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Stranger Danger 2020
69 Plays4 years ago
We have returning champion Laura Kruse on to discuss her latest Red String column. There is a huge effort going on to whitewash a dangerous and extreme right wing conspiracy theory and tens of thousands of well meaning folks are getting sucked in. And it's using child sex trafficking as the entry point.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
We're doing it live. Fuck it. We'll do it live. These people are demons. Literal demons smoke sulfur and hellfire. Yeah, I know. I am...
00:00:16
Speaker
Uh, it's always good to have you on. So I'll do the, I'll do their actual proper intro here, but, uh, you're, I think you're our fourth time on the pod now. So you, you get a challenge coin. I'll get you a progress Alberta t-shirt. Thank you so much. Yeah. I knew like a medium, a large, I don't know. We just have these like fucking regular ass t-shirts with our logo on it, but I'll cut it into a crop top.
00:00:40
Speaker
Crap top, yeah, yeah, tie the little tassels on the end. You can zhuzh it up.
00:00:58
Speaker
friends and enemies. Welcome to the progress report. I am your host Duncan Kinney, and we're recording today here in a miss wishy was sky again, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. Back on the show, we have returning champion, Laura Cruz, Laura. Welcome back.
Anti-Pedophile Stance and Political Humor
00:01:12
Speaker
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
00:01:14
Speaker
four-time guest of the Progress Report, you have the most. Undefeated. Undefeated, yes. And you probably could beat the shit out of all our other guests, too, to be honest. You actually know how to box and shit. That's how I am uniquely well-equipped to take on the pedophile cabal.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yes. Yes. And, um, I don't know about your politics, my politics. I don't really have any besides being anti pedophile. That's really my only pro priority. Um, you and Ted Cruz. Yeah. Uh, by the way, if anyone ever says that to you, like, and is serious, like run away from that person because you do not want to get stuck in a conversation with them. Uh, they definitely, they definitely do have some politics, which we'll get into later.
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Child Trafficking Hysteria and Conspiracy Theories
00:02:07
Speaker
But Laura has written another incredible piece for us as part of the red, with the red string, that's her monthly column, where she uses kind of conspiracy theories to deconstruct and understand the world around us and how fucked up it is. And Laura's latest story is very good. It'll be obviously linked in the show notes, but it is called, hashtag save the children, human trafficking hysteria and the expansion of the police state.
00:02:31
Speaker
and Laura, how has a widespread panic about child sex trafficking lured otherwise well meaning normie folks into a vast web of extreme right wing conspiracy theories slash QAnon.
00:02:45
Speaker
Well, I think that it's totally understandable that people are concerned for the well-being of children. And I think that it serves as an excellent Trojan horse for bad actors who kind of want to twist that concern into meeting their own political ends.
00:03:04
Speaker
It's important to understand that child sex trafficking or child sacrifice or child abuse panics are nothing new. They're embedded in a long-standing tradition of this happening, flaring up every once in a while, especially comorbid with big changes in terms of the material conditions that people
00:03:23
Speaker
have around them. And so right now the kind of latest iteration of this panic, this moral panic, is this idea around there being a cabal of liberal elites, especially Hillary Clinton and Obama, who are trafficking or sexually abusing and murdering children.
00:03:45
Speaker
And so this very well-founded concern for the wellbeing of children is a very convenient way to kind of get people started down the road of looking into more and more fringe conspiracies, ending up with QAnon. When people get into this shit, I think they fundamentally realize that our society is broken and ill and bad.
00:04:09
Speaker
And instead of trying to understand the world through, I don't know, dialectical materialism or whatever, they come across these very handy conspiracy theories which explain everything.
00:04:25
Speaker
And the latest kind of inciting incident here is a couple of viral tweets randomly. We've got people on the internet talking about how the furniture manufacturer Wayfair is shipping children in cabinets.
00:04:43
Speaker
And also this mega viral tweet of like 39 missing children in a double wide trailer in Georgia. Like how is that not the biggest story in America? Like these two things kind of happened within a few weeks of each other and really was opportunistically taken up by the kind of Q folks into this save the children thing, right?
