S2E16 - The Crusaders: Context (QAnon, pt1: history & context)

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Kayla: Welcome to culture. Just weird.

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Chris: I'm Chris. I'm Kayla, and this is cult or just weird.

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Kayla: This is our podcast. Okay. Before we get in, before getting it. Oh, no. Before we get into it, I feel like I'm gonna put you on the spot.

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Chris: Oh, no, that's my least favorite spot.

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Kayla: Because I feel like we would be remiss to start our next episode without saying a few words about the recently deceased James Randy, whom we owe our entire podcast to, our entire ethos, to a lot of our ethics and morals, too. So I didn't write anything or prepare anything. I just went, Chris has got this great.

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Chris: You know, when I put you on the spot, it's like, explain how mirrors work, and then I can't do that. I don't know, say something profound about a great man who has passed from this earth.

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Kayla: I thought mirrors were just a lot of glass.

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Chris: Well, they're glass, and then they're, like, usually silver.

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Kayla: Yeah, I just thought it was a bunch of glass stacked together till it was reflective.

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Chris: Okay, well, maybe that wasn't a good example. Anyway, yes. To echo, Kayla, James Randy passed away this week. And again, big influence, big inspiration for us. He's one of my personal heroes. He's, like, as true for Kayla, too.

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Kayla: As to, like, a hero you can get.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: And for anybody who may not know, James Randy is a. I mean, he is like, the progenitor of the skeptic movement. He.

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Chris: Yeah, like, the modern, like, rational skeptic movement.

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Kayla: He is a magician. He was a magician back in, like, the fifties and sixties, and then he turned kind of, like, pivoted his career in the seventies and eighties to be a. He did not call himself a debunker. I forget what he called himself, but he did not call himself that. But he. He was, like, a skeptic. A skeptic.

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Chris: Professional debunker. But he didn't call himself.

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Kayla: He didn't call himself that. A rationalist. He exposed charlatans and frauds like Gary Geller and faith healers like Peter Popov, and he's amazing. And you should all go watch his documentary or the documentary about him, an honest liar, and cry and have your life changed.

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Chris: Yeah. And like, Kayla said, this, you know, this pod. We wouldn't even been doing this podcast without his influence, you know, rip to him. And, you know, what's weird is that, like, this when. When it was announced, you know, that he. That he passed away, like, I was sad, but I was also like, he led a good life. You know, I kind of had this sort of, like, sense of almost, like fulfillment, too. Like. Like, yes, I was sad, but also, I kind of was like, he. He did it. He did the thing.

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Kayla: He did. He did life.

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Chris: He did life. And I. That's a. You know, he can go away now being like, yep, I did that right.

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Kayla: If only, like, I only hope to be in that position at the end of my life, or, like, anywhere close to it.

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Chris: And speaking of DNA for the show, one of the things that, you know, he used to say is, like, anybody, no matter how smart or educated, can be deceived. And I feel like that's really into the DNA of this show because we've seen that overdose and over and again with the things we've looked.

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Kayla: At, and we will continue to see that over and over again. So thank you, James. Randy. He was a so called charlatan. He called himself a charlatan. And from these two charlatans to another. Thank you. Are you ready for the episode?

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Chris: No.

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Kayla: Okay, let's just not do it.

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Chris: Let's call it.

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Kayla: Okay, the end. That was not even ten minutes. Bye.

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Chris: Finally, we're getting down to some bite sized form. Oh, wait. Although Rip Quibi is well, so maybe we shouldn't be doing bite sized content.

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Kayla: Yeah, not in the pandemic. We all want to go back to long form.

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Chris: Fill up the time. Fill it up.

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Kayla: So before we get into the episode, I have some major content warnings here. We are going to be discussing at length the topics of child abuse and child trafficking. We will do our absolute best to handle those conversations carefully and responsibly, but we will be talking about them. Violence, racism, white supremacy, misogyny, and a number of other isms will also come up. I promise that the content itself is necessary to discuss, but before we get into it's important we toss up some red flags.

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Chris: That's a lot of red flags.

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Kayla: It is a lot of red flags. Onto the topic.

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Chris: All right, now that we've whetted your whistle with all those horrible things, Chris.

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Kayla: Kayla, we've waited a long time to cover today's topic, and it's a big one. One of the more important topics we'll cover on the show. We'll get to those details later, though. But first, I want to tell you a story.

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Chris: Aw, is it a nice story about child trafficking and white supremacy?

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Kayla: Such a nice story. Okay, I want to tell you about Project Sunshine. Less than ten years after the United States dropped atom bombs on the japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the US Air Force launched a series of research studies to determine radioactive fallout's impact on the world's population. In 1953, the project was kept under wraps and utilized tissues.

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Chris: Oh, I've heard of this.

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Kayla: Utilized tissues and bones of the dead content warning.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: To measure levels of dangerous isotope SR 90. After encountering fallout, the project became known publicly by 1956. And there was some minor concern over where the government was procuring the dead bodies used in the experiments. These concerns were written off as conspiracy style thinking. The government doesn't need to steal bodies in order to conduct these tests. That would be too big a deal to keep under wraps. This is good, honest scientific work being done. Half a century later, declassified documents revealed the truth about the project and where these bodies came from. No, the government wasn't stealing dead bodies to conduct their tests. Instead, the government was stealing parts of dead bodies from the world. Overdose. Collecting samples and limbs from deceased babies and children without notifying or gaining consent from the parents.

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Chris: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't. I don't have a reaction.

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Kayla: Yeah, that's fine.

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Chris: It's like, that's the thing is, like the stuff we're talking about here. I'm not gonna be like. Like, normally my reactions are funny quip, hey, keep going. But now I'm just like, yeah. Dead baby, stealing parts. Okay.

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Kayla: Yep.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: Turns out, in a secret meeting on January 18, 1955, US Atomic Energy Commissioner doctor Willard Libby, stated that the experiments were yielding insufficient data due to the project's lack of human samples, especially samples from children. He went on to say, quote, I don't know how to get them. But I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them, and particularly in the young age group. So human samples are often of prime importance. And if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country. 1500 samples were then gathered by a network of agents across the world. 1500 samples from 1500 different children, meaning 1500 grieving families, had no clue the bodies of their deceased babies were being stolen and used in secret government radioactivity experiments.

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Kayla: The mother of one stillborn baby whose body was taken for the experiments, claims that the baby's legs were removed by doctors and then presumably to the US. And in order to keep her from discovering what they had done, she was not allowed to dress her own baby for the planned funeral. This is a real thing that happened. This is a real thing our government did that we have legitimate documentation for. There is evidence, there is proof. This is not just a conspiracy theory. This happened, and it's obviously not the first time the government has done something fucked up, especially in regards to children. I recommend, or actually, I really don't recommend doing a control f search in the unethical human experimentation in the United States Wikipedia page for the word children.

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Chris: If you're gonna do that, just make sure you have, like, a nice tall glass of scotch.

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Kayla: Yeah. I did not have a good night last night. There you will find entry after entry describing various researchers, hospitals, and government funded groups that carried out appalling, unethical, violent, and unspeakable experiments on children. Side note, the article talks about all unethical human experimentation, including children and adults. I was just shocked at how many examples of child experimentation was included. And all of these experiments were mostly conducted on poor of color, orphaned ill or mentally disabled adults and children.

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Chris: All right, you gotta get that low hanging fruit.

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Kayla: Experiments carried out on children have included unnecessary spinal taps and electroshock therapy, exposure to STI's and other illness.

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Chris: Oh, so now we're talking about not just, like, dead bodies, now we're talking.

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Kayla: Now we're talking about live ass children. Yes. So unnecessary spinal taps and electroshock therapy, purposeful exposure to STI's and other illnesses.

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Chris: Awesome.

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Kayla: Yeah. The application of radioactive material to either food that was then fed to the children or directly into their bodies, and psychological experiments that would result in techniques later known as torture. So, look, the US does.

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Chris: It's not coming across because we have an audio format here, but, like, my face just has this contorted, like.

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Kayla: And it's like it's.

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Chris: Their head's kind of dropping to the side.

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Kayla: If you do go on this Wikipedia page to do your own research, like, please be warned, it's bad. It's really bad. I did not have a good night last night.

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Chris: I'm sorry that you did this again in the year of our lord in 2020. It's already stressful enough.

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Kayla: I mean, look, the US does not necessarily have the best track record when it comes to secrets it keeps from its citizens or the way it treats people, especially marginalized people. Some of these things, like project sunshine, straight up, sound like science fiction. But again, it's not. It is real. Our government often does fucked up things we, the people, only find out about decades later, if at all. It happens over and over again. It erodes our trust institutions and leaders. It erodes our sense of stability. It erodes our experience of subjective reality. It makes it more and more difficult to tell the difference between conspiracy theories that turn out to be true, conspiracy theories that are only rooted in fantasy.

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Kayla: Mix that up with some other major shortcomings of american myth, of rugged individualism, systemic racism and white supremacy, the patriarchy, christian hegemony, and add a dash of 21st century, postmodern, post scarcity, automation era ennui malaise, lack of agency and meaning.

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Chris: So that last whole bit means Facebook.

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Kayla: And you then have a recipe for some particularly complex and dangerous cocktails. One of those cocktails takes a confirmed story like project sunshine and completely blows it out of the water. And that cocktail is our topic for today's episode and the next three episodes after that. Today and for the next two months, culture, just weird, will finally be tackling the topic of QAnon. So, to clarify for our listeners, I won't be covering QAnon all by my lonesome. Chris and I have already decided to work on this topic together, dividing it up as best we can amongst ourselves to hopefully bring you the most well rounded presentation possible. Surprise, surprise. We like. It's been so nice to be able to talk about the topic together.

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Chris: I know. To not have to keep it a secret and be like, oh, no. Because this one would be a hard one to do by yourself without talking.

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Kayla: To someone you can't. Speaking of talking to people, we have been and will be talking to experts on and everyday people affected by QAnon. We have done research that covers both primary and secondary sources, and we have thought long and hard as to whether or not we should even cover this topic. More on that in a minute.

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Chris: And also, you've been following these communities for, I mean, almost since their inception, and what was it, like, 2017 or whatever?

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Kayla: But we will get to that. Okay, so for anyone who may not yet know what QAnon is, first of all, I envy you. Please tell me your secrets. Second of all, here is the briefest of brief descriptions of what it entails, but please know that this description is like reading one word out of the dictionary, like you have nowhere near the full context. But hopefully you join us for the rest of the journey down the rabbit hole and have your mind blown. Qanon is.

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Chris: Well, it's a hard. So I just want to say it's hard to succinctly describe, because QAnon, at least by the time we're going to publish here in 2020, it's become sort of this uber, er, conspiracy theory that contains so many things. So it's, like, hard to say it's this because its adherents are, believe, a wide variety of things.

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Kayla: It contains multitudes. At this point, I would say it's almost more of an identity rather than a community or even one thing I just came up with that I'm so smart.

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Chris: Wow, that is very insightful, actually.

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Kayla: No, actually, I think it is. I think it is.

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Chris: That is extremely insightful.

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Kayla: QAnon is in the shortest definition I can find, according to Wikipedia. Quote, a far right conspiracy theory that alleges that a cabal of Satan worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex trafficking ring and plotting against us. President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal.

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Chris: That's pretty. Okay. That's succinct. I mean, that covers the.

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Kayla: But there's so much more to it.

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Chris: Core beliefs. And then what happens is, like, that's sort of like this little ball that, like, rolls down a hill and then collects other conspiracies as it goes. And now it's just a huge ball of conspiracy.

