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I Want To Believe 101
74 Plays4 years ago
We kick off the inaugural edition of the Red String, a monthly column from Laura Kruse on conspiracy theories and Alberta, with a bit of theory and history on conspiracy theories in Canada. From Freemasons to aliens to Q and everything in between. Also, please read Laura's story on one of our favourite conspiracy theories that isn't a conspiracy theory titled McKinsey, 🍞📈, and the UCP’s incoming evisceration of Alberta’s post-secondary system.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:15
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, and we're recording today here in beautiful Amiskwichiwa Skygun, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Joining me today for the second time and bringing us to two consecutive podcasts in a row featuring hosts from the Kino Lefter podcast, let us welcome Laura Cruz back to the pod. Laura, how are you?
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, how's it going? I'm in the core zone. I've got maximum queue clearance. We're
Diving into Conspiracy Theories
00:00:45
Speaker
ready to rock. We're ready to enter phase four of truth discovery.
00:00:50
Speaker
Yes, and if you cannot tell by that intro from Laura, we are talking about conspiracy theories today. Laura is an enthusiastic, what would you, I would say believer, that's probably the wrong phrase. I am a student, I am a student and enthusiast of the conspiracy genre. A scholar, you're a scholar and a gentleman.
00:01:15
Speaker
I wish I had that much distance on it, but I will say I do. I have taken some red pills, not all, but definitely I have some on my vitamin stand. Yeah. The reason why we are talking about conspiracy theories on this episode of The Progress Report is that Laura recently wrote a story for us.
00:01:38
Speaker
that kind of touches on a conspiracy theory. It's titled McKinsey, Bread Crimes, and the UCP's upcoming evisceration of Alberta's post-secondary system. And it'll obviously be in the show notes, but this is the start of something of a continued collaboration between us, Lauren. Why don't you kind of tell us about this column and what you've called it and kind of what you want, how you want to kind of go about it, what you want to explore.
00:02:03
Speaker
Absolutely. I've called it the red string after the string that people use to show that it's all connected man, to circle things and connect the dots in between disparate levers of power. I think for me what is interesting about conspiracy in general
00:02:22
Speaker
is that it's an exploration of shadowy forces, right? And I think that like we're going to talk about today, there are like reasons that people on the right in particular tend to be the most connected with conspiracy theory, you know, your Alex Jones and whatnot.
00:02:39
Speaker
But I think for people on the left, it's also a very valuable thing to explore. A lot of the time, power is obscured, but it's also out in the open. It's this process of manufacturing consent that the media goes through to obscure the relationships between
00:03:00
Speaker
powerful players. And I think that conspiracy, it kind of opens the door for you to be able to explore and look at these things and find the connections. And it's also just like really fun. I mean, I think understanding and learning about
00:03:17
Speaker
conspiracy theories really provides a lot of insight into modern North American political culture. I think conspiracy theories are a lot more popular than left-wing politics are, but they are two sides of the same coin.
00:03:35
Speaker
get into why the people who believe in conspiracy theories aren't necessarily wrong, at least for that initial dive, that initial twinge when they realize that something is not right. So Laura, I want to get into your story a bit later on, but I think that it's time to strap in.
00:03:56
Speaker
for some game theory or in this case, conspiracy theory theory and get into, you know, Laura's unified theory of lizard people as well as a bit of kind of like history of conspiracy theories in North America. So why don't why don't we get into that for sex? So the first kind of really modern
Historical Context of Masonic Conspiracies
00:04:18
Speaker
conspiracy theory in North America is the masons. The masons are responsible for all of the bad shit that happens. These modern conspiracy theories around the masons really start with the advent of newspaper culture and really the rise of financial and industrial capitalism in North America. Folks are being forced off of the land, they're moving into dense cities, they're
00:04:42
Speaker
working in mechanic shops or factories. And yeah, newspapers become these huge engines of communications. And there's massive upheaval in the world, right? And people need to start explaining why shit is changing and getting worse, why their lives are getting worse. And when you're not explaining things with a class lens or with a critique of capitalism, which I don't think a lot of Canadian North Americans were in 1830,
00:05:07
Speaker
one of the first things that people grasped onto was the Masons, right? You know, there were Masons involved in the French Revolution, the American Revolution was shot through with Masons. And it wasn't much different in Canada. Like, how many of the fathers of Confederation were Masons? 30% of them. Yeah, and six different prime ministers have been Masons, including John A. McDonald, everyone's favourite, and John Diefenbaker.
00:05:36
Speaker
And you know, you know, when I think about the Masons is it's just like, uh, the landed gentry and like rich blasps, they love to have like little dress up parties. That's their big thing. They love to have, uh, things where they get together with their boys, no ladies, and, um, like put on fun hats and have ceremonies.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, dicks out, get drunk. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I mean, you're totally right about funny hats. The Shriners literally are masons. That is like 17th level. If you want to be a Shriner, you really got to put time in at the lower levels of masonry to really get to Shriner level. Because those guys are like, they're uber powerful, super high up in the hierarchy.
00:06:26
Speaker
But the Masons were a convenient thing for people to grasp onto, right? And it really was the kind of OG North American conspiracy theory. And William Lyon McKenzie, one of the primary folks behind the Upper Canada Rebellion, and a guy who was a journalist. We talked a lot of shit, actually, before he settled down and became a respectable member of society.
00:06:47
Speaker
an MP and stuff, also incidentally, Prime Minister William Lyon, Mackenzie King's grandfather, he was all about this Mason shit. And he published story after story about the abduction and supposed murder of a guy named William Morgan, who had published a whole bunch of like, you know, a book on the secrets of Masonry. And, you know, it was, it really was the like, the kind of like, first, the first instance I can find in kind of Canadian history of, of this, like, modern conspiracy theory.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I also heard from someone who was a Mason that Bill Clinton is also part of the Masons and that when the Monica scandal broke out, he was signaling to his boys using a Masonic sign. I'm doing it with my hands, but this is an audio medium. When he was up and giving his testimony, allegedly he was flashing a triangle symbol with his hands.