00:05:06
Speaker
So yeah, that Wayfair conspiracy that Wayfair was sending children under the guise of these very expensive cabinets, which are very weirdly priced. I will say that. They didn't really have super good of an answer for why they were that expensive, which just further inculcates this conspiracy thinking, right? Obviously this is not- It's the very nice walnut finish.
00:05:32
Speaker
on otherwise plain as I don't count it. Yeah. I mean, I looked at the cabinets, it's embedded in the story. They just look like fucking cabinets to me, but whatever. Well, they say they're industrial grade, which I don't know what an industrial cabinet is to ship children in. They've got extra air holes to make sure they make it through customs, unharmed.
00:05:56
Speaker
But this is, again, like you said, this is just the latest in a long line of moral panics around the safety of our children. And time is a flat circle. And these things continually crop up every couple decades.
Connection to QAnon and Exploitation of Children's Safety Concerns
00:06:15
Speaker
But I suppose the question is, how does this all relate back to QAnon? How do you relate this moral panic around
00:06:22
Speaker
the child sex trafficking and how do you connect it back to Q? Well, like as I said, basically the core organizers around this Save the Children movement are Q people and it is intentionally a way to obfuscate their messaging to be more palatable to the broader public. So the more kind of strategically minded of the Q pushers,
00:06:47
Speaker
who materially benefit a lot from people being involved in this. They're on speaking tours, they're selling books, they're monetizing their YouTube channels, whatever. They basically know that if you come straight out and say, you know, Hillary Clinton is a demon, which I think we can all agree with, but Hillary Clinton is a demon who is literally cutting the faces off children.
00:07:10
Speaker
and putting out videos where she's eating them alive. That is crazy and that takes a little bit of time to kind of warm up to. So they're kind of using this, like I said, this is a Trojan horse. Save the Children is a Trojan horse to bring people in
00:07:28
Speaker
who start to read these very inflated stats around child trafficking and child sexual abuse and kind of slowly start to red pill them into this new way of thinking where the signs are all around you and then everything in your worldview starts to confirm that, right?
00:07:49
Speaker
Open your eyes, sheeple. I mean, I mean, who doesn't want to save the children, right? Like, like if you just see that unattached to any type of ideology or any type of context, you're like, yeah, save the children, of course. But like, I mean, hilariously, the original name of we charity was free the children, which from the tunnels underneath New York City.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, free them from the sex dungeon underneath Comet Ping Pong. Yeah. They changed their name as they became much more than, I don't know, a charity. They cared about child slavery or whatever. But I mean, it's a very easy trope to use to be like, look, children are in danger. We have to do everything we can to save them. And that cuts across, you know, every person of every political stripe wants to do that.
Rarity of Child Kidnappings and Historical Context
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah. And if you come out as a person saying, no, no, fuck the kids, uh, you know, there's just no way for you to actually, you actually have to take the time to sit down and be like, look, here's how it works. Well, like it's, it's no, there's no easy way to like instantly blow up, you know, save the children, free the children, whatever it is. Right. Like you actually, they have so much of an advantage off the hop just with their like initial premise. Yeah, exactly.
00:09:05
Speaker
But the actual stats on child kidnapping, like you actually did some digging here, like what actual bearing, what is the reality of children being kidnapped?
00:09:15
Speaker
So child kidnapping is fairly rare. In Canada, there are usually about 50,000 reports of missing children, and reports of missing children is not the same thing as kidnapping. The vast majority of the time when a child is kidnapped, they are being taken by their noncustodial parents, so it's some kind of
00:09:38
Speaker
Um, some kind of dispute or, uh, yeah, that kind of thing where there, yeah, exactly. Or rough divorces, that kind of thing. Um, and so when we think about child kidnapping, though, what we think about is, you know, the stranger pulling up to, uh, you while you're.