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Kayla: Is it a katamari? Is that what it's called, that game?

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Chris: I don't know.

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Kayla: It's katamari, that game where you roll a ball around and you collect things.

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Chris: That's a game.

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Kayla: Yes, yes. Katamari. You tilt with a ball, and then you just roll around and it just collects all. Yes. Bigger and bigger. I can't believe you don't know what katamari is like.

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Chris: Like paperclips and bookers and, like, dogs.

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Kayla: And houses and buildings and trees.

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Chris: Well, that's an intense game.

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Kayla: I think they have a. I think there's an iPhone app for it now.

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Chris: Sounds fiction. Okay. I thought you meant, like, in real life.

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Kayla: Oh, no, like a. Like a video game.

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Chris: Oh, you said game, and we're talking about pushing a ball around, and I was, like, picturing, like, kids, you know, pushing the ball around in the dirt.

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Kayla: No, it's a video game. God, grandpa.

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Chris: Whatever.

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Kayla: Now, our listeners may be wondering why we've waited so long to talk about this subject, and there are a couple of reasons for that I would like to address before we get into it.

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Chris: I didn't want to.

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Kayla: No, I didn't want to. First and foremost, I've basically fought the idea of covering QAnon since we've had the podcast, because I've been afraid to cover it. When I first discovered QAnon for myself, as Chris mentioned back in 2017, it was something very fringe, existing only on the edges of the Internet and in vague news stories covering the fallout of events like pizzagate. As I watched the movement get larger and larger, spurring real world violence and being embraced by governmental candidates. I only became more afraid. I was worried that by talking about QAnon, we could be responsible for infecting innocent listeners with a theory that could take hold of them and dominate their lives. I was afraid of giving it more publicity, of putting it out into the world any more than it needed to be.

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Kayla: I was also a little afraid of the repercussions. Would the extremely online followers of QAnon take offense to our discussion of their group as a cult? Would there be retaliation? And then there was the fear of being able to cover the topic responsibly and comprehensively. In short, I put off doing this topic for two years, largely because I'm a scaredy cat. But that doesn't mean, pussy that I avoided the topic. I started following it not right away, but definitely in 2017, just after it hit the Internet. So, like, I visited message boards that we'll talk about. I joined their Facebook groups. I followed Twitter personalities and subreddits, all dedicated to following QAnon. And I observed the community as an interested outsider.

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Chris: Yeah. And like, other conspiracy theories over the past, you know, four, five, six years, it followed the same trajectory of like, oh, that's so interesting and fun to learn about that niche, little community there. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, my God, why are they everywhere? Yeah, wait, there's a bunch of people that live in flat earth. I thought it was like five people. Now it's like thousands. What's going on? So it had that same sort of trajectory, at least in my mind.

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Kayla: So it goes from like, yeah, this, look at that Internet thing to, oh, God, oh, God. It katamaried into a giant ball. QAnon is no longer on the fringes of the Internet. It has taken a prominent place in the political and social landscape of 2020. Every news outlet covers it in detail. The current president is asked about it during town halls. More and more americans identify as Q followers, or at least interested in the subject. Perhaps at this point, my fears over the ethics of covering the topic, lest I give it more coverage, is completely silly at this point. And perhaps the ethical thing to do is work to cover the topic responsibly, as we've decided to do. And perhaps, as my co host has pointed out to me time and time again, on and off, the podcast light is sometimes the best disinfectant.

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Chris: But I also, your co host sounds really smart and attractive.

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Kayla: Well, he's one of those things. I'll let you guess which one attractive I also won't take all the blame for why we've waited so long to talk about QAnon. Chris, my co host, also has his own reason. I forget what that is.

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Chris: I don't know. Some bullshit. Whatever. No.

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Kayla: Oh, you know, I remember what it is now.

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Chris: Yeah. And just to echo what you're just saying, like, it feels like there's just articles every day now about Qanon, and it's on Business Insider, and it's in Bloomberg, and it's in Forbes, and it's in. I just listed three business magazines all in a row. Sorry. Time, Washington Post, New York. I mean, it's just. There's a lot of. There's a reply all episode about it.

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Kayla: On a bunch of podcasts.

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Chris: On a bunch of podcasts. There's a podcast that's about it. There's. I think there's multiple, actually. So it's just kind of like. It's hella Zeitgeist. Yeah. I mean, I think that it. For me, it comes down to a couple of things. Like, first of all, I think after we've had the podcast for a while and interacted with a bunch of our listeners and. And kind of, like, have a good picture of a cross section of our fans, at least. I know we haven't interacted with everyone that listens, but I think I trust our listeners. Right. Like, I don't feel like we have this mass market of. I'm not really sure it'd be nice to have mass market, because then we could do, like, Honda ads and make a lot of money. But I think that our particular audience is.

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Chris: I trust them with dangerous information, I guess, is what I'm gonna say. Right. So. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is. Yeah. Is that it's even. Even without that, I think that we can handle the topic. We can present the information in such a way that is, as long as we're responsible and careful with it, we can. We can present the information in a way that's is beneficial. And I think it helps the overall landscape of things like this for people to. To be more educated about it rather than less educated about it. Like, I don't think it's always the best idea to. I mean, it's. It's a hard tightrope to walk sometimes. I have a friend that works for the Washington Post, and he was telling me, I talked to him a little bit about this episode, and.

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Chris: And he said, you know, that they talk about this in the newsroom all the time. Like, what's the, you know, what is the balance of, like, the ethics and side of things versus, like, you know, the information they're presenting? Like, do they have a responsibility to present information even if it's dangerous? We've talked about this before, too, in the show with utilitarianism. Right? Like the Rokos basilisk episode. That's dangerous information. I had sort of the same dilemma, right. Where the information hazard of that thing was something I had to balance against. Do I want to talk about it with people on the. That listen to the show? And so I think this is another one of those information hazards where we have to be careful with how we present it.

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Chris: And I think that we're going to do that, and we're going to present it to an audience that can handle it.

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Kayla: You guys can handle it. But I will say that's not why you have put off doing this topic.

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Chris: Wait, why did I put it off?

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Kayla: Cause you think it's too much of a cult.

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Chris: Oh, right. I thought you wanted me to speak to the whole, like, light is the best disinfectant.

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Kayla: No, you absolutely did that. But it's also. We haven't not done the topic just because I'm a afraid. We also have gone back and forth on whether or not it's even an appropriate subject matter for the podcast.

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Chris: Yeah, but last episode, we talked about GiF versus Jif.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: So I feel like that's on the, you know, that's the balance on the other end of the, like, how is this a cult, you guys, versus now this is just gonna balance that out. So.

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Kayla: Got it.

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Chris: That's fine.

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Kayla: So I guess with all of that said, let's get to that. So the way we've divided this topic up is as follows. Today, we'll get a history, pre 2017, of what, at least in the opinion of this podcast, led up to the birth of QAnon. That's our timeline for today. No pressure to me.

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Chris: Who were QAnon's mom and dad?

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Kayla: That's what we're looking at. We have a mommy, we have a.

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Chris: Daddy, and they love each other very much. They give birth to a father.

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Kayla: I don't know if there's any love here. The following episode will be a more focused timeline on the birth of QAnon in 2017 and its state today. Episode three will cover some alternative explanations for QAnon. I don't know if you want to say that.

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Chris: Who's doing that one?

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Kayla: That's all you, baby. And our final episode will focus on friends and family of Q followers as well as what can be done to counter the belief system.

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Chris: Who's doing that one again?

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Kayla: That's all on you.

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Chris: Oh, God.

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Kayla: I.

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Chris: Why do I have to do things?

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Kayla: I don't know. You did the hard ones.

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Chris: I don't want to do things anymore.

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Kayla: Who does? For today, let's start at the beginning. The very beginning.

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Chris: It's like the big bang.

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Kayla: Yeah. Again, another content warning. We're going to be talking about a lot of child murder and anti semitism right now, so strap on in.

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Chris: I got to say, I'm pretty proud so far of how I've been able to make a few little jokey jokes because I know I'm not going to be able to really say anything the entire rest of the session here.

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Kayla: No, no, you cannot. In 1144, a murder case rocked like ad. Yeah. Not like 11:44 p.m. No, 1140 in the year 1144.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: A murder case rocked the english town of Norwich. It might be Norwich, I don't know. I'm gonna say, for the purpose of this podcast, I'm saying Norwich if you're british and it's wrong.

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Chris: Dirty american. So we're gonna say Norwich. If Norwich is correct, then we shouldn't even be saying it correctly because we're american.

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Kayla: A twelve year old boy named William, a local tanning apprentice, was found dead in the woods the day before Easter Sunday, his wounds indicating a violent end. Because he had last been seen alive while working, his job as a tanner had him dealing often with the local jewish community. Local Christians almost immediately accused the Jews of being behind the murder and approached the ecclesiastical court seeking justice. Being non Christians, the jewish community was not under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical court and were advised by the sheriff to not submit to their trial by ordeal. The issue remained heated, and the jewish town folk were eventually given protection in the local castle, able to return home only when cooler heads prevailed, even though tensions remained.

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Kayla: Six years later, Thomas of Monmouth, a benedictine monk, decided to investigate the murder himself, interviewing folks who were around at the time. Those interviews would become a multi volume hagiography, the Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, published in 1173.

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Chris: What's a hagiography? I'm sorry?

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Kayla: It's the writing of the lives of saints. So it's like, oh, I feel like.

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Chris: I should know that.

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Kayla: Catholic a saint biography. Yeah.

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Chris: Oh, snap. Okay. Whoops. Totally cut that and stuff.

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Kayla: No. So again, this multi volume hagiography, the life and miracles of Saint William of Norwich, became the first medieval accusation against jewish people of ritual murderous wow. Thomas claimed to also interview converted jews as part of his investigation, who provided secret intel regarding the goings ons of jewish rituals. In his book, Thomas stated of William's death that local Jews, having shaved his head, they stabbed it with countless thorn points and made the blood come horribly from the wounds they made. Some of those present had judged him to be fixed to a cross in mockery of the Lord's passion. The book also claimed that a jewish convert filled Thomas in on a prophecy in the jewish faith that if Jews sacrificed a christian child each year, they would regain Israel.

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Kayla: Jewish leaders supposedly would meet to decide who was responsible for that year's sacrifice, and in 1144, the jewish community in Norwich was chosen. Thomas corroborated this with completely believable eyewitness accounts that only came out a decade later.

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Chris: You're air quoting right now if you.

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Kayla: Can'T tell by the timbre of my voice. A man claimed he was hired to Lord William for the sacrifice. A servant woman spotted William through a crack in a door. A man on his deathbed supposedly confessed he had seen a group of Jews carrying a body through the woods. When the book was published, Thomas editor described him as being someone who was of the kind of people one could consider deceivers and being deceived, but regardless, grifty. Grifty? Yeah, that's the medieval way to say grifty. But regardless. His account of a group of jewish people sacrificing a christian child in a bloody, violent ritual that mocked the passion of the Christ during Easter to celebrate Passover stuck. William was reburied in.

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Chris: That's not a good thing to have stick.

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Kayla: No, it's really not. It's really not.

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Chris: How long did it stick, Kayla?

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Kayla: We'll get to that. William, the murdered child, was reburied in the local monk cemetery and then reburied again and again increasingly. Yes, increasingly important places in the church, he was considered a martyr. A large number of miracles were witnessed around his tomb, leading even to pilgrims coming to visit the location. He was basically canonized. Canonization was kind of like a different beast back then. Like, kind of. Anybody could get canonized. But then, like, he's not. He's not like an official saint. Like, if you go to the Vatican, they're not like, oh, yes, Saint William. Yeah, but by.