00:07:45
Speaker
which is allegedly, according to this Mason that I was talking to, a sign to fellow brothers in their organization that he was in trouble and that this was a kind of plot to bring him down. So yeah, I don't know for sure. I was doing my research on the Masons to see if he was listed officially and there's lots of unconfirmed sources of dubious nature, but that's where
00:08:12
Speaker
That's where us in the conspiracy field really like to live. There you go. I mean, there is a whole host of like secret Mason handshakes and shit, but I mean, I don't really give a shit. Really, the only thing I care about when it comes to the Masons is the Stonecutters episode of The Simpsons, which still holds up to this day and is very, very good. Okay, so Masons, we're past Masons now, and I think
00:08:37
Speaker
if we're taking a walk through kind of conspiracy theory history, the kind of like next big like conspiracy theory that pops up is, you know, there's really no way around it, but just like anti-Semitism, fascism, the Jews are everywhere and controlling everything. Have you heard of a man named Henry Ford? I have once or twice.
00:09:02
Speaker
He was a huge anti-Semite. And every time you bought a Ford Model T, you got a subscription to the international Jew. That would be so weird to just get your Honda Civic and get bourgeois communist monthly. I love that. Just straight propaganda. It was reprinting the protocols of the elders of Zion. Henry Ford, he collaborated with the Nazis. He obviously thought they were very cool and good.
00:09:32
Speaker
But yeah, in the 30s, in the 20s and 30s, in North America, you do see this kind of rise of fascism and antisemitism, obviously alongside the Great Depression, right? And just like as we saw in the 1830s or whatever with the Masons, shit was changing, the Great Depression was happening.
00:09:54
Speaker
there was turmoil and tumult and people needed a way to explain the world around them. In the 30s though, what we did have to kind of counteract fascism and anti-Semitism was a strong labor movement and a labor movement that was really out on the march and organizing people and improving the material conditions of people's lives through collective struggle.
00:10:18
Speaker
And that really is the kind of best way to kind of counteract conspiracy theories. Yeah, absolutely. I think that in this way, I think you have a quote in here in our notes from Austrian Democrat Ferdinand Cronowetter, sorry for my terrible German,
00:10:40
Speaker
But it says anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. And I think that's a really nice way to kind of understand that when leftists talk about this like power that's trying to dominate the world, it's about
00:10:55
Speaker
class, right? It's about the ruling class and when people are kind of struggling to grasp that or are alienated from people around them and view their struggle as singular, then it can turn very easily into looking at, you know, people whose motivations don't really make a lot of sense. They just want to destroy the world because they're Satan or whatever, which we can get into later. But yeah,
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I think even that phrase works when you substitute conspiracy theories instead of anti-Semitism. Like conspiracy theories are the socialism of fools, right? Like people have realized- I disagree, but okay. But people have realized that something is wrong, right? Like at the core of why people believe in conspiracy theories is that they've realized that they are alienated from the way that the world works, the way the economy works, the way that powerful institutions are able to exert their will on them. They realize that that is
00:11:52
Speaker
It's happening. But then like the fools part, right? They've turned to the wrong. They've expressed their anger and their alienation on the wrong target. Yeah, absolutely. I think that a lot of times, you know, this is where I think it's actually very valuable to also look at right wing thinkers because I think descriptively they can explain the problem quite well. It's the problem comes from like understanding what the prescriptive solutions to it are.
00:12:18
Speaker
And I think that that's what conspiracy theories also grapple with, right? Like there's a deep state that's controlling the world. That's 100% true. Is Donald Trump trying to root it out and bring peace and prosperity and may a thousand flowers bloom or whatever? No.
00:12:37
Speaker
Exactly. And if you kind of consider the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for a second, they fall apart, right? If there's any type of material or class analysis, it's like, why would the Jews simultaneously want to destroy the world through Judeo-Bolshevism or communism? And then also by finance capital and the banks and like, you know, the Rothschilds or whatever, right? Like pick your, pick your, you know, Jew banker conspiracy theory.
00:13:02
Speaker
It's incoherent falls apart in a second. If you think about it, right? Yeah, George Soros, you know, you just the conspiracy at the core of all conspiracy theories is this this idea that you need to find this inchoate other that you know, just wants to watch the world burn, you know, with Satan, right? If I don't have to justify this person's like, reasons for acting, then you're justified in using all means necessary to destroy it. Right. And that's that was what was so scary about fascism.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you can see kind of shadows of it, obviously not in the kind of systematized way that the Nazis engaged in genocide. But you can still see this kind of very inflamed rhetoric throughout something like Q, right? Like they're killing kids, they're killing babies. Literally like child sacrifice, eating their brains while they're alive.
00:13:52
Speaker
making them as terrified as possible to get their adrenochrome like Hillary Clinton literally, you know, pulls the skin off babies and wears it on her face, you know? And in that kind of environment, any force is absolutely okay because these people are, you know, in Alex Jones' voice, they're literally demons.
00:14:12
Speaker
literally demons. They're monsters. You are justified in using all means necessary to crush these people if they are eating babies alive or whatever. Right. Well, I also think that's something about conspiracy is it's more of like a spectator sport. So yes, I think that's
00:14:28
Speaker
you know, conspiracies have their political utility in terms of, you know, let's return back to the question of Q, right? I was listening to a really excellent episode of True and On where they were talking about how quite major players got involved in propagating Q and Q ideas. And
00:14:50
Speaker
They were speculating basically that the fact that the drug report and WikiLeaks and all these other people that were kind of bringing these things to light and how quickly it spread, it might be because there was some kind of campaign dirty tricks because the right wing realized that Q is very, very useful for them politically.
00:15:11
Speaker
But the thing is, is that that justifies power taking and that justifies like them on the powerful side being able to do whatever they want, right? It doesn't mean that you as an individual actor have any more control over the situation, right?
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah, conspiracy theories are passive for the most part. They want you to kind of document it and bear witness. The only thing that a conspiracy theory really asks of you, which is why it's so comforting and why it's such an effective, demotivating force for collective action or people coming together, exploited people coming together and organizing, is that
00:15:48
Speaker
If all I have to do is post about the bad people, then I don't actually have to talk to my neighbors or my coworkers or the people who share my values on this issue. Are you telling me posting is not activism?