00:09:55
Speaker
while you're playing and saying, can you help me find my dog and then taking you away? And that is very, very rare. The most recent statistics I could find about it were from 2011. And I think it was like 0.003% or about like, I can't remember the exact thing I have in here, but I think it's around 25 or something. It's a minuscule number. Yeah. When you look at like the vast majority of kidnappings are yes, children taken by their other, by the parent who's not in charge of
00:10:25
Speaker
taking care of them. And then the other big chunk of it is like child runaways, right? Yeah, exactly. So most children who are reported missing are found safe and unharmed within 48 hours, like 99.7% of them or something like that. And yeah, these are runaways that are coming home. Yeah.
00:10:44
Speaker
but this idea of stranger danger, so it's an important thing. I was born in 1983, I'm a little older than you, so I was in my elementary school in the late 80s, in the early 90s, and there was this very much kind of latent background panic about
00:11:00
Speaker
the very real possibility that me or my brothers could be kidnapped at any time by strangers. We were never supposed to talk to strangers, not even a little bit. That was anathema. And we link to a video in the story, which really kind of like,
00:11:15
Speaker
sets up just how fucked up this stranger danger concept is, and how it just made kids terrified of the world around you. But this is like some, I don't know, some YouTube video. It feels very early 90s, late 80s to me. And I'm just gonna play it, we'll link to it in the show notes, and let's just react to it. You've already been told about strangers dressing up in uniforms, but there are other traps you need to know about.
00:11:44
Speaker
Hi, I lost my little dog. Can you help me find him? Be suspicious of an adult asking for help. The old little dog chick. Hi, I'm just playing with my daughter's video game, but the batteries seem to be dead. I have some in my car, why don't you come over and help me put them in? Stay away from people with cars or vans. Hey kid, how you doing? Um, you know we're making a movie over there, you wanna go see it?
00:12:07
Speaker
only professional agencies hire kids okay that one is probably no you should probably should be kid let's go to the arcade and play some video games what do you say ignore it walk away little boy i'll give you ten dollars if you'll take my bags at the car for me it's okay you can't even trust old women even to an adult that old lady fuck you up good manners do not trust her hey kid she just needs help with her bags i'll teach you how to hit this ball right over the fence come on it'll be fun trust your own feelings
00:12:43
Speaker
That's fine. Your mom's been hurt. She's in the hospital. She sent me to come and get you. What's the secret code word? I don't know the code word. You don't need to get near the car to talk to someone inside. What if that person's mom wasn't real? You look like you could use a friend. Say no to what you think is wrong. I could, actually. Not open the door. Nothing is more important than your safety. Hi. You're sure a cute kid.
00:13:12
Speaker
You know, I'm a professional photographer. Come on, hop in the car. I'll take your picture. If someone wants to take your picture, say no and tell your parents. If you tell anybody about our little secret.
00:13:27
Speaker
I'll kill your dog. Children should never be asked to keep special scenes from their parents. Now you know the 11 most common kidnapped traps to avoid and how to be street smart. Now you know kids. Time to start is now. Be cautious and observant and report anything suspicious.
00:13:44
Speaker
The 11 most common kidnapping techniques. Yeah, I'd like to see your stats on those. Despite your sources there, stranger danger video. But I mean, like, I don't know. I mean, there's some obvious very red flaggy ones like someone wants to take pictures of you or whatever. But what if you want to become a model?
00:14:07
Speaker
How will I be discovered and become a movie star? But like the one with the like, your mom's fucked up and she needs your help. It's like, what if you knew that person and they just like didn't know your stupid password? Well, that was the thing because I obviously was a kid in the early nineties, but we still were very much in the shadow of this kind of stranger danger thing. I remember having a presentation, one of those school assemblies.
00:14:32
Speaker
where they taught you how to go on the ground and kick them in the shins if a man was trying to get you. And yeah, they said you can't trust anyone, not even a family friend, unless they know the passcode. Because I guess the family friend is going to be activated to come and kidnap you one day. You can't even trust those around you. Your aunt, fuck that lady. She has nefarious intentions.
00:14:56
Speaker
It's a plot of 24 or whatever. Back in the day when we had house phones or home phones and I was talking to an adult, I was supposed to intimate to them that, oh yeah, my mom's here. She's just in the shower and can't come right now or whatever. As if the person on the phone was just itching to come over and break into our house and kidnap me.