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Chris: It's funny that, like, I don't know about hagiography because I do know that there's. There's a bunch of saints that we consider saints, quote unquote, that are more like folk saints and there's only, like, a very few that the catholic church actually recognizes. Like, it's surprisingly small. Like, for example, St. Christopher is not an official saint.

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Kayla: Right? Right. Well, neither is St. William. But even so, a small cult was established around William of Norwich, encouraged by the miracles recorded by Thomas of Monmouth. Interestingly, the bishop of Norwich had previously been interested in establishing a cult in Norwich. And again, this is like the bishop.

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Chris: Wanted to establish a cult.

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Kayla: This is like the old timey version of cult where it's like, we're a group of people that really worship this one guy. You know how we talked about the greek esoteric cults or whatever, and it wasn't like a cult. It was just a smaller religious group specifically dedicated to one God or one.

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Chris: So the bishop wasn't branding people and having them have sex with him?

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Kayla: No, he wanted there to be a group of people that were like, oh, this is our cult.

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Chris: This is our local. This is the guy we, like, worshippy person. Okay.

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Kayla: So before the cult was established, this bishop had been interested in having a cult established because it would bring more money to the church. And that bishop is the person who initially encouraged Thomas to investigate and write of the murder. I won't draw any conclusions for you, but I think. I think that you can draw your own. Something else highlighted in the book was the intervention by the sheriff authorities on behalf of the jewish townsfolk. Remember how the sheriff kept the jewish community out of court and offered them protection within the castle?

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Chris: I was surprised by that in the Middle Ages. That's.

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Kayla: Well, because this was actually before a lot of the. Really? We'll get to that. We'll get to that.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: The local king Stephen, had even promised to look into the murderous. And then he just never did.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: These actions and the reminder of these actions by Thomas's book incited suspicions in the christian population of collusion between the local ruling class and the jewish people. Okay, so they were like, you're taking care, right? You're saying you're gonna investigate the murder, and then you don't, and you're letting them come in your castle and must be.

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Chris: So you must be working together. Yeah.

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Kayla: Following this, a handful of unsolved child murders were then blamed on duke. These were Harold of Gloucester in 1168, Robert of Bury in 1181, and the well known at the time, Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, 1255. He's, like, the most well known of these murders that were child murders that were blamed on jewish people. This series of child murders blamed on jewish people became known as blood libel, one of the well known anti semitic canards.

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Chris: So this specific series was known as.

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Kayla: Blood libel, the ritualistic murder of christian children by jewish people. That's blood libel.

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Chris: Got it.

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Kayla: So. And if for anybody listening, anti semitic canard is a sensational report, misrepresentation or fabrication that is defamatory towards Judaism or Jews. Over the years, the rumors and claims around Jews using christian child blood for rituals morphed and grew. Eventually, it was believed that not only were these children murdered, but their blood was literally consumed, sometimes in a mockery of the communion and the more widespread belief as an ingredient in matzah bread for Passover.

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Chris: Oh, my God.

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Kayla: This particular aspect of the myth that jewish people sacrifice christian children and then consume the blood as an ingredient in matzah is the most well known piece of the blood libel. Anti semitic canardous. Blood libel is considered alongside well poisoning and host desecration. Do you know host desecration is. No, it's like when you, like, bastardize the usage of. Or you seek to destroy or, like, harm in some way, the communion member.

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Chris: Okay. And well poisoning is literally poisoning of.

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Kayla: A well, an actual well. Okay, so blood libel and then well poisoning and host desecration are like the main drivers of jewish persecution, particularly in Europe after this time, like it was. Those were the biggies. And these early murders, while obviously not the first examples of anti semitic smears and sentiments in our world history directly tied to the persecution of Jews over the next 900 years.

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Chris: Holy shit.

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Kayla: 900 years. I'm not kidding. We'll get to that. Accusations of blood libel against jewish people are documented throughout history since the eleven hundreds up to literally this year.

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Chris: Awesome.

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Kayla: Yeah, sorry that you cannot react to any of this. It just sucks.

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Chris: Yeah, no jokes for that one.

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Kayla: After the murder of William and the subsequent blood libel murders across England, also, like, this is a total aside, but sometimes, especially non Jews, people will take the term blood libel and apply it to other things, and you really shouldn't do that. That's considered really shitty inoffensive.

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Chris: So using it as a metaphor, you mean?

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Kayla: Yeah, I.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: Because it is a real thing that real people have been accused of, and then, like, so don't try not to use it for anything other than what it actually is referring to. So the blood libel murders across Europe. After this, the christian views of jewish people became more and more intolerant. This jewish specific prejudice dovetailed exactly with the rising christian sentiment that wanted to see a crusade happen, which would eventually be the first crusade.

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Chris: You can cut this if you don't know the answer. But was there anti semitism before this, or was this the birth of antisemitism overall, or just the birth of this particular flavor of anti semitism?

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Kayla: Well, I mean, jews have been persecuted since the literal beginning. Well, in Europe, though, I don't know about the antisemitism against jews in Europe. I think that this was the start of what we know as antisemitism.

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Chris: So, like the sort of, er, modern version of it.

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Kayla: Yeah. And feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but that is what it seems like. So it was like this jewish anti jewish sentiment was rising. This want for a crusade was rising, and, like, this desire for a crusade basically lumped all non christians together. So, like, it was kind of like we want to just drive out anyone, or, like, we would just want to kill anyone who's not a christian or whatever. The crusade was about, I don't know.

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Chris: It was about taking back the holy land, which at the time was under control of, I forget, the name of the sultan, but basically the arab world.

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Kayla: So that was the crusade. Thank you, history, man. But because of this sentiment, even jewish people were lumped into it and that actually put Jews who were living in England and other predominantly christian areas at the time in mortal danger. Beginning in 1189, massacres of jewish people broke out throughout England, spreading all the way to Norwich. By 1190, any Jews who had not escaped had been murdered in this town. Less than 100 years later, jewish people were expelled from England and were not permitted to return to the country until after 1655.

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Chris: Whoa, hold up. When. When was the expulsion?

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Kayla: In 1290 to 18.

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Chris: No, sorry, you said 16.

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Kayla: I can't say that there weren't jew. That there weren't jewish people living in England before that time, but it's just.

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Chris: They weren't allowed to. Yeah. 1655 is like, now that's like.

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Kayla: It's like, yeah, holy shit. It's like, oh, the enlightenment's happening.

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Chris: Like, right. Oh, the enlightenment's well underway and we're ahead in the americas and everything. Yeah. Holy shit.

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Kayla: But back to blood libel, it's important to point out that human sacrifice and the consumption of blood runs totally counter to actual jewish law and faith.

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Chris: Oh, yeah. I thought that kind of went without saying.

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Kayla: Maybe you'll recall the story of Abraham in the Bible where God is like, yo, don't actually sacrifice your son, please. Like, we don't do that. Just take this ram instead.

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Chris: Right. And then that became, like, kind of part of their.

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Kayla: I. Yeah, that's like a thing. Not committing murder is literally one of the ten Commandments. And all blood, not just human, and human flesh specifically, are not allowed under kosher dietary laws. So just saying. Probably better to look at the actual jewish religion to get an idea of what right it's going wrong, rather than like, talking to some christians who are scared and mad, right.

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Chris: It's interesting that it's not just they don't do this, it's like they specifically have stuff against this.

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Kayla: Let me read you this quote that just makes me so sad. A quote from a rabbi named Rabbi Israel Rutman.

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Chris: I don't want to be sad.

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Kayla: It has been one of history's cruel ironies that the blood libel accusations against jews using the blood of murdered gentile children for the making of wine and matzah became the false pretext for numerous pogroms. And due to the danger, those who live in a place where blood libels occurred are halachically exempted from using red wine, lest it be seized as evidence against them. So, like, halachically is jewish law. If you are a jewish person and you were living in a place where blood libel accusations were happening, it was highly recommended. Too dangerous to own red wine. Don't do your red wine stuff because people are going to be like, oh, you're using children's blood in that.

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Chris: Oh, my God.

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Kayla: It's really vile to be like, oh, we're gonna take this like tenant of your religion and, like, bastardize it and say that you're doing this horrible thing. But that reality, of course, has not stopped the accusations. Here are just some other examples of blood libel accusations throughout history. In 1529, Count Wolf of basin. Basin, I don't know, someplace in the Czech Republic. Wasn't the Czech Republic at the time, but that area, the future Czech Republic. So this count Wolf, claimed that a nine year old boy had been tortured to death via bloodletting. 30 jews were forced to confess to the crime and were then burnt. 30 later, it was discovered that the boy was alive and had been kidnapped by Count Wolf, who orchestrated.

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Chris: Oh, my God.

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Kayla: Who orchestrated the event in order to escape his creditors by having them burned to death. It's not good.

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Chris: That was easier than just getting the money together to pay them back, apparently. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

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Kayla: In 1823, a christian child was murdered outside of the russian town valise. The only witness was a drunk woman, and multiple local jews were imprisoned due to her false testimony. Many of them stayed behind bars for over ten years, with the last release happening in 1835.

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Chris: Can we do a happy show after we do all this.

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Kayla: You wanted to do QAnon, so we're.

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Chris: Barely getting started here, and I'm already.

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Kayla: Like, it's not good.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: In 1903, anti semitic newspaper in Dobasari, Russia, claimed that a boy was found murdered by Jews who killed him in order to harvest his blood for matzah. As a result, the Kishinev pogrom ensued. 49 jewish people were killed, hundreds were injured, and almost a thousand homes were destroyed.

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Chris: Good God.

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Kayla: In Nazi Germany, obviously, Jews were often accused of.

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Chris: I've heard of this one.

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Kayla: Yeah. Jews were often accused of blood libel and the ritual murder of christians for blood. One anti semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer, was even banned by nazi authorities themselves in 1934 because the rhetoric went too far.

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Chris: Holy shit.

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Kayla: Because it compared jewish ritual murder to the right of communion.

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Chris: Wow. Okay. So it was like the Nazis were like, you've gone too far here. It's starting to infringe on some christian y stuff.

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Kayla: Yeah, basically.

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Chris: Okay. You know what's interesting, though? As much as I knew about, you know, the existence and whatever details of the Holocaust, I didn't know about blood libel until fairly recently.

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Kayla: Yeah, I don't think I did either.

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Chris: I don't think I was taught about that. I mean, I guess it's like, I don't know.

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Kayla: I. Like, I knew the phrase, but I didn't.

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Chris: I feel like I'd heard the phrase right. I didn't know how it had. I didn't know how that societal meme. Right had helped or contributed towards the world war two holocaust.

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Kayla: And I feel like I just. I can't help but wonder, like, what's the reason for that? Why do you and I, as to non jewish people, not know about this?

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: Do you actually. Do you want to know where I finally, like, googled what it was and found all this out, where it was because of somebody that I follow on twitter talking about how one of the episodes of Lovecraft country fell into blood libel rhetoric. So I finally googled it, and, like. And it's. And it's shocking to me that I don't know this. Not because I know a lot of things and obviously I have a lot of blind spots, but because, like, I've definitely googled anti semitic canards before. Yeah, it, like, totally escaped me. I totally, like, breezed past it.

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Chris: Like, if it. I don't think I would know exactly what blood libel was if QAnon weren't a thing.

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Kayla: Yeah, same. That's a failing of ours. In March 2020, an italian artist named Giovanni 2020. This year, in March 2020, an italian artist named Giovanni Gasparo showed a painting titled the Martyrdom of Saint Simon of Trento in accordance with jewish ritual murder. So, like, these beliefs and sentiments are still around, still pervasive, still.