00:16:03
Speaker
Posting is not practiced. But, you know, the communist kind of, and the Judea Bolshevism kind of conspiracy theory kind of falls apart post World War II, right? Like the Holocaust and the genocide perpetrated upon the Jews really means that you can't be an overtly anti-Semitic anymore, right? And the bad guy in conspiracy theory now becomes communists and, you know, fluoride in the water
00:16:31
Speaker
the paranoia of the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the overwhelming state power that was brought forward by the United States and the UK to crush the left in any kind of form.
00:16:51
Speaker
And that is what leads us to conspiracy theories that are not actually conspiracy theories and that actually happened. Yeah, and I think that the conspiracy theories that we're about to talk about, they were all in response to this Judeo-Bolshevism hysteria, right?
Unethical Covert Operations: COINTELPRO to MKUltra
00:17:07
Speaker
And the things we're going to talk about are like, you wouldn't believe they were real unless there was actual documented evidence. I would, but of a broken brain.
00:17:18
Speaker
But COINTELPRO or Operation Midnight Climax or MKUltra, this is bad fiction when you actually read it, but it actually happened. Why don't we take a walk through some of these things? What was COINTELPRO? COINTELPRO was an extensive surveillance and bad jacketing operation to disrupt leftist movements. They used it against the Black Panthers quite famously.
00:17:47
Speaker
And what does that mean? Like, what does bad jacketing mean? What was, what were like some of the tactics they used that were notable? Um, I don't know COINTELPRO as much as the, as Operation Climax and MKUltra. Um, I think bad jacketing is basically starting rumors within an organization about, um, like other people in it, uh, to kind of create internal divisions and, uh, let the, let the organization basically eat itself.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah. And like, it was very famously used on the Black Panthers and then did actually result in some deaths. But Operation Midnight Climax was a part of Co-Intel Pro, right? And this was... I didn't know that. I thought it was MKUltra. Oh, maybe it was MK. Maybe I'm mixing up my American anti-left wing conspiracy theories. But this one is absolutely fucking wild, right? This is a great one. So the CIA...
00:18:40
Speaker
sets up shop in a bordello in like San Francisco. And they renovated a fancy name for a whorehouse whorehouse. Yeah, and they set up two way mirrors and cameras. And then they they have the sex workers in on the gig. And it's they essentially douse their clients in LSD after they their work is done. And then they would like observe them and document them. And it was all kind of like a part of a
00:19:09
Speaker
of a brainwashing or what LSD would do to people and whether it would help you interrogate people. Exactly. They were trying to discover a truth serum that they could use if they had enemy combatants or communist spies that were in the Americas so that they could douse them with LSD and then see if they could get the truth about what they were doing out.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, this is not a conspiracy. This happened. There are stamped papers from the United States government that says that the CIA, yeah, we actually did this. I mean, it sounds a lot like just idiot frat boy CIA guys just getting their rocks off with sex workers and having the government pay for it. I mean, they did also do that. I don't imagine a lot of actionable research was done in this environment, you know what I mean?
00:20:05
Speaker
psychological testing was such a wild west. If you think about things that are not CIA, like the Stanford Prison Experiment, things like that, where they would just basically torture and humiliate people and be like, hmm, interesting. I wonder what happens when we fuck children up. Let's take a look.
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah, like the government in the name of fighting communism, the US government was willing to kind of just, you know, stick their finger into the brain of random citizens and swirl it and swirl it around and see what happened. But but if okay, so if climb midnight climax was under MK ultra, what was MK ultra?
00:20:43
Speaker
MKUltra was a very extensive program of trying to learn how to undo brainwashing. So there was this fear in the Red Scare that soldiers who had been captured in the Korean War were sent, they sent videos or recordings home of them professing to be in support of communism now. And so the common refrain was that they were brainwashed and now they believe these things unequivocally. So they were trying to figure out
00:21:11
Speaker
how it was that they could basically take a person, like erase them, like erase their personalities, erase their memories and kind of rebuild a person. So actually quite a few of the experiments took place at McGill University in the psychology department there. And what they would do was all manner of things, right? They would dose them with like
00:21:37
Speaker
huge amounts of LSD, given electric shocks, isolation chambers. They would sometimes like, they wanted to, you know, that very common kind of cartoon thing of listening to a tape on the loop under your pillow or whatever. They were doing that, but the thing is, is that people like didn't want to listen, like stay still and listen to things. So they would often put radios
00:22:02
Speaker
in like football helmets and lock them on their heads and just repeat phrases on a loop and like debase people and like try to bombard them with messages about how they were terrible and then you know counteract that with positive messaging all to see if they could basically
00:22:19
Speaker
and rewire someone and the people that were experimented on, this is a lot of times people that were just going in because they had postpartum depression or schizophrenia and they were seeking treatment and then they were experimented on in this very brutal and grisly way and some of them never recovered from this kind of psychological torture.
00:22:42
Speaker
psychological and physical torture. It's really like dark chapter in like Canadian history as well and I don't think that that Montreal connection or that McGill connection is brought up enough. I believe that there's still a street in Montreal that's named after the doctor who conducted those experiments in conjunction with the CIA.
00:23:01
Speaker
Ah, good times. Yeah, this, I mean, all manner of horrible things were justified under this kind of like anti-communist rubric, right?
State Measures Against Communism
00:23:11
Speaker
And the kind of modern capitalist liberal, democratic state free market used, you know, whatever covert means that were necessary to crush communism, right? Because if communism succeeded through democracy,
00:23:27
Speaker
then obviously their system wasn't the best one. It wasn't the one true way. And that leads us to like some of the wilder ones that I've only kind of heard about recently, but like Gladio is like all sorts of fucked up. Do you have a kind of Coles notes of Gladio?