00:15:24
Speaker
And I think I may have talked over that one, but there was one where it's like, don't trust the pizza delivery guy. Like what?
00:15:31
Speaker
Get that pizza, kids. But I think this riff, this like 80s, 90s riff on Stranger Danger really got kicked off by a really awful person kind of named Anita Bryant. She was like this quasi celebrity. And she had a, and again, an instance showing that time is a flat circle. Her movement was called Save Our Children.
00:15:59
Speaker
And she wanted to be able to teach some type of like millenarian, like very literal teaching of the Bible in schools or whatever. And she was the one to like organize this pushback, you know, against queer folks that, you know, this was this was the 80s and this was the kind of reactionary pushback that was happening. And I think ultimately what, you know, the folks who are worried about
00:16:27
Speaker
Uh, you know, save the children in 2020 and people who were worried about stranger danger back in the eighties and nineties, you know, what they want is this kind of like idealized, you know, 1950s, safe, suburban, you know, middle-class life free of, you know, black people or people who don't look like them. Make America great again.
00:16:47
Speaker
It is, it totally is Make America Great Again, right? And it is this very deep subconscious yearning for, you know, a society where, you know, they never have to look at another person who doesn't look like them ever again, like they want the ethno state, right?
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And I think this was like Anita Bryant and their push back against queer people would have also been a giant driver and the lack of communication about like HIV, which, you know, is another thing that doesn't really fit into that safe suburban middle class life.
Conservative Child Protection Movements and Nostalgia
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I didn't really make the connection there. But like, yeah, there was definitely male pedophiles who were definitely like part of the stranger danger panic and part of the like, was that there was this panic that, that, you know, gay pedophiles were kidnapping boys and kind of like,
00:17:37
Speaker
turning them into gay men because they couldn't procreate. There was this theory. Anyways, it's really fucked up. But you pitched me this piece and I was interested. I was like, Laura has good instincts and she knows this shit. I want to read what she writes about it. But then you wrote it, I edit it, we publish it, and now I fucking see this shit everywhere.
00:17:58
Speaker
There's literally like save our children graffiti, like in one of my dog walks, like I'm on a piece of wood. And just the other day, we had new Conservative Party of Canada leader, Aaron O'Toole, who is recovering from COVID-19 right now, get well soon, King. He was on the internet.
00:18:19
Speaker
He's quote-tweeting True North Center, which is my favorite anti-immigrant think tank slash news source. And he's quote-tweeting True North Center, and they're talking about Cuties, which is this Netflix movie. And his tweet reads as follows.
00:18:33
Speaker
I'm a dad who was deeply disturbed by this Netflix show. Childhood is a time of innocence. We must do more to protect children. This show is exploitative and wrong. I don't know how I can read this as anything but a nod to the fucking QAnon, save the children, wackadoos.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's, well, I think it's interesting. I was just actually on a episode of Kino Lefter, my old podcast, and Evan invited me on to talk about cuties and this kind of hysterical reaction that people are having that I think is very much rooted in this moment.
00:19:06
Speaker
However, I also think that the kind of outrage is again cutting across these political divisions, right? Like there is this very much this huge reaction as if canceling QTs off of Netflix and unsubscribing from Netflix is going to solve the problem.
00:19:23
Speaker
of child exploitation. By the way, it's not exploitative and wrong. It's a very boring movie. You've seen the movie. Can you give us a little close notes, like thumbnail sketch of what everyone is freaking out about? Are they just freaking out about the name and the poster and the actual content?
00:19:40
Speaker
I mean, there is, so the movie is basically about this young Senegalese woman. They're 11 years old. She lives in this very, you know, traditional home, very like conservative Muslim home. And she becomes fascinated with this group of girls, the popular girls at her school who have a dance crew called the Cuties. And there she becomes, you know, part of them and starts dressing in the sexualized way and interacting with social media and seeing herself as this like sexual agent.