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Chris: He did an art about it.

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Kayla: Yes. And didn't just title it like something that wasn't saying that Jews are doing ritual murder. Like he was saying, hey, look, here's Jews doing ritual murder of this child.

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Chris: Do you know if he at least.

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Kayla: Got, like, he was condemned by the italian jewish community? I can't say he was condemned by the, by a larger community. I just know he was condemned by the italian jewish community.

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Chris: Jeez.

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Kayla: And like some other art circles, imaginary blood libel, sacrifice rituals fall under the realm of the nocturnal ritual fantasy. An idea. It's great. I had revelations doing this. Well, it's just, it's very helpful. So the nocturnal ritual fantasy is an idea coined by historian Norman Cohn. Basically since the dawn of western culture and throughout its entire existence, the consistent belief exists that some secret group of people regularly and ritualistically gets together for nocturnal meetings to, one, figure out how to undermine and destroy mainstream society. And two, murder and eat children.

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Chris: What the hell?

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Kayla: We've always had this belief.

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Chris: That's so weird. It sounds like when were talking about the satanic panic in the teal episode.

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Kayla: Oh, we will get to that.

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Chris: Oh, man. This is the second time we're gonna talk about satanic panic in the show.

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Kayla: And we have to. It's very important.

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Chris: It's so interesting that we've always had that. I wonder what sort of deep seated thing that is.

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Kayla: Oh, we'll get to that.

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Chris: Oh, okay, cool.

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Kayla: Jewish blood libel stories are probably not the first instance of nocturnal ritual fantasies. According to an article from the public medievalist written by Michael Barbizot, Romans made these claims against early christians. That might have been the first I.

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Chris: Think I've heard of that, at least.

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Kayla: In like, recorded history. The nocturnal ritual fantasy was later levied against christian heretics and as mentioned, jewish people. These are the same claims levied against witches during the widespread witch hunts of, well, forever, all the time, right?

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Chris: Multiple times.

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Kayla: One thing that's common in every accusation of nocturnal ritual fantasy, the charges are not real. They only exist in the imaginations of the accusers. I found no example of nocturnal ritual fantasy that was based on actual evidence of shadowy groups eating babies. Another thing common to most of these claims, violence, fatal violence towards marginalized people justified by these false claims of ritual child sacrifice.

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Chris: Oh, so violence, not violence. Of the sacrifice, but violence towards the alleged perpetrators of the sacrifice. Sweet. That sounds great.

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Kayla: That's great. As my co host mentioned, we have already covered a topic many consider to be a result of nocturnal ritual fantasy, and that's satanic ritual abuse and the satanic panic of the 1980s. Michael Barbazot's article, as well as an article written for the New Republic by Talia Levin, both make the connection between anti semitic blood libel accusations, witch hunts, and the eventual widespread panic and subsequent accusations and rooting out of Satanism in the United States. The parallels are there.

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Chris: That's so weird that it's like we think, like, oh, man, the Salem witch trials back in the 16 hundreds. Oof. We were crazy then. But then, like, the satanic panic was in the eighties.

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Kayla: And it's basically, it's the same thing.

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Chris: It's maybe not as devastating, but like the same flavor of thing. It's in the same ballpark. I mean, ideas.

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Kayla: The kind of violence that came out of that was not necessarily like mass hangings, but the kind of violence that came out of that was like, I mean, people's lives were destroyed. People were falsely put in jail for these children were traumatized. These parents were traumatized. The people that were accused were either dragged through these lengthy, years long trials that destroyed their businesses, destroyed their reputations, some of them spent years in prison. And it's because many actual Americans really believed that groups of Satanists were gathering together to perform their desecratory rituals, abusing, murdering, and consuming children in the process. Like, if you'll remember from our episode and from what I just said 2 seconds ago, the accusations were often levied at daycare providers, leading to highly covered, highly expensive trials, many of which led to jail time for innocent people who did nothing.

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Kayla: We learned in that episode that there is absolutely no concrete evidence of any satanic ritual abuse ever occurring in the United States, and that many children who confessed, quote unquote, to experiencing or witnessing the abuse were led to make those accusations by motivated interviewers.

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Chris: By the way, in case you are a new fan, in case you're not a longtime listener, then get the hell out. No, just kidding. It's episode five and six of our first season.

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Kayla: Oh, good for you. If we're remembering.

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Chris: Yes, I remember all of our episodes. Just give me a number and I'll tell you the title.

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Kayla: Proud of you. I won't do that.

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Chris: Good, because I don't think I would have been able to.

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Kayla: Yeah. Many of us believed that Satan worshippers were doing black magic all across the country with daytime talk shows warning us our children were being indoctrinated into these groups by heavy metal music or, as Geraldo Rivera claimed, by dungeons and dragons.

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Chris: Oh, man. The D and D thing was, yeah, that was a big part of it.

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Kayla: Rings of magical child sex abusers were everywhere. It did not matter that there was zero evidence. People believed in it hard enough, so it must be true. From Talia Levin's article QAnon Blood libel and the Satanic Panic, one thing I noticed about the daycare panic was very strange magical thinking among people who seemed like normal working people. Debbie Nathan, one of the most clear eyed contemporaneous reporters of the panic in the 1980s, told me Nathan recounted an experience in which a father with a child at McMartin, which you'll remember, the McMartin trial was like the biggie. That was the seven years long, like, most expensive.

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Chris: Right?

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Kayla: Nathan recounted an experience in which a father with a child at McMartin resolutely denied alibi evidence for one of the accused. The man had told Nathan he could have been in two places at once because he is a satanist, and Satanists have that ability.

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Chris: So that's very similar to.

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Kayla: You can't even have an alibi.

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Chris: Falls under. Well, yeah, but that falls under the anti factuality motivated reasoning, and that's more of, like, the closed logical system. It's like there's no.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: There's no counter argument because anything you present gets incorporated back.

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Kayla: Well, of course, you saw him at the store while he was doing the satanic ritual abuse. He's a sadist. They can do that.

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Chris: Right, right. We talk a little bit about that in our third episode that somebody here will be doing.

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Kayla: Oh, that's you, baby. Another piece of magical thinking. The deep seated belief that there was a series of elaborate tunnels under the McMartin school in which children were transported and where much of the satanic magical rituals and sex abuse took place. Why would the belief in these tunnels was so strong?

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Chris: How would they build the tunnels that.

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Kayla: About 50 parents rented a backhoe to dig up the property?

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Chris: Oh, my God.

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Kayla: When the backhoe proved fruitless, the parents.

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Chris: 50 parents.

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Kayla: 50 parents. The parents dug in with hands and shovels, determined to find some evidence of these tunnels because they knew they were there.

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Chris: I bet they still believed it was there even when they didn't find it evident.

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Kayla: No amount of digging produced said tunnels. One parent, however, found a turtle shell buried in the ground, which, of course, must have been proof that Satanists were conducting animal sacrifices in the tunnels, even though the tunnels did not exist.

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Chris: Well, you know, if you sacrifice a turtle, it has the effect of filling an area of earth. So what had happened was.

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Kayla: You got it. Satanists.

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Chris: They cast this turtle sacrifice spell to fill in the tunnels. That's how they got filled in.

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Kayla: Gotcha.

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Chris: Bada bing. I could be part of the cult.

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Kayla: Yes, you could. Now at this point you might be thinking, why. Why is there such a history of accusations from a majority group making claims a minority or imaginary group is abusing and killing children? Why?

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Chris: Well, that sound. Yeah, I'm more wondering why this specific flavor. I'm not wondering why there are majority groups persecuting minority groups. That seems to just be human nature.

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Kayla: Well, let's get into it. I mentioned earlier that believing the worst about a marginalized group of people then allows you to justify violence done against them. But why the need for violence? Some explanations I've read claim that believing the worst about certain groups of people allows you to sacrifice them in order to change the world to your liking. It's easier to utilize less than savory methods to achieve your social and political goals if you believe the people in your way are evil incarnate.

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Chris: Okay, so you're like, we want everyone to be christian here. We don't want any more jews in England. So how do we go about doing that?

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Kayla: Well, I think it's even. Let me. Okay, here's my. Here's the way I, like, rationalizes it in my head. So imagine you are a Townsville person living in Norwich in the eleven hundreds. You're living in a feudal system of peasants and royalty. Your life is brutally difficult. Yours most people's few resources to go around there is constant jockeying for position in a social class hierarchy which is an actual matter of life and death.

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Chris: Speaking of dungeons and dragons, that's literally what you're doing at that point. You're going to dungeons, fighting dragons. Fighting dragons.

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Kayla: Jewish people settled in Norwich only a few years before the murder of William. Outsiders make easy scapegoats, especially when you think they're getting preferential treatment by the ruling class. Why don't you get that special treatment? You deserve it. You've been here longer. You're just as worthy. You've lived such a hard life. Well, one way to get that treatment or to gather more resources or to find an outlet for your frustration of living a brutal life is to vilify another group of people as evil and then kill them. Your standing in the world is immediately shifted. Plus, you got what you wanted without having to do anything evil yourself. You are simply taking out the trash.

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Chris: That's what happens in America. Yeah, with. Yeah, I mean, not to get too deep into it, but, like, that's what happens here. Is that so?

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Kayla: It happens everywhere.

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Chris: People less fortunate get turned on each other because then it's easier for the people that are in power to maintain control. It's not their fault. It's the minority's fault. It's the people that you don't have anything, not because of the powerful and the rich, but because you have a.

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Kayla: Feudal system, like maybe rise up and kill the king. So. I'm not advocating killing the king.

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Chris: Well, England doesn't have a king right now, so what you're advocating is killing the queen, which I don't think is possible.

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Kayla: Okay, first of all, obviously not. Second of all, I'm talking about at the time, if instead of doing this and fighting with your fellow peoples, what's this?

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Chris: We're on a.

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Kayla: Instead of an audience biting heads and fighting with your fellow peoples, you gotta. You gotta dismantle the power structure, man.

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Chris: Right, right.

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Kayla: But Karl Marx, that failed to consider the middle ages.

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Chris: Oh, here we go. It's all about capitalism as a cult again.

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Kayla: Well, this is feudalism as a cult.

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Chris: Oh, okay. Any economic system is a cult is kind of what we're saying.

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Kayla: I don't think that's wrong. Including communism, including socialism, including capitalism. I think they're all cults.

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Chris: Economics are just weird.

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Kayla: That's our next podcast. You might still be asking yourself at this point, why is child abuse? And most of the time, pedophilia goes along with that, why is this always a part of the nocturnal ritual fantasy?

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Chris: Yeah, like, why is it not just they're doing bad things? Like, why is it that specific bad thing?

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Kayla: Well, according to La Times reporter Melissa Healy, pedophilia and child abuse. I mean, this is not just according to this reporter, but, like, I'm gonna reference her article greatly.

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Chris: I gotcha.

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Kayla: But pedophilia and child abuse are universally reviled on a deep evolutionary lizard brain level.

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Chris: Okay, so it's like, if you're gonna accuse somebody falsely, you might as well go ahead and accuse them of the.

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Kayla: Worst thing if you need to wipe them off the map. Like, really the only way to. Yeah, it's.

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Chris: Right. You can't be like, well, they were jaywalking.