00:23:48
Speaker
So, Gladio was basically an internationalist, like right-wing op to disrupt any kind of left-wing organizing and communist governance, pardon me, in especially Italy, but all over the world potentially. So, they did all kinds of really fucked up things. The Vatican was involved. They would operate through the Masonic Temple.
00:24:18
Speaker
Just saying, it's pretty stuff. So they operated through the Masonic Temple and they did all kinds of murders and random acts of terror that they would blame on to left-wing agitators just to basically create this complete environment of fear.
00:24:38
Speaker
and this desire for a strong patriarchal strong man to be able to kind of take power back and be able to kind of assert control over this very unstable environment.
00:24:51
Speaker
But they were like weapons, caches, and like all over Western Europe that these gladiator folks had kind of set up in case the revolution ever happened, right? It was set up to immediately counter any type of successful either democratic or otherwise move towards anything resembling a left wing vision of the world.
00:25:20
Speaker
which I don't think it's, and the actual murders that were done in their name, like there's a whole bunch of very shady, very sus shit out of Italy that has been talked about a lot by other people, very well researched, that is like pretty fucking inexplicable unless it was Gladio.
00:25:37
Speaker
The thing is that we don't actually know that much about Gladio. There's so many things that probably have happened that have been Gladio. You can only speculate and you'll never know. It's just about using what you have and trying to piece together the rest in a plausible way.
00:25:59
Speaker
Yeah, and the final kind of like red scare conspiracy theory that's not a conspiracy theory is something that's been popularized by a recent book. And it was a book called the Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. And this is nothing too fancy. It really is just the whole scale slaughter, secret slaughter of communists or suspected communists. And this was, you know, a million people were murdered in Indonesia, which is the third largest country in the world by population in the 60s in order to
00:26:27
Speaker
you know, implant this friendly US dictator. And again, not a conspiracy theory, like a million communists or suspected communists were just straight up like murdered and thrown into ditches or the river in order to install, in order to fight communism, and in order to install a friendly US dictator.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And this kind of method was imported all over the world or exported all over the world, pardon me, to, you know, all over South America, people were doing the same things. You know, we've got the helicopter flights of, you know, communists and socialists being thrown into the
00:27:05
Speaker
into the sea off of helicopters and this like reign of terror. I believe, I think Bevins talked once about how when Bolsonaro was taking control of Brazil, they were spray painting Jakarta in
00:27:20
Speaker
Jakarta is coming. Yeah, exactly. So it's pretty scary and dark to see this kind of very organized, extreme right power kind of trying to crush any semblance of any kind of communist government at all.
00:27:40
Speaker
Exactly. And these things all actually happened and demonstrate that the lengths that the modern capitalist liberal democratic state will go using covert means and their intelligence services to crush the success of left wing ideas around the world.
00:27:59
Speaker
The quote from Matt Crisman is, democracy is necessary to give capitalism legitimacy, but democracy can't be allowed to actually threaten capitalism. I mean, I think it's all a strat to keep democracy from getting too big for its britches and people actually coming together and demanding things that actually threaten.
00:28:18
Speaker
you know, powerful interests. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's something that you saw in Bolivia very recently was this effort or this successful effort, this coup that was undertaken by, you know, Christian very right wing factions against the indigenous socialist leader of the country, Evo Morales.
00:28:42
Speaker
They basically stopped the count for the election. The Organization of American States, mostly US funded, raised speculation as to if it was a legal election or not. Morales instantly says, no problem, we can do a recount.
00:29:00
Speaker
But the army was like, no, you got to get out of here. So it was completely overthrown. And now the New York Times, you know, six months later, surprise, surprise, posting articles saying, doesn't seem like there was a lot of evidence for this claim that that democracy wasn't being followed.
00:29:19
Speaker
And yeah, it just goes to show that this stuff is far from over. I think that a lot of times people will know these kind of, if you want to forgive my elitism here, but these intro level conspiracies and think that they're, you know, Cold War relics.
00:29:36
Speaker
But the shit is going on forever, probably, until we actually are able to assert some kind of left-wing control and get control of this shadow government that basically the CIA runs and Mossad, all those kinds of things. Yeah.
00:29:55
Speaker
The Bolivian example is, I mean, yeah, just like super recent and modern and, you know, case again of, you know, the modern mainstream media being unable or unwilling to kind of actually call out reality as it is objectively happening in front of us.
00:30:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's this Jakarta method stuff and it really I think bears further investigation like 20 countries apparently used the strategies and there was this like international kind of like anti-communist network that got together at parties and conventions and like, you know,
00:30:36
Speaker
eight canopies together and discussed the best ways of kind of secretly murdering suspected communists. That's what they talk about at the Bilderberg conference probably. Yeah, which Jason Kenney has attended. He has. Yeah. Yeah. And they invite Kissinger every single year.
00:30:54
Speaker
So moving a bit of away from the Red Scare because we're approaching the like 80s now and you know communism kind of fades back as a threat and one thing that really does pop up in the 80s here in North America is the satanic panic.
00:31:11
Speaker
And this is a really interesting conspiracy, kind of almost mass hysteria event as well. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that a satanic panic is interesting because it's more of a cultural phenomenon that had real impacts.
The Satanic Panic and its Impact
00:31:27
Speaker
I think it is class-based, as we'll see later on, where the fear kind of manifested who gets punished by it.
00:31:35
Speaker
It kind of falls in with that We're approaching in the 80s like the the the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the complete domination of of liberal capitalist democracy all over the world and so I think that you know a moral panic basically is this like widespread fear about like threats to society so I
00:32:01
Speaker
Usually these are propagated by like moral entrepreneurs like think Oprah and those kinds of folks in the mass media. So I know when I was a teenager, the really big thing that everyone was scared about was rainbow parties. Do you remember this? Yeah, I went to several. No, yeah.
00:32:17
Speaker
So a rainbow party was basically, it's oftentimes things that kids are doing too, right? So rainbow parties are when you go, the girls put on different lipstick and they engage in, you know, an act between two people that love each other very much involving the mouth and try to see who can get the furthest down and, you know, create a rainbow.
00:32:39
Speaker
So that was, I don't think that that ever happened, but you know, that was a thing that everyone was talking about and everyone was scared of. There was also- I never thought it could happen to me.
