it actually had an influence. And I
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: think deplatforming and treating social media as the sort of
• 54:17
  Speaker 3: communities that they are and the news sites that they
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: are and having even stricter standards for them than we
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: do for sort of in-person conduct, I think is not
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: going to happen. But that would be my suggestion for
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: the media side of things. I think you have to
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: control the amplification of these conspiracy theories. And there's also
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: just sort of the larger problem of society-wide radicalization and
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: that's a bigger question than just conspiracy theories. The only
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: people who can really get to people who are deep
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: into it are those who are already intimate with these people,
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: who are already friends with these people, who already have
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: some other form of connection with them. You're not going
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: to get through to them. That's not, sorry. What?
• 55:12
  Speaker 4: I know. It's a new family.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: You're a family out there. Talk to those you love.
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: I mean, you also speak to something there of There's
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: the intimate relationship people have with their computers when they're
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: alone in their room.
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: And that person.
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: It's like a parasocial relationship.
• 55:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: And I see going to these rallies, this myth of
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: American exceptionalism. We talk with such rhetoric of everybody on
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: their own hero's journey. And I will say a lot
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: of those MAGA rallies, you talk about all the problems
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: in the world. And then somebody gets on stage and
• 55:42
  Speaker 2: they says, you're a patriot.
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: You can be a hero. You can do this.
• 55:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: Well, guys, this has been lovely.
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: Elise Wong, Matt Gertz, I leave this conversation energized as
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: if I've sucked on the blood of a child.
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: Thank you. That's all I could ask for. I appreciate
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: your insight and your thoughts. Thank you, guys.
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: Listen to Jordan Klepper figures The Conspiracy from The Daily
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: Show on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: get your podcasts.