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Kayla: Yeah. It's just not as visceral. Like, we have a species have evolved to feel compelled to care for and protect children. So the thought of abuse towards them disgusts and horrors triggers the lizard brain in us. Yeah, it obligates us to act. Or at least it, like, obligates us to want to act. So it makes sense that if you need to create a monster, like, if you need to justify your violent hatred towards a group of people, the shorthand your brain would go to is accusations of pedophilia in our collective unconscious. The pedophile is subhuman. It is innately evil. This is a thing that must be put to death. There is no hope of redemption. It is indefensible. It is the perfect villain.

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Chris: I think Darth Vader was the perfect villain, but this is pretty good, too.

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Kayla: I feel like.

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Chris: Is that a joke we can keep in, or should we cut that?

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Kayla: No, I thought that was doing my best.

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Chris: I'm doing my best. I'm trying. I'm trying so hard.

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Kayla: Another evolutionary psychological tidbit is negatively biased credulity. This is the idea negatively biased credulity. This is the idea that it more greatly benefits our survival as individuals and as a species to believe and remember signs of danger.

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Chris: That is, things that are bad, where we give more weight to negative things that might harm or damage or risk than we do to positive things.

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Kayla: To neutral or positive things.

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Chris: Yeah. Right. So this is why, like, people make irrational decisions with money, for example.

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: It is better for your survival to believe your spouse when they say the brakes are out in the car than it is to believe that they had a great sandwich for lunch. If they tell you about their day, you're probably gonna remember one of those things, right?

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Chris: And the on the savannah argument for that is like, if you hear a rustling in the bushes, it could be either a leopard or a delicious dinner rabbit or something. And, you know, if you're. If it's one, then you get a delicious dinner, but if it's the other, then you're dead.

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Kayla: Right? So better for your survival to assume the worst. It is also better for your survival to believe that your child's preschool is abusing children in secret tunnels than to believe they're learning the Alphabet.

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Chris: Well, it's.

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Kayla: It's not actually better, but our brains are wired.

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Chris: Our brains are wired to react that way.

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Kayla: It's an instinct that it does protect us to a degree. And unfortunately, it also causes us to remember and put stock in the bad stuff, like anti semitic canards or rumors of nocturnal rituals. From that LA Times article, quote, conspiracy beliefs that are more run of the mill, that a cabal of greedy bankers run the worlds economy, or that the moon landing was faked. Just dont carry the same emotional freight as a charge of child exploitation. And interestingly, some people are actually more prone to this than others. We will probably maybe get more into this in future episodes. Ill be sure to link to Melissa Healys La Times article, which cites extensive research that has been done that seems to show that people who lean politically right are more likely to believe messages of danger than political left leaners.

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Kayla: In surveys conducted in September 2016 by evolutionary anthropologist Daniel Mt. Fessler, 948 american adults across the political spectrum were asked by Fessler's team to rate how strongly they believed or disbelieved 16 assertions, almost all of which were false. Some of the assertions suggested neutral or happy outcomes, while others hinted at hazards that could be serious. Plenty of test subjects were taken in by false claims about both hazards and benefits, and participants across the political spectrum showed some negativity bias in deciding what to believe. But when a bogus claim raised a prospective danger, respondents who embraced conservative political views were more likely to believe it than those who adhered to more liberal political positions.

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Chris: Interesting.

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Kayla: Melissa's article gets more into the whys of this. So read it.

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Chris: Go read the article.

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Kayla: Go read it.

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Chris: That's our podcast. Read the thing.

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Kayla: And then finally, on the whys of why the hell is there a consistent pattern of social ingroups accusing social out groups of ritual abuse and murder of children?

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Chris: Well, it feels like you explained that, right?

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Kayla: Well, I'll give you my opinion.

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Chris: Oh, okay. So, but just to recap, though, that your explanation for it was the in group, the majority population wants to do basically some social engineering of their society. And to do that, they feel like they need to persecute or destroy the out group.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: And then they thus create these ideas.

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Kayla: I think there's more to it than that. Sometimes I think that there's because not everyone who necessarily engages in believing in these things go out and do the actual violence or like, are even part of the in group that's going to benefit from getting rid of the out group. So here's my opinion again.

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Chris: I definitely want your opinion. You know what I think most of the times I say, what does Kayla think? I really want to know what Kayla thinks about this.

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Kayla: Everybody does. That's why we have this podcast, actually.

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Chris: Yeah, I guess. Yeah, this is a fundamentally vain podcast.

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Kayla: This'll, again, we'll get deeper into this in future episodes. But I think a big why of this particular conspiracy theory style, and honestly, a big why of most conspiracy theories is that the world is chaotic and meaningless and terrifying. It is bone shatteringly scary to face a potential reality that nothing happens for a reason. And the universe is a cold, unfeeling place where children sometimes get murdered just because. And there's no point to any of it, right? Creating a narrative, discerning a why, a reason, a story to explain away the things that happened, helps to make sense of an otherwise senseless world. No matter how awful, how horrendous that narrative may be, it is more comforting than the idea that there simply is no narrative.

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Chris: Yeah, well, that's not just a kayla idea.

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Kayla: I mean, did I say that?

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Chris: You said that's what you think I said.

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Kayla: This is my opinion.

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Chris: Oh, okay.

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Kayla: Just because I'm saying this is my opinion, not saying I created this sprung from nowhere, you're saying there is zero context for this, and I created it. And I will be teaching a class at Berkeley.

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Chris: All right, what you're saying is subscribe to this aspect of conspiracy theorism, that part of what drives it is this desire for control, this desire for order. Even if that order is scary, any amount of scary order is still better than chaos.

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Kayla: Yeah, I think it might be easier for some people to believe that there's, like, a shadowy elite cabal sacrificing children for satanic rituals, right?

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Chris: Because then it suggests that there's something to be done about it and you can fix.

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Kayla: And it's not just like, oh, no, the world is so cruel that, like, violent deaths of children happen sometimes.

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Chris: Right, right. Because then there's, like, what do you do about that?

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Kayla: It's easier to believe that some people are literal demons from hell than to believe that, like, some people. Some things people do or outcomes that happen just don't have a reason. Like, it's easier to believe that someone is innately evil than, like, it is to face the fact that maybe they're just a politician with an impossible job, or maybe it's a person with a tendency towards sociopathic behavior and it doesn't really mean anything. Like a narrative, any narrative is better than the alternative.

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Chris: Right?

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Kayla: And I came up with that all by myself.

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Chris: Oh, my God. You're gonna let me live that down?

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Kayla: I don't think I will. Speaking of narratives, I'd like to shift now to another narrative, one that is a far more modern example of the nocturnal ritual fantasy than anything we've discussed so far. But that clearly has roots in the blood libel history we've discussed. Let's talk for a moment about pizzagate.

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Chris: Mmm. Pizza. So, is that a gate made of pizza?

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Kayla: God, I wish.

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Chris: Or is that a pizza with gates?

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Kayla: A pizza made of gate.

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Chris: You need to put little pepperoni and then little gates maybe on the pizza.

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Kayla: Yeah, pizza gate. In March 2016, eight months before the presidential election, John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton's campaign, had his personal email account compromised via a spear phishing attack. Most authorities on the topic agree that the hack can be credited to a russian hacker group, Fancy bear, which may or may not be a part of Russia's military intelligence agency.

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Chris: What's the spearphishing attack again?

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Kayla: So phishing is with a pH. With pH from Wikipedia. The fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by the disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

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Chris: Okay, so that's when you get an email from bank of America, but it's not actually from bank of America. It's like a spoofed email, and it says, click here. And then all of a sudden you give your password away.

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Kayla: Spear phishing is phishing that's targeted towards a specific person organization.

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Chris: Okay, so is that when, like, one of those emails says, dear Chris Carlson?

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Kayla: No, it's like when hackers are like, we want to get John Podesta's emails, not, we want to get at someone's emails.

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Chris: Okay, but does it still use that format of like, yeah, it's still phishing.

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Kayla: But it's specifically like, they're not. Like most phishing things are not just being sent to some hacker going, let's send this to Christopher.

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Chris: There's blasted out to everyone.

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Kayla: Spearphishing is like somebody going, I am targeting John Podesta to get his emails.

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Chris: Got it.

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Kayla: And that's what happened. Seven months later, WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website founded by Julian Assange, published 20,000 pages of podesta emails, which is a lot a nightmare. As soon as I think about what would happen, I'm not anyone, but if all of my emails.

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Chris: Oh, God.

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Kayla: Yeah, I kill myself. Like, horrible. It would be the worst thing in the world.

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Chris: Yeah. I would ritual sacrifice myself.

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Kayla: Imagine if you knew everybody in the world was looking through all of your emails.

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Chris: Nope, nope. I don't want to imagine that.

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Kayla: Oh, God. Sorry, John, but I don't know.

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Chris: It's the worst thing you've said yet on this podcast.

407
01:02:33,210 --> 01:03:03,812
Kayla: The Clinton campaign has never verified the authenticity of the emails, but most cybersecurity experts believe them to be real, though most also capitulate that the hackers could have falsified some of the emails or like, interjected, mixed in false with some. Okay, the emails had a dramatic effect on the tenor of the election, if not the actual outcome. Yeah, I think we all remember that phrase, butter emails. And I really don't want to get into it more than that because I'm still tired.

408
01:03:03,916 --> 01:03:08,876
Chris: My favorite meme from that is the stick of butter that says emails on it.

409
01:03:08,988 --> 01:03:18,580
Kayla: Butter emails. My favorite one is the still shot from Handmaid's tale where there's just like the handmaid standing in the grocery store and it says butter emails.

410
01:03:18,660 --> 01:03:19,844
Chris: Yeah, that one's good too.

411
01:03:19,972 --> 01:04:07,900
Kayla: Anyway, the 20,000 pages of emails were immediately scoured by, well, a lot of people, many of which we will call very online. I will say that it seems like most folks in retrospect, who gravitated towards poring through the emails were very politically right. Members of the far alt right already prone to conspiracy and just the kind of people who are willing to study in detail the leaked, the 20,000 pages of leaked emails of a political opponent. The fake news industry also experienced a boon at the time, taking bits and pieces of the real story and blowing them up into just insane things that were, of course, then shared virally. And like, I'm talking about literal fake news, not like Huffington Post or Fox News. I'm talking about sites called, like, planet free will and the vigilant citizen, like, fake news, actual fake news.

412
01:04:07,940 --> 01:04:09,480
Chris: Classic fake news.

413
01:04:10,020 --> 01:04:20,182
Kayla: And then on October 30, 2016, a Twitter account going by the name of David Goldbergny tweeted it has been since deleted. I think it was taken.

414
01:04:20,246 --> 01:04:21,046
Chris: No way.

415
01:04:21,198 --> 01:04:29,662
Kayla: David Goldberg NY tweeted rumors stirring in the NYPD that Huma's emails point to a pedophilia ring. And Hillary. Hillary Clinton is at the center.

416
01:04:29,766 --> 01:04:31,094
Chris: Hashtag, what's huma?

417
01:04:31,142 --> 01:04:39,854
Kayla: Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner's wife and Hillary Clinton's one of her aides. Okay, remember his emails got all hacked too.

418
01:04:39,902 --> 01:04:40,454
Chris: Oh, right.

419
01:04:40,502 --> 01:04:44,766
Kayla: His emails got really forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. There were a lot of emails getting released.

420
01:04:44,798 --> 01:04:45,810
Chris: A lot of emails.

421
01:04:46,170 --> 01:04:59,170
Kayla: Rumors stirring in the NYPD that huma's emails point to a pedophilia ring and Hillary Clinton is at the center. Hash gohillery. Hash podesta emails, 23 hash gohillery. Well, yeah. Cause they want that. They want anybody type searching.