00:32:50
Speaker
Um, there was also that Momo challenge thing that went around, uh, where apparently like people were, uh, I forget how it worked, but I think it was a text-based game that basically ended in trying to make you kill yourself. And if you saw this woman, you were killed or whatever. Um, yeah, there was that clown scare that happened a few years ago. I was personally terrified of the clowns. I fucking hate clowns, but, um, I didn't see one. So consider myself lucky.
00:33:18
Speaker
Never saw a cloud on the side of the road just waving to you. Fuck. God, I hope I never do. And then stuff like, there's other stuff like violence in video games causing the Columbine shooting that caused a big uproar. Tipper gore. Tipper gore. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, this the moral panic about satanic ritual abuse reached its height in the 90s in the 80s, sorry, in the early 90s.
00:33:48
Speaker
Uh, but kind of a lot of different cultural threads kind of led, uh, to this, uh, environment where this could thrive. So I'd say, um, for me, like what I think about is interest in the occult, like arising out of this fear of the hippies and, um, hippie movement. Very interesting. We can talk about Laurel Canyon in a little bit and the conspiracy theories that emerge about, uh, the hippie movement.
00:34:12
Speaker
possibly being a CIA op. But yeah, the Manson Family murders made everyone very afraid of this movement. And Anton Lavey, who was the founder of the Modern Church of Satan, he started that church in 1966. And they're just like mostly libertarian nerds, like they're not really anything to worry about, but they are around. They just hate God so much.
00:34:39
Speaker
they're all like do what thou wilt kind of that's their thing but they have they don't even hate God they just like they just like are kind of they're kind of edgelords to be honest with you they're not really
00:34:54
Speaker
Yeah, they like to trigger people and like have this like reaction to like, and I think it was most popular at the like the height of like Christian fundamentalism to like, I'm sure there was a big spike in, I think maybe new atheism took over from people who are interested in Satanism because they kind of share the same DNA to me.
00:35:14
Speaker
But you're saying that there was this broad hysteria and modern panic or moral panic over ritualistic murder of children and like Dungeons and Dragons and you know, like witches and warlocks and Dungeons and Dragons and all that shit, right?
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And this is also in the age of like stranger danger, fearing your neighbor, kids on the milk carton, this kind of this kind of environment where, you know, the communist is mostly out, but the danger is all around you and it's in the suburbs, right? Yeah, because people were people had to, you know, you had to
00:35:49
Speaker
You have to have two incomes now to support each other, right? Because Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had eviscerated the social safety net and the kind of the society where one income earner could take care of an entire family. And now you've got to put your kids in daycare. You're not seeing them all the time. Who's taking care of them? What do they believe?
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, that kind of shit. Exactly. Also, I don't know, Abdul from my podcast would say it was lead in the water, and I don't know that for sure, but there were so many cults and like Jonestown Massacre and all that kind of stuff. Also, all these serial killers, so many of them in the 60s and 70s that also received mass attention.
00:36:29
Speaker
And I think that real watershed moment for the satanic panic was in 1980, Michelle Remembers was published, which is like a memoir about a woman who went through regression therapy. So she went under hypnosis and uncovered all these memories. And it was about being witness to satanic ritual abuse.
00:36:56
Speaker
And basically, it was almost discredited as soon as it came out. Regression therapy, not real. If anyone's trying to implant memories in you, that's definitely not going to work, as we saw with MKUltra. But this book kind of formed the basis of a lot of the court documents and the court proceedings that ended up arising from these folks who would basically like a lot of people
00:37:25
Speaker
who were mentally ill were coaching their children to say that they were seeing things like being forced to drink blood, being hung by their backs on hooks in daycares, and between 1984 and 1986, 26 people went to prison. Obviously, most of these, all of these convictions have been overturned, but it was
00:37:51
Speaker
Not for a long time. Some folks were serving their prison sentence for up to 20 years. I think that it's also worth noting here that there was a journalist, I actually just heard about this on Chapo Trap House yesterday. They had a great episode about
00:38:10
Speaker
the Maple Gladio shooting that people are talking about, the Nova Scotia mass shooting that's got its connections to the RCMP. They were talking about kind of Canadian conspiracy and how it all kind of ties together here as well. And they were talking about a journalist named Debbie Nathan, who was a feminist journalist
00:38:33
Speaker
But she basically was covering the satanic panic and was purged from the ranks, right? Especially by confirmed CIA spook and cultural ambassador, Gloria Steinem. And Debbie says, to right-wing Christian fundamentalists, steeped in lore about devils and stewing with hostility towards public childcare, it was hard not to embrace the notion of Satan infiltrating daycare centers.
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, good times. Yeah, I think it's super interesting too because even this cultural force, it ultimately becomes weaponized against people of color, poor people, migrant workers who are the ones that are put in charge of caring for their children because that is such a devalued
00:39:23
Speaker
workforce in general, and also because of this like right wing belief in like not using these public services. Yeah, yeah, because childcare is bad. And I mean, it's funny because, you know, Reagan and Thatcher were set on, you know, destroying the labor movement and forcing people to join the workforce essentially because they had to. But then they were also not interested in providing
00:39:50
Speaker
you know, a public option when it came to childcare and then you've got this fucked up society trying to grapple with this change and it ends up in a conspiracy theory as we always see. So we move on to the kind of like golden age of conspiracy theories and really what I kind of became aware of conspiracy theories and that is, you know, the 90s and
Rise of Alien Conspiracies in the 90s
00:40:17
Speaker
really, you know, tin foil hats at the end of history, right? The United States has crushed the Soviet Union. It is now the global cop, the capitalist hegemony reigns. And, and, and what has, and we got to just go through the kind of bad guys that we've had in these conspiracy theories, you know, we started with masons.
00:40:38
Speaker
We moved on to Jews, then communists, then, you know, the communist reaction. Then in the 80s, we had, you know, daycares and a satanic panic and now aliens. And this is completely like inscrutable, motivationless force that is descending on the people.
00:41:07
Speaker
Yeah, aliens really kind of enter the discourse as the kind of like, you know, the prime mere movers in so many various conspiracy theories, right? Crop circles and cattle mutilization, cattle mutilizations and mutilations. And, you know, Alex Jones really starts up and X-Files, you know, enters the pop culture. That's really mean. I mean, when I say I became interested in conspiracy theories, it was through X-Files, right?
00:41:29
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I will say, though, that aliens have been around since the early 60s encounters like the counters of the third kind. And there's also there's actually like, I didn't know this, but there's like the first kind, second kind and third kind, like there's actual distinctions. I don't know what they are off the top of my head. But a third kind encounter is actually like going and speaking to them, maybe going to the ship, maybe having sex with them sometimes. Maybe just maybe just vibing.
00:41:59
Speaker
smoking weed, like hanging out, watching a movie. Um, that would be cool. Um, but you know, for during a lot of the cold war, when people would report these, um, these encounters, they would be positive, right? And it would be like the alien would come get you. Um, you'd hang out, you'd vibe and they'd show you a PSA video about why we shouldn't have nuclear nuclear bombs. And, um, then later on, like,
00:42:27
Speaker
maybe to kind of coincide with this Reaganomics kind of fear of the suburbs and fear of your neighbor, it becomes more dark and scary and abduction. This is where the probes yeah, medicalization, all those kinds of things. So that even even the ways that people interact with the aliens has changed with changing moors, right?
00:42:53
Speaker
Yeah, aliens were definitely around prior to the 1990s. The stuff around Roswell started popping up in the 60s or whatever, I think, originally. But it didn't really enter mainstream consciousness until the 90s. And I think the Soviet Union needed to be defeated for aliens to come and take their place. But again, the 90s come, happen.
00:43:20
Speaker
George H.W. Bush says, you know, the New World Order.
00:43:25
Speaker
bunch of people freak out about that and David Ike and his lizard people theory shows up. I actually had an old roommate who believed in the whole David Ike thing and would make me watch the videos and stuff and paid money to whatever the thing was. I don't know how we got into it. He could see the truth. He could see their LCD projectors glitching sometimes.
00:43:52
Speaker
But the David Icke thing and even even the broader like Epstein stuff around, you know that there's a coterie or a circle of ultra powerful ultra rich pedophiles Is Not the lizard people thing is becoming more and more kind of born out over time but definitely the ultra rich ultra powerful pedophiles seems to be having reality is More and more stuff comes out
00:44:16
Speaker
And this is what I mean about my unified theory of lizard people. I think that the phrase lizard people has its utility because it points to this idea around the ultra powerful, the ultra wealthy being this very remote
00:44:38
Speaker
and inhuman and extractive force. I also think that's why the adrenochrome stuff is very compelling to me because it's literally about sucking the life force out of people, which is what I think a lot of people feel under the alienation that they're suffering when they're just shuffling from their job that doesn't pay them enough.
00:44:59
Speaker
back to their one-bedroom apartment where they can't even go anywhere now because of the 5G coronavirus. I think that lizard people to me is very emblematic of the way that we can understand a class lens on things. Obviously, I don't think that there are actual lizard people who take off their skin suits
00:45:23
Speaker
though, you know, prove me wrong. My DMs are open. The truth or line is taking requests. If you have video documented evidence of lizard people, please DM Saturn under Saturn return.
00:45:39
Speaker
I was watching because I always love watching the like Obama shapeshifts videos where it's just a grainy video of him like chewing and you can see his temple move or whatever. I do enjoy watching those quite a bit. And this 90s is such a kind of
00:45:57
Speaker
alienating time, right? Like George H.W. Bush campaigns on NAFTA, you know, eats shit, people hate it, Clinton comes in and probably passes NAFTA, right? And I think you were completely justified in feeling totally alienated from politics and society, right? Jobs were starting to be offshore. People were losing their jobs. You know, politics doesn't seem to fucking matter. Who you vote in doesn't matter.
00:46:22
Speaker
And so aliens or lizard people or whatever becomes this avatar for the supernatural power that governments and now for the most part corporations hold over us, right? And the 90s are such a kind of fruitful time for conspiracies because it really, the whole Francis Fukuyama end of history thing really did I think psychically affect a lot of people, right? If there was no more bad guy to fight, if the commies were dead
00:46:50
Speaker
I don't know. It got transposed onto aliens, but I don't think it took and I don't think people enjoyed not having a kind of clear, identifiable human enemy. You know what I mean? Well, I think that it's like that Adam Curtis hyper-normalization theory that kind of at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, everything started basically running on a wire, right? There was
00:47:11
Speaker
this understanding that shit wasn't what it seemed. And there was this theater that was being created to kind of give the illusion of politics happening. So when you think about the Obama or the Clinton years, pardon me, you think about the scandals, Whitewater, Lewinsky, all those other things that are actually quite like nothing.
00:47:37
Speaker
quite boring, quite boring to actually unless you want to get into the Clinton body count. But that's another as another podcast. But yeah, this this kind of idea that there's this like new world order or this like external factor now that's that's kind of pulling the strings is is compelling because everything else is just like it's on a wire. It doesn't matter. You can't affect it. It's just moving forward.
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah, and that's why the 90s I think are this kind of deeply, where conspiracy theories really enter the mainstream and become these kind of popular parts of popular culture. But, I mean, what I just talked about, like people feeling alienated and not having a human target to focus their ire on, well, you know,
00:48:22
Speaker
For some people, this is very convenient. 9-11 happens. And, you know, Muslims quickly replace aliens and take over, you know, the popular imagination as the kind of big bad. And as a reaction to 9-11,
00:48:38
Speaker
you know, you end up seeing kind of like 9-11 trutherism, right? People working backwards from the events, you know, oh, gee, you know, George W. Bush sure benefited from this. Oh, gee, you know, military industrial complex sure is benefiting from this war in Iraq that wasn't even a part of 9-11. And kind of seeing these... Weird that they had the Patriot Act basically ready to go.
00:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, all this shit just happens post 9-11. And left-wing conspiracy theories kind of show up to kind of fill this space, right? This is when we see the popularity of loose change and jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams.
00:49:24
Speaker
And I know this is when you originally became red pelt, right? So why don't you kind of take us through your journey here into kind of this world? Because I kind of was mostly tuned out at this point. I was in college and smoking a lot of weed and this was not my way and I was already into aliens.
00:49:43
Speaker
I was quite little when 9-11 happened. I was only 12. So I didn't really understand what was going on until a little bit later when I was in high school. And a little film called Loose Change came out. And we learned about jet fuel. But the thing is that at the time, I was also very skeptical. So I read a lot of debunking things. But that's kind of what got me interested in
00:50:10
Speaker
in conspiracy at all. But at the time, I feel that this was also before the 2008 financial crash when I started developing or the beginnings of developing a kind of understanding of how class functioned.
00:50:25
Speaker
And so I think it's interesting because I was interested in 9-11 trutherism. I thought it was bullshit. And now, when I read stuff, I'm like, hmm, kind of makes sense. Obviously, like, there's lots of, this is the thing with 9-11 trutherism. It's kind of, you described it as a left-wing conspiracy theory. I would say that there is a lot of different overlaps. It's kind of basically like a mirror. You can see whatever you want to see in it.
00:50:54
Speaker
Yeah, there's interesting things about the financial trading that was going on. I have questions about some of the stuff, but it's not necessarily that I think that the Bush did 9-11
00:51:10
Speaker
hashtag or whatever or joke or meme that's arisen out of that. I think it's a more complicated story than that, but there's no doubt that at the end of the day, the military industrial complex and the apparatus of US intelligence benefited greatly from 9-11.
00:51:31
Speaker
They were able to massively extend their power and just suck trillions of dollars out of the American treasury. I think the natural transition is to 2008, both the financial crisis and the election of Obama. There we have the reactionary right, losing their mind. They had been in charge for eight years with George H. W. Bush.
00:51:59
Speaker
you know, they just, that's when they start to lose it, right? And Alex Jones becomes even more prominent, you know, the Glenn Beck's chalkboard comes out, you know, George Soros becomes, you know, the mastermind of everything, right, as opposed to just the Jews being responsible for wanting to destroy the world. Now it's just one Jew.
00:52:18
Speaker
And so it's not anti-Semitic anymore. It's very convenient. It sucks when people bring up the George Soros thing because I don't want to defend George Soros either because he's like a piece of shit billionaire who cares, right? Yeah. But yeah, you get into some tricky business with the George Soros discourse, which I don't appreciate.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yes, very much so. Who on the left who gives a shit about George Soros? I don't know anyone who takes money from George Soros. At some point he must have given money to some causes. I haven't looked into it. I don't give a shit. He has.
00:52:59
Speaker
But like, but it's not like it was a mean, not like it was like he was meaningfully trying to, to like, change the world, right? It was probably just like democratic adjacent bullshit. It's just like, I imagine it's something like what Bill Gates does, which is like, launder his image through, you know, charitable donations and whatnot, and ends up actually making more money in the long run from these charitable initiatives. That's what I imagine he's doing. I don't know for sure, though.
00:53:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't give a shit about George Soros, but it's like, I would bet good money that it was like simply just like consultants and like people adjacent to the Democratic Party, like lining their pockets, right? Like with a guy who donated a shit ton of money to the Democratic Party. I mean, that's the other reason why they hate him.
00:53:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I also think something that's interesting about Barack Obama is that I was listening to Jesse Ventura, my boy, and he was talking about his theory that Obama's mom was CIA because they were in Indonesia during the 60s, which I thought was very compelling. Yeah, the Bevins book, I think, mentions a bit about his time and
00:54:08
Speaker
Indonesia very briefly. Yeah, his mother like worked for the embassy there or something, which yes. And, and I think, as we enter the modern, like the past five or six years or so, now, and the election of Donald Trump, the, and the kind of omnipresence of social media, we really have entered, you know, conspiracy theories on steroids, on the good steroids too. And like,
00:54:39
Speaker
We've seen stories on adrenochrome. Yes, exactly. In the center, we've seen the rise of Russiagate and of Putin as this shadowy figure that wants to destroy the world.
00:54:57
Speaker
I like Donald Trump and all these things. And then on the right, we've got Q and Pizzagate, which at the core of Q and Pizzagate, again, is the thesis that there is an ultra powerful circle of billionaire pedophiles, which is, again, not wrong, probably.
00:55:20
Speaker
The difference between me and the Q people is that the Q people believe that every rich person is a pedophile, allegedly, and I believe that every, every rich person, sorry, I'm going to try that again.
00:55:35
Speaker
The difference between the Q people and me is that Q people believe that every rich person except for Donald Trump is a pedophile and I believe that every rich person, especially Donald Trump, is a pedophile.
00:55:49
Speaker
There you go. I mean, yeah, social media essentially starts melting the brains of every old person and all content is now flattened and the same where stuff from InfoWars is treated the same as stuff from ABC News on Facebook. It all looks the same, right? And these kind of factors, this factor I think really kind of
00:56:10
Speaker
causes these conspiracy theories to go to go bonkers in the past few years. And the other thing that's really, I think, caused the popularity of Q is really the like the gamification of it, right? Is how everyone who is into Q can be a part of Q and can kind of make their own Q riffs and become little Q micro celebrities. Yeah, and you can become a baker where you interpret the drops and you can find out the secret messages hidden within.
00:56:39
Speaker
Yeah, and just for the folks who aren't aware of what QAnon is, because I know we've mentioned it a bunch here, it is a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that posits that top Democrats and anyone else essentially that Q people don't like is a cannibal pedophile that will soon be arrested and executed by Trump. And then a common trope in these things is the secret indictments or
00:57:00
Speaker
the fact that these people have already been arrested, but it just hasn't been released to the world yet. And QAnon's rise to power, real world kind of prominence is kind of weird when you think about how it started. It was really just a handful of posts on 4chan in 2017.