422
01:04:59,210 --> 01:05:01,938
Chris: Oh, anybody that's seen gohilary to see his. Okay, right, right.

423
01:05:01,994 --> 01:05:08,626
Kayla: This Twitter account claimed to be run by a New York lawyer and had a history of tweeting white supremacist material. Okay, see, this was the.

424
01:05:08,658 --> 01:05:11,130
Chris: Sounds like a nice chap.

425
01:05:11,210 --> 01:05:38,406
Kayla: Nice. Nice fellow. Again, the account no longer exists. This was the summary of a narrative that had been gleaned by readers of the various leaked emails. They claimed that hidden in codewords was messaging that told the story of a child sex trafficking ring run by high ranking Democrat party leaders and candidates that all centered on the satanic ritual abuse carried out by said Democrats in the secret tunnels underneath a DC pizza parlor. Comet. Ping pong.

426
01:05:38,438 --> 01:05:42,418
Chris: Holy shit. So that's where the pizza and pizza gate comes from.

427
01:05:42,474 --> 01:05:42,850
Kayla: Yes.

428
01:05:42,930 --> 01:05:47,530
Chris: And the gate just comes from everything being called gate after Watergate.

429
01:05:47,570 --> 01:05:50,730
Kayla: Yes. Stop calling things gate. It's not a gate.

430
01:05:50,850 --> 01:06:00,810
Chris: You know, so my favorite gate, by the way. I'm gonna just tell the story. I don't care if the person. So one of my co workers at Blizzard.

431
01:06:00,930 --> 01:06:02,150
Kayla: You don't have to say that.

432
01:06:03,570 --> 01:06:27,926
Chris: Whatever. I'm not saying the person. One of my co workers at a previous job there was. So at Blizzard, there's a. It's. It's gated, it's fenced around. And you have to, like, if it's off hours, if it's on hours, they open the gate and there's a security guard there. You show your badge. But if it's off hours, then there's a little, like, little. What do you call it when you have to, like, run your badge across? It's like, you don't have to swipe it. Whatever.

433
01:06:27,998 --> 01:06:33,328
Kayla: Point is, beep you in. Like, beeper. She's your fob, and it fobs you in.

434
01:06:33,384 --> 01:06:38,664
Chris: Okay, let's call it that. The point is, you have to wave your badge in front of this little thingy and it beeps you. And then the gate opens.

435
01:06:38,712 --> 01:06:39,328
Kayla: Right?

436
01:06:39,504 --> 01:07:18,916
Chris: The gate's a little slow. So at one point, this said co worker was a little. A little bit fast on the. A little bit jumping the gun on the gas, and just barely, just nudged the gate. Just barely. Just barely. So anyway, thought nothing of it. But then, like, her boss got an email from HR being like, we need to talk about this thing where so and so hit the gate. And it was like. And he had to, like, go talk to HR about it. And he was like, what is this? Obviously nothing came of it, but, like, the fact that even happened was, a, hilarious. And b, we ended up getting to call it gate. Gate.

437
01:07:18,948 --> 01:07:19,676
Kayla: It was gate. Gate.

438
01:07:19,748 --> 01:07:20,964
Chris: Which makes it my favorite gate.

439
01:07:21,012 --> 01:07:21,812
Kayla: That is a good gate.

440
01:07:21,916 --> 01:07:22,436
Chris: Yeah.

441
01:07:22,548 --> 01:07:31,438
Kayla: So, okay, back to pizzagate again. Child sex trafficking ring, run out of the basement, tunnels underneath comet ping pong.

442
01:07:31,494 --> 01:07:35,182
Chris: Right? So I just told this story, so let me make sure I can baseline myself here.

443
01:07:35,206 --> 01:08:13,148
Kayla: So I'm baselining you, comet ping pong. The pizza parlor, for some context, is a popular place in Washington DC. It has been featured on diners, drive ins, and dives. It has received critical acclaim for its pies. It's often a place where Capitol Hill staffers go. It has a back room where you can play ping pong, and it also serves as a concert venue. It's also. Yeah, like a little like, you know, you move the ping pong tables out of the way and you concert. It's also been known to be a queer friendly space hosting events for the LGBTQ community. And the owner is an outgay man named James Alfontis, who GQ once ranked as the 49th most powerful person in Washington DC.

444
01:08:13,204 --> 01:08:13,756
Chris: Wait, what?

445
01:08:13,828 --> 01:08:16,934
Kayla: Simply based on the cultural cache of owning comet ping pongous.

446
01:08:17,011 --> 01:08:17,586
Chris: Really?

447
01:08:17,738 --> 01:08:37,113
Kayla: It's not a small. So supposed evidence of this child's sex trafficking ring came from things like podesta emails about ordering cheese pizza. Pizzagate theorists believed that cheese pizza was code for child porn due to the shared first letters of the words CP. CP.

448
01:08:37,242 --> 01:08:38,830
Chris: That's just science, Kayla.

449
01:08:40,689 --> 01:08:48,844
Kayla: I don't know if that is science. CP has historically been used by pedophiles attempting to codedly share child porn online.

450
01:08:48,892 --> 01:08:51,692
Chris: Oh, was it so CP saying CP is a real thing?

451
01:08:51,796 --> 01:08:52,220
Kayla: Yeah.

452
01:08:52,300 --> 01:08:52,732
Chris: Okay.

453
01:08:52,796 --> 01:08:56,720
Kayla: Don't go on the Internet and say CP. Don't look for CP. Just don't.

454
01:08:57,340 --> 01:08:59,323
Chris: Okay. And so then they. So it's. Then they extract.

455
01:08:59,372 --> 01:09:06,604
Kayla: They were like, people are looking for cheese pizza, right? Which. Why can't a guy just go on a cheese pizza? I love a cheese pizza.

456
01:09:06,692 --> 01:09:19,974
Chris: I mean, we're the actually probably don't have the answer to this. What were the emails like, I would like to order a cheese pizza for later, please. Or was it like, we must get, please give me a cheese pizza so that I can have sex with it. You know what I mean? No.

457
01:09:19,982 --> 01:09:25,130
Kayla: It was like, oh, we're gonna have a fundraiser, maybe we should order some cheese pizzas.

458
01:09:26,790 --> 01:09:29,613
Chris: Oh, wow, that's damning.

459
01:09:29,742 --> 01:10:06,896
Kayla: Other evidence included the fact that James Alfontes had some connections to the democratic party in that, a, he was a prominent donor, b, John Podesta's brother, Tony Podesta, frequently visited the restaurant, and c, he had previously dated David Brock, a former right wing journalist who eventually changed course and advocated for Hillary Clinton. At one point, Al Fontis was going to organize a Clinton fundraiser with David Brock. I think cheese pieces were discussed in that. And like, maybe that seems kind of shady. Like, why does this guy have these connections? But, like, Washington DC is a company town. And speaking as somebody who also works in a company town, like, everybody knows everybody, Kayla.

460
01:10:06,928 --> 01:10:14,816
Chris: I've seen house of cards. I know that everybody is into everything. This just strikes me as the ribs restaurant guy.

461
01:10:14,888 --> 01:10:15,384
Kayla: Right?

462
01:10:15,512 --> 01:10:16,592
Chris: Sounds similar to that.

463
01:10:16,656 --> 01:10:18,128
Kayla: Everybody knows everybody.

464
01:10:18,264 --> 01:10:23,100
Chris: Yeah. Here's the thing, though. This whole thing is disgusting.

465
01:10:23,400 --> 01:10:25,180
Kayla: Why? What's your joke?

466
01:10:26,440 --> 01:10:32,060
Chris: Because pepperoni pizza is superior to cheese pizza. I would be suspicious too.

467
01:10:32,390 --> 01:10:33,930
Kayla: I prefer a cheese.

468
01:10:34,550 --> 01:10:36,806
Chris: Okay, well, I don't know what you're.

469
01:10:36,838 --> 01:10:39,254
Kayla: Up to then, but it's because I don't eat pepperoni.

470
01:10:39,342 --> 01:10:41,958
Chris: Oh, yeah, you're a veget. Oh, vegans there.

471
01:10:42,014 --> 01:10:45,670
Kayla: I mean, we like to eat children. Babies are vegan.

472
01:10:45,750 --> 01:10:46,126
Chris: Yeah.

473
01:10:46,198 --> 01:10:47,598
Kayla: Baby blood is vegan, guys.

474
01:10:47,694 --> 01:10:48,566
Chris: Yeah, for sure.

475
01:10:48,678 --> 01:10:53,374
Kayla: So, okay, to recap, John Podesta got hacked by Russians.

476
01:10:53,462 --> 01:10:53,910
Chris: Yeah.

477
01:10:53,990 --> 01:10:55,630
Kayla: His emails were posted to WikiLeaks.

478
01:10:55,710 --> 01:10:56,158
Chris: Yes.

479
01:10:56,254 --> 01:10:58,952
Kayla: People online scoured the emails for signs of wrongdoing.

480
01:10:59,046 --> 01:10:59,412
Chris: Yes.

481
01:10:59,476 --> 01:11:09,796
Kayla: And ended up believing mundane details and coincidental connections were code for a secret democratic led cabal of child sex trafficking and satanic ritual abuse occurring underneath a local pizza restaurant.

482
01:11:09,868 --> 01:11:15,884
Chris: So what? How did it get to satanic ritual abuse from cheese pizza? From, from child porn?

483
01:11:15,972 --> 01:11:18,508
Kayla: Because of nocturnal ritual fantasy.

484
01:11:18,564 --> 01:11:22,236
Chris: Oh, so it's like once you have one, it just, so that's the other stuff just comes with it.

485
01:11:22,268 --> 01:11:44,226
Kayla: If you were a person going, we gotta get a, we gotta get these guys out of here. And you have this trove of emails, your brain is going to go to this thing that our brains have consistently gone to over at least the last 900 years, probably a lot longer. And it blows up into this nocturnal ritual fantasy of satanic ritual abuse. Sex cabals.

486
01:11:44,298 --> 01:11:45,658
Chris: Right, okay, got it.

487
01:11:45,714 --> 01:12:06,824
Kayla: That's like, that's what happens. This story, quote unquote, went on to make more rounds across fake news and far right sites around the Internet, fueled by anonymous speculation on image boards like four chan, as well as on r Pizzagate and r the Donald, both of which have been banned from Reddit. Infowars picked it up with Alex Jones obviously going full crazy on it.

488
01:12:06,952 --> 01:12:08,128
Chris: What? Infowars?

489
01:12:08,224 --> 01:12:13,488
Kayla: I know. He has been forced to apologize for like, for Pizzagate. For like. Yeah.

490
01:12:13,624 --> 01:12:14,144
Chris: No way.

491
01:12:14,192 --> 01:12:16,944
Kayla: Yeah. He had to apologize to James Alfontes. Otherwise he was like, I'm a suit.

492
01:12:16,952 --> 01:12:19,466
Chris: You sure? He was very sincere.

493
01:12:19,648 --> 01:12:20,238
Kayla: Sure. Yeah.

494
01:12:20,294 --> 01:12:28,142
Chris: Apologize for a lot of stuff you do. He had to get, he had to stop selling stuff with Pepe on it too, remember?

495
01:12:28,206 --> 01:12:30,206
Kayla: Oh, yeah. Fuck you, Alex.

496
01:12:30,278 --> 01:12:31,870
Chris: Or Alex Jones.

497
01:12:32,030 --> 01:12:41,494
Kayla: The story was promoted by other alt right activists, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiak, as well as kind of random top notch folks, basketball player Andrew Bogut.

498
01:12:41,622 --> 01:12:43,686
Chris: Yeah, that's what. Hold on.