00:57:17
Speaker
uh, you know, claiming for some guy from Q claiming that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month. It was, you know, November 2017 came and Hillary Clinton was not arrested, but that did not stop the popularity of this conspiracy theory. No. And Q is kind of an omnibus theory because it's, uh, you know, user generated pretty much because it's like this emergent process. You can find anything in Q. There's different Q sex, right? So you like aliens, there's aliens in Q baby. You want,
00:57:46
Speaker
You want New World Order? You got it. There is a huge swath of things that you can go down in different things. There are divisions within Q2, just amongst us 9-11 truthers, there are divisions.
QAnon and its Real-World Impact
00:58:01
Speaker
Where RFK, is he alive or not? That's a big one. That's a division. There's all kinds of different things located within this really vast terrain.
00:58:13
Speaker
that people can kind of insert whatever it is that suits their own personal understanding of how the world works into. Yeah, and it's still essentially passive, like all that Q is asking, all that happens in the kind of Q galaxies that people are kind of posting more and kind of, you know, having their own twists and takes. Digital soldiers.
00:58:35
Speaker
Yeah, but it has manifested itself, and Q has manifested itself in the real world, right? There have been people, wasn't there some crime mafia guy who got shot by a Q person? Yeah, got shot by a guy that was interpreting a message from Q that he had to do that. A guy also drove a train off its tracks because of Q.
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's worthwhile to kind of understand these things and know where they're coming from. And no, I mean, you don't have to be like me and or Laura, who's like deep, deep in the weeds. But like, to understand this stuff is important, right? Because it is being used to kind of demotivate and essentially organize people who, you know, would, in an ideal world, be amenable to some type of like class analysis, who would be on our side, right?
00:59:32
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that if folks want more information about Q, they should check out the fantastic podcast QAnon Anonymous that has basically been doing like on the ground reporting about this since it emerged.
00:59:48
Speaker
Just kind of like with lots of updates, like there are quite a few people running for Congress right now that are QAnon supporters. And obviously there's variants within that. Some of them are true believers. Other of them are just kind of using it as a political tool to attract a certain kind of base.
01:00:08
Speaker
So it's going to be interesting to see how this develops, but it's very much got a lot of DNA in common with the kind of Mason panic that we were discussing at the top of the episode. Yeah. And I think this cue thing is really the ultimate of expression of kind of politics as a spectacle, right? Instead of politics as an activity where we come together to affect change.
01:00:37
Speaker
And if you can't make change happen, why not just sit back and enjoy it? Root for the white hats who are finally going to unseal the indictments and arrest the bad guys who are eating baby brains.
Advocating Class Solidarity Over Conspiracies
01:00:49
Speaker
Conspiracy theories are really just a way for powerless people to cope with and express their powerlessness. And the opposite of conspiracy theories is class solidarity, class consciousness.
01:01:00
Speaker
good old dialectical materialism, baby. You know, conflict is caused by material needs, rich and powerful people want to stay rich and powerful. And if you determine their motivations, you will kind of understand history. You know, word up Karl Marx and pretty smart guy, honestly.
01:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the better conspiracy theories out there, and really that class analysis is really, I think, cleverly talked about and kind of displayed in visual form in one of the greatest movies of the 80s, They Live. Haven't seen that one yet. You haven't seen They Live? Oh my God.
01:01:38
Speaker
movie with the rowdy rowdy piper and the like all the obeying language and shit i know this is like this is like being on a date with any man they're just like you haven't seen this i thought you watched movies especially for like conspiracy lefties
01:01:55
Speaker
I'm well aware it's on the list. Okay. Well, you probably don't watch movies that you don't have to because you do a movie review podcast where you have to watch a movie every week. But please, get back to that class consciousness thing. The only way to deal with your sense of alienation is
01:02:16
Speaker
to talk about it with your family your co-workers and your neighbors and ultimately you will find that the source of most of your fucking problems is your boss the person who is exploiting your labor and if you start from there you can build the kind of skills that you need to actually change the world because you have to start where you work and like that is that is the thing that i will leave you with
01:02:40
Speaker
As we close, I think this is going to be the first part of a two-part, because we didn't even get to your story, Laura. We will get to your story. There's so much. There's so much to talk about when it comes to conspiracy theories. Do you have anything to plug? Twitter accounts, podcasts, I know you are active with both and any other things that you need to plug at the moment.
01:03:00
Speaker
I am active on the computer. So you can follow me at underscore satin return. I'm also on the Kino left or podcast. We do a, I have lots of theories on that one, which are not fit to print. So you can check those out. My dark multiverse solar flare theory is one of my favorites that I've concocted lately. So subscribe to our Patreon to gain access to all the good stuff that we have back there.
01:03:28
Speaker
Yes, thank you. It is a very good podcast, and I do listen to a lot of what they produce. It's very good. And I am a patron. And if you like this podcast, and you want to keep hearing me and Laura talk about conspiracy theories more, as well as the other newsier things that we talk about, in the second part of this episode, we will get to her story about the conspiracy theory that is embedded in the UCP's evisceration of our post-secondary system.
01:03:52
Speaker
There are a few things you can do, obviously. Please share this podcast with your friends and family. Word of mouth and kind of like people talking about it is the best advertising. We don't pay for advertising, so please do that. Leaving a review, only five stars, of course.
01:04:07
Speaker
As we all know, no one wants a four-star review. Except no substitutions. Yes, exactly. And if you do like this podcast and you want to join the 300 or other so folks who help keep this independent media project going, you can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and contribute $5, $10, $15 a month. We do really appreciate it.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:04:29
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things that you think I need to hear, I'm on Twitter, at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK, at progressupwarda.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communists for the amazing theme. Thank you to Laura Cruz for being our guest. Thank you. Thank you for listening.
01:04:45
Speaker
Did you know that Progress Alberta is part of a national community of leftist podcasts on the Ricochet Podcast Network? You can find the Alberta Advantage, 49th Parahel, Kino Lefter, Well Reds, The Progress Report, Lefi Sales, Out of Left Field, and Unpacking the News, as well as a bunch of other awesome podcasts at Ricochet Media or wherever you download your podcasts.