499
01:12:43,718 --> 01:12:57,410
Kayla: And, like, pizza Gate, like, then he, like, hurt his knee and, like, pizza gators were like, that was retaliation. Like, literally, there was, like, theories about his, like, his basketball injuries, and he dug too deep.

500
01:12:57,450 --> 01:12:58,050
Chris: Kayla.

501
01:12:58,170 --> 01:13:01,354
Kayla: Pizzagate was also spread by Minecraft creator.

502
01:13:01,402 --> 01:13:04,258
Chris: Marcus Persson, also a stand up fellow.

503
01:13:04,354 --> 01:13:08,514
Kayla: Not Microsoft. Like, doesn't even, like, refuses to acknowledge he exists now.

504
01:13:08,682 --> 01:13:14,332
Chris: Yeah, because he's bad for too much to get into. Bad, bad business.

505
01:13:14,356 --> 01:13:14,700
Kayla: Bad for business.

506
01:13:14,740 --> 01:13:15,668
Chris: He's not great.

507
01:13:15,844 --> 01:13:26,756
Kayla: The story caught fire on Twitter, though researchers later discovered that a large number of tweets and retweets with hash Pizzagate are about Pizzagate were either bots or from foreign sources posing as american accounts.

508
01:13:26,908 --> 01:13:27,636
Chris: No way.

509
01:13:27,708 --> 01:13:45,110
Kayla: I know. But the story wasn't just spread by pundits and randos on Reddit. And four chan, then advisor to the Trump campaign, retired US army lieutenant general Michael Flynn, tweeted a fake news story that claimed the NYPD had linked a child sex trafficking ring to Hillary Clinton.

510
01:13:45,270 --> 01:13:45,822
Chris: Wow.

511
01:13:45,926 --> 01:14:09,554
Kayla: And Michael Flynn's son, his own chief of staff, also tweeted about Pizzagate, not only claiming it to be true and spreading the rumor further, but also stepping the conspiracy theory out even more, turning it into what was then called pedogate, which claimed a satanic cabal of elites of the new world Order operates international child sex trafficking rings. And obviously many of those elites are like, us dems.

512
01:14:09,602 --> 01:14:14,130
Chris: Did he use the new world order terminology, too? Yeah, that's a favorite of the conspiracy. Yeah.

513
01:14:14,250 --> 01:14:25,018
Kayla: Okay, so this was like, pizzagate was like, oh, Hillary Clinton is abusing children underneath this pizza place. And then he was like, nah, nah. International new world Order run child sex.

514
01:14:25,074 --> 01:14:31,586
Chris: He just injects all over steroids into it. Yeah, but Michael Flynn, he didn't end up getting any, like, position of power or anything in the future?

515
01:14:31,618 --> 01:14:36,210
Kayla: No, he just tweeted this and then he went away. Oh, wait, no, he didn't get a.

516
01:14:36,290 --> 01:14:37,682
Chris: Staff position in the White House or anything?

517
01:14:37,706 --> 01:14:38,850
Kayla: Yes, of course he did. He was.

518
01:14:38,930 --> 01:14:40,070
Chris: Oh, right.

519
01:14:40,770 --> 01:14:52,482
Kayla: What was he? I literally just looked it up. He was the former. He's a former United States national security advisor for Mister Donald Trump. I believe he's in prison. Is he in prison?

520
01:14:52,546 --> 01:14:57,642
Chris: I don't know if he's in prison or if he's been just accused or prosecuted.

521
01:14:57,666 --> 01:15:40,180
Kayla: I'm not sure he'd been in trouble, so. Okay. These stories are flying around the Internet with high profile people claiming that they're true. Again, the story. I have to keep saying it because it's insane. The story was that there were trafficked children being sexually abused and murdered by high ranking Democrats under a DC pizza parlor. Comet Ping pong owner James Al Fontis and his 40 odd staff started receiving phone calls, texts, and social media messages and reviews threatening violence. Like, literally, these messages were things like, I will kill you myself, like, nonstop harassment. So the restaurant owner, of course, contacted the authorities, including the FBI. He even contacted Facebook and Reddit to try and get these, like, posts of the rumors taken down.

522
01:15:41,240 --> 01:15:45,640
Chris: Facebook doesn't take down fake news, Kayla. The harassment, that's what they make their money.

523
01:15:45,720 --> 01:15:52,288
Kayla: Exactly. Their harassment obviously continued to flood in and in person. Protests even began to take place outside the restaurant.

524
01:15:52,424 --> 01:15:52,888
Chris: Fun.

525
01:15:52,984 --> 01:16:18,492
Kayla: This is all obviously horrible. Like, truly terrible. And I, like, justice can never be done for this man that had these claims levied against his restaurant. But I also understand why the vitriol, if you truly believe a restaurant just down the street is capturing children and serving them up to be sexually abused and sacrificed, calling in threats is kind of, like, the least you can do, right?

526
01:16:18,516 --> 01:16:30,042
Chris: Well, that goes back to what you were saying a few minutes ago about if you're gonna levy a claim, levy something that's gonna make people react in the most, you know, primal, angry way.

527
01:16:30,106 --> 01:16:42,682
Kayla: Right. And, like, it feels righteous. It's like, there's. There's no way for me to be wrong here because you are eating kids. Like, there's no way for my to be wrong because you are literally eating children.

528
01:16:42,786 --> 01:16:48,738
Chris: Right. And I would go further and say that, like, you don't even have to believe 100% that they're eating kids.

529
01:16:48,794 --> 01:16:49,034
Kayla: Right?

530
01:16:49,082 --> 01:16:55,062
Chris: To be like. I mean, even if it's only 50% true, then we have to do something. Right?

531
01:16:55,126 --> 01:16:56,130
Kayla: We have to do something.

532
01:16:56,710 --> 01:17:00,414
Chris: Even if it's only a coin flip chance of being true. We should do something.

533
01:17:00,462 --> 01:17:45,594
Kayla: We should do something. Yeah. Well, for one man, he felt particularly compelled to do something. On December 14, 2016, a 28 year old named Edgar Welch drove from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina, to Comet Ping Pong, where he entered wielding an AR 15 style rifle, which he pointed at one of the employees who fled. He fired his weapon three times, hitting the wall, a desk, and a closet door. When officers surrounded the restaurant, he was arrested without incident and no injuries occurred, but was lucky. Yeah, I know. It was also discovered he was carrying other weapons on him in custody, Welch confessed to the police that he had learned about the pizzagate theory, that comic ping pong was harboring child sex slaves in their tunnels under their basement, and he wanted to investigate for himself.

534
01:17:45,722 --> 01:18:21,580
Kayla: He viewed himself as a hero, someone who would rescue these children so many people were talking about. He believed that Hillary Clinton had personally murdered children herself. And prior to his attack on the restaurant, he had attempted to recruit a friend to join him by showing him YouTube videos, even after his arrest, after he had seen that there were no child slaves there, after it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there could not be tunnels under Comet Ping pong, because it did not even have a basement. There is not even a basement there, let alone tunnels. Welch denied accusations of fake news when it came to pizzagate. He was charged with several crimes, and by the time he was sentenced to four years in prison.

535
01:18:22,040 --> 01:18:27,416
Kayla: I think he was sentenced, like, a couple years ago, he finally admitted to being, quote, foolish and reckless.

536
01:18:27,568 --> 01:18:29,608
Chris: Oh, wow. I was gonna. I was.

537
01:18:29,664 --> 01:18:37,986
Kayla: I don't know if he's. I don't know if he. I don't know if that means he goes. I don't think that this is true. I think he thinks that his methods were improper.

538
01:18:38,098 --> 01:18:46,114
Chris: Okay. Because he. If he was not that reckless, then maybe he would be able to sneak in and find the tunnels before they cast the turtle spell.

539
01:18:46,162 --> 01:18:46,490
Kayla: Right.

540
01:18:46,570 --> 01:18:47,602
Chris: That fills them in.

541
01:18:47,666 --> 01:18:50,714
Kayla: Right? We need to get a back home and check out comic ping pong.

542
01:18:50,762 --> 01:18:58,586
Chris: Yeah, there's a turtle shell under there, right? Like, it's. It's so similar. Like, it's. There's tunnels. People looking for tunnels. There's no tunnels.

543
01:18:58,658 --> 01:18:59,058
Kayla: The tunnels.

544
01:18:59,074 --> 01:19:00,538
Chris: What is with the fucking tunnels?

545
01:19:00,674 --> 01:19:03,350
Kayla: And we'll get into tunnel. We'll get into so many more tunnels.

546
01:19:03,970 --> 01:19:05,150
Chris: What the hell?

547
01:19:05,330 --> 01:19:06,222
Kayla: I wonder.

548
01:19:06,366 --> 01:19:09,766
Chris: Cause it's creepy. It's subterranean because it's like.

549
01:19:09,838 --> 01:19:15,574
Kayla: Well, you don't see kids just like. Cause these people also claim that there's millions of kids going missing every second.

550
01:19:15,702 --> 01:19:17,390
Chris: And it's like, where would hordes of.

551
01:19:17,430 --> 01:19:21,990
Kayla: Children running through the. Being run through the streets like sheep? So it's like, where else are they being transported? The tunnels.

552
01:19:22,030 --> 01:19:25,174
Chris: I see. That way it's. You can. Okay, got it.

553
01:19:25,222 --> 01:19:40,460
Kayla: I mean, we'll get to this in future episodes. But, like, I know of theorists who claim that, like, there are tunnels under Hollywood because that's the way to get the children into, like, Brad Pitt's house. Brad Pitt's not just gonna go and, like, pick up a kid at the bus stop. He's gotta have the kids brought to him, right?

554
01:19:40,500 --> 01:19:40,844
Chris: Of course.

555
01:19:40,892 --> 01:19:50,740
Kayla: Tunnel under his house, naturally. Yeah. Welch is not the only person to attack comet ping pong with violence in 2019. The restaurant was the victim of attempted arson when it began.

556
01:19:50,900 --> 01:19:52,228
Chris: I didn't hear about the second thing.

557
01:19:52,284 --> 01:20:32,646
Kayla: Yeah, I didn't either, until I started researching this. A man named Ryan Giselkes set a curtain on fire and was sentenced to four years in prison for arsone. Multiple instances of real world violence inspired by the spread of fabricated stories on the Internet. And when I say fabricated, I mean fabricated. The pizzagate theory, obviously, has been thoroughly and widely debunked by a list that includes Snopes.com, comma, the New York Times, the New York observer, the Washington Post, the Independent, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, Fox News, CNN, whoa. The Miami Herald, the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, and many, many more.

558
01:20:32,798 --> 01:20:34,606
Chris: Fake, fake, fake.

559
01:20:34,758 --> 01:20:56,210
Kayla: Many of these outlets discovered that, obviously. Yeah. Many of these outlets discovered that large swaths of evidence the pizzagate believers took as truth were literally faked. Like, just totally made up. So, like, photos of alleged child victims that were shared in these circles turned out to be pictures of children that were pulled from, like, friends and family of comic ping pong staff members. Instagrams.

560
01:20:57,470 --> 01:21:06,854
Chris: Awesome. So the pizzagate thing, by the way, is the first time I heard this word that is, like, sadly, part of our lexicon now. Crisis actor.

561
01:21:06,942 --> 01:21:07,958
Kayla: Oh, that was the first time you heard it?

562
01:21:07,974 --> 01:21:31,840
Chris: That was the first time I'd heard the word crisis actor, or words, phrase, whatever. It was like a friend of a friend or something on Facebook. And they were explaining how, oh, you see this guy that. So, crisis actor basically means that anything that needs to be debunked, you can explain with a crisis actor. So, like, in this case, what was the guy's name, the shooter?

563
01:21:31,920 --> 01:21:32,800
Kayla: Edward Welch.

564
01:21:32,920 --> 01:21:51,956
Chris: Yeah. So in this case, he wasn't actually a real guy that believed this stuff and was really going there for real. He was an actor that was hired by the elite cabal or whatever to go in and play the role of a shooter so that, you know, you. I forget there's another word for that.

565
01:21:52,028 --> 01:21:53,356
Kayla: This is a false flag operation.

566
01:21:53,428 --> 01:21:55,268
Chris: Yeah, false flag operation. Thank you.

567
01:21:55,324 --> 01:22:02,324
Kayla: This was a false flag operation. So his fruitless attack was actually orchestrated by the elites to discredit the pizza gate theory.

568
01:22:02,412 --> 01:22:09,316
Chris: Right, exactly. And then the crisis actor is the person you hire. The actor you hire to play that role for the false flag operation.

569
01:22:09,348 --> 01:22:27,790
Kayla: It's like one of the crisis actors referring to, like, people who are, like, victims of a crime. Like, I've. I've. I had not heard him referred to as a crisis actor. I'd heard, like, the Sandy. The parents of Sandy Hook children as crisis actors. Or, like, the.

570
01:22:28,210 --> 01:22:30,154
Chris: I'm. I could be wrong about that.

571
01:22:30,242 --> 01:22:43,364
Kayla: What was the shooting in Parkland? The Parkland shooting kids as being crisis actors. I'm not saying that. That's not a crisis actor. I'm just saying I had previous. I've only really heard it used. Referred to. Refer to fake victims.

572
01:22:43,412 --> 01:22:45,164
Chris: Well, I will look it up and correct myself.

573
01:22:45,212 --> 01:22:45,764
Kayla: They're all crisis acts.

574
01:22:45,772 --> 01:22:52,148
Chris: I'm wrong on the net, but I think crisis actor just means an actor that is hired for the purposes of this false flag.

575
01:22:52,284 --> 01:22:53,400
Kayla: Of this crisis.

576
01:22:53,740 --> 01:22:56,036
Chris: Yeah, crisis aftermath type thing.

577
01:22:56,228 --> 01:23:11,254
Kayla: So, yeah, that was another piece of evidence that totally fake. This man confessed to these crimes and is in jail for them. But no pizzagate conspiracy claims that this was a false flag story to discredit the.

578
01:23:11,382 --> 01:23:12,974
Chris: That's still part of the act. Kayla.

579
01:23:13,022 --> 01:23:46,220
Kayla: Yeah. The picture of the supposed basement under the restaurant where the kids were being held. Like, this was a picture that was being shared around this was fake. Because, again, comma, ping pong basement didn't exist. Has no basement. And the picture that was shared was from a different restaurant. No victims have come forward. No physical evidence has been found. Now, does any of this seem familiar? A sensationalized story of shadowy child abuse occurring behind closed doors, existing only in the minds of a group of people who want to subjugate or dominate the group they're accusing, which eventually leads to real physical violence.

580
01:23:47,328 --> 01:23:49,792
Chris: It sounds like the stuff you led the episode with.

581
01:23:49,856 --> 01:23:52,176
Kayla: Nocturnal ritual fantasy, anyone?

582
01:23:52,368 --> 01:23:54,112
Chris: Well, I see what you did there.

583
01:23:54,216 --> 01:24:18,828
Kayla: Pizzagate is just another example of this thing that keeps popping up over and over again in our world. Jews, Christians, witches, heretics, Satanists, the democratic elite. Again, I highly recommend reading the public medievalist article by Michael Barbazzott, Pizzagate in the nocturnal ritual of fantasy, imaginary cults, fake news, and real violence. It's a very good article, and it is part 19 of a series on, like, racism in the middle Ages. I love them.

584
01:24:18,884 --> 01:24:24,442
Chris: 19 also. That's great. That's perfect for you because that's the deepest of deep dives.

585
01:24:24,596 --> 01:25:10,272
Kayla: The other thing that seems familiar here is the idea that the government could actually be hiding something as sinister as child abuse and abduction from us. Pizzagate has been debunked as nothing but a conspiracy theory. But I'll remind our listeners that project sunshine and unethical experimentation on children are very real. Okay, perhaps at this point, you're going, yeah, yeah. Okay. I thought you said this episode was about QAnon. Well, dear listener, it is, because in order to understand QAnon, you first need a world of context. Context, I hope, that I have provided here today. I wanted to draft a timeline that explains how QAnon's style of beliefs has evolved throughout history to get to where it is from the middle ages up to Pizzagate, because Pizzagate is generally accepted to be the progenitor of QAnon, the ashes from which that Phoenix rose.

586
01:25:10,456 --> 01:25:12,512
Kayla: But how exactly did that happen?

587
01:25:12,696 --> 01:25:13,536
Chris: I want to know.

588
01:25:13,608 --> 01:25:15,248
Kayla: Well, that's for another episode.

589
01:25:15,304 --> 01:25:16,856
Chris: Oh, good cliffhanger.

590
01:25:16,928 --> 01:25:27,602
Kayla: The next episode. In part two of our series on QAnon, we will jump off from this point post 2016 election and give you a timeline of how exactly QAnon sprung from the forehead of the Internet and stepped into its own.

591
01:25:27,786 --> 01:25:28,642
Chris: Like Athena.

592
01:25:28,706 --> 01:25:29,634
Kayla: Just like Athena.

593
01:25:29,722 --> 01:25:30,386
Chris: Awesome.

594
01:25:30,538 --> 01:25:52,570
Kayla: But for now, I will leave you with this reminder from Debbie Nathan, the satanic panic journalist who spoke to Talia Levin for her article on Blood Libel in QAnon. It will be something to chew on as we try and wrap our brains around the nocturnal ritual fantasy emerging in our political landscape that feels like something brand new, never before seen and frighteningly unique. Quote, moral panics are cyclical. The end.

595
01:25:52,650 --> 01:26:26,642
Chris: That's the quote. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that is true. So I just want to ask real quick, though, about. Because you mentioned the Sunshine project. Was it Sunshine project? Sunshine project Sunshine. So is the implication here that sometimes these things are true or the implication here that there is reason there are other. Because, like, we talked about child abuse as being something that when people need to make up, you know, a scapegoat or whatever, right? Then that's what they make up.

596
01:26:26,706 --> 01:26:27,050
Kayla: Right.

597
01:26:27,130 --> 01:26:38,114
Chris: But then we also said that sometimes children do get abused by shadowy cabals. So what's what. How do we reconcile that? Like, is that.

598
01:26:38,162 --> 01:27:05,890
Kayla: You tell me. Literally, you tell me. I don't know. That's part of what makes. As part of why I started this episode talking about Project Sunshine and talking about how things like that erode our trust institutions, erode our trust in reality, erode our ability to tell the difference between things that are conspiracy and things that are real, it makes it more and more difficult for even people like you and me to go pizza gate totally crazy when, like.

599
01:27:05,970 --> 01:27:06,162
Chris: Right?

600
01:27:06,186 --> 01:27:08,882
Kayla: Because there's always these nagging bodies of babies.

601
01:27:08,946 --> 01:27:29,930
Chris: Like, yeah, there's always this nagging. Well, what about Project Sunshine? And the Tuskegee experiment, which is. Yeah, I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of us to future episodes here by asking this question. But, yeah, you said that ritual, nocturnal ritual fantasy is never pans out real. So I guess we would say then, that something like project sunshine is not.

602
01:27:30,010 --> 01:27:32,326
Kayla: It's not nocturnal because it's.

603
01:27:32,478 --> 01:27:37,694
Chris: It's organized by, like, a governmental entity, and it doesn't have anything to do with, like, satanism.

604
01:27:37,742 --> 01:27:40,798
Kayla: And it's not racialistic. It's not about eating babies.

605
01:27:40,854 --> 01:27:44,966
Chris: It's not about magic. It's not about Satan. It's bad things happening to kids.

606
01:27:45,038 --> 01:27:49,190
Kayla: Everybody go listen to lime town. It's lime town. Like, sometimes it's not magic.

607
01:27:49,310 --> 01:27:50,530
Chris: Very good podcast.

608
01:27:51,110 --> 01:28:04,218
Kayla: It's. It's not these project sunshine and the unethical experimentation is nothing about, like, shadowy satanist cabals. It is about, like, brute forces, the.

609
01:28:04,234 --> 01:28:06,378
Chris: Cruelty of the bureaucracy.

610
01:28:06,434 --> 01:28:24,940
Kayla: Yeah, yeah. It's horrible. And I do believe, I think that the more we are lied to about things like that and the more that those things happen, it makes it. It makes. It helps to set the level for people buying into some of these conspiracy theories.

611
01:28:25,020 --> 01:28:26,852
Chris: Right, right. But we'll get to that.

612
01:28:26,876 --> 01:28:28,040
Kayla: But we'll get to that.

613
01:28:28,660 --> 01:28:32,460
Chris: Well, thanks, Kayla. Thanks for that light fun.

614
01:28:32,580 --> 01:28:40,012
Kayla: You're welcome, podcast. You're welcome. Yay. That was hard. I think next one's gonna be harder.

615
01:28:40,156 --> 01:28:41,356
Chris: Great. Oh, good.

616
01:28:41,428 --> 01:28:42,428
Kayla: Well, harder. Probably.

617
01:28:42,524 --> 01:28:44,204
Chris: Probably stop listening.

618
01:28:44,292 --> 01:28:47,236
Kayla: Probably less hard for the listeners, but probably harder for me.

619
01:28:47,388 --> 01:28:55,698
Chris: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, this. This one has been a little bit tough to research and do. Yeah. My topics included.

620
01:28:55,834 --> 01:28:59,350
Kayla: Yeah. So, yeah, we're doing q and on, guys.

621
01:28:59,890 --> 01:29:01,914
Chris: We said we're gonna do it, so we're doing it.

622
01:29:01,962 --> 01:29:03,150
Kayla: So we're doing it.

623
01:29:03,850 --> 01:29:11,018
Chris: Was there any good? See, this is when I did creativity. Why I wanted to end that episode with, like, a bunch of, like, nice stuff. Do we have any nice stuff?

624
01:29:11,074 --> 01:29:16,450
Kayla: Do you have any palette cleansers to r ibleach and scroll through the pictures of cute puppies?

625
01:29:16,530 --> 01:29:18,012
Chris: Eye e. Yeah.

626
01:29:18,146 --> 01:29:20,496
Kayla: Bleach pictures of puppies and bunnies and kitties.

627
01:29:20,568 --> 01:29:21,160
Chris: Yeah, do that.

628
01:29:21,200 --> 01:29:24,256
Kayla: Do that. It helps. I don't have any good news because.

629
01:29:24,288 --> 01:29:36,920
Chris: Kittens and puppies are great. Yeah, maybe I'll go do that right now. Yeah, well, this has been. Cults are just weird. Oh, wait, I did that backwards. Yeah, let's just do backwards then.

630
01:29:36,960 --> 01:29:39,112
Kayla: Okay. It's a topsy turvy world, guys.

631
01:29:39,176 --> 01:29:39,760
Chris: That's right.

632
01:29:39,840 --> 01:29:40,464
Kayla: I'm Kayla.

633
01:29:40,512 --> 01:29:41,460
Chris: And I'm Chris.

634
01:29:41,960 --> 01:29:42,400
Kayla: See ya.