00:20:09
Speaker
So there is definitely parts of it that are a bit gratuitous, but it's making a point, right? It's making a point about how this is wrong. And it clearly comes out in an opposite way where she, at the end of it, she is kind of, you know, synthesizing her identity as like a Muslim girl and her identity as like a French girl into this, like,
00:20:37
Speaker
New kind of paradigm so I I saw this other great tweet where I was talking about how like Martin Scorsese doesn't like It doesn't put out a movie about the mob and be like I like everything that happens. This is good No, Henry Hill was dope actually I want to be like him
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So I feel like I wouldn't recommend watching the movie, but because it is not that good.
Media Influence and Politicization of Trafficking Issues
00:21:04
Speaker
I think that the I think that the the complete outrage and fear and and, you know, moral panic that it sparked is completely outsized. And it's the same story, right? Like the same queue and like grifter folks who were behind the Save the Children stuff have latched on to cuties and used it.
00:21:22
Speaker
to again, worm their way into the consciousness of people who just want to like, you know, keep our kids safe. And it's just another articulation for a Q person who is seeing this. It's another articulation that all the media and all institutions are controlled by these powerful liberal elites who are, you know, communicating through signs and communicating through, you know, coded messages and putting it all out there for you to see. Right.
00:21:51
Speaker
And, and there always has to be an Alberta connection. I always make you get something, uh, connected to Alberta into the piece. And since that's where we live and it's in the title of the organization. So, but, uh, our friend, uh, Jason Kenny is all about this human trafficking shit and has introduced campaigned on something called the saving the girl next door act. I think the first draft of the legislation was called the saving the girl next door act. Uh, I think it's now called the protecting the victims of human trafficking act.
00:22:19
Speaker
This is a piece of legislation that was introduced in the spring, I believe, still hasn't been passed yet. I think the actual details of it are relatively uncontroversial and basic. It's like victims of trafficking can now sue or something.
00:22:35
Speaker
The law itself seemed relatively unimportant compared to just being able to stand in front of cameras in the media and say, I am going to do something to end human trafficking. We're going to save the girl next door, which is pretty clear coded language. I mean, it's not that coded really. Like what girl are we talking about here?
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, the white girl, the suburban girl. And always in these kind of conceptions of what human trafficking is, it's about, you know, young suburban girls being lured off into lives of prostitution. And this kind of obfuscates the other forms of labor exploitation and coerced labor that exists all around us all the time.
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah, and you go into that and into our story, right? Like, like, what is I mean, the concept of human trafficking, like, is, is it useful? Like, what do we mean when we say it?
00:23:26
Speaker
Well, that's the interesting thing. I would argue that yes, there is a form of human trafficking that exists. I think that there is not really a shared definition that's super useful. And a lot of the statistics that are used, that are generated are very unclear, especially because it's quite hard to get data on these things and they're kind of
00:23:50
Speaker
averaged out over population, so we'll take a sample, all this kind of stuff. So for me, it's not really that useful. Does child sexual exploitation exist? Absolutely. Does coerced labour exist? Absolutely. Does slavery exist? Absolutely. But we have to consider what is the political end and the political goal of when we engage in these discussions and who are we thinking about when we think about human trafficking.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, and the who brings it up part, I think, is the important part, right? When you have reactionary conservative politicians talking about keeping our women safe, that's when things get bad, you know what I mean? The story of Emmett Till, of being falsely accused of a black man being falsely accused of rape or sexual assault by a white woman, and then he was lynched.
00:24:43
Speaker
within the 50s or whenever it happened. People are alive who were around when that happened, you know what I mean? This is not something, and Canada is not free from this as well. Emily Murphy, one of our so-called Famous Five, made an entire living talking about the evils of white slavery and the yellow menace and how white women were going to get hooked on opium and get sold into prostitution.
00:25:11
Speaker
And we have a statue of that lady here in Edmonton, so great. But like what is actual, like what is the much more common form of, you know, quote unquote human trafficking? It's not necessarily what we think, right? It's much more related to work.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yes, so usually when people are being forced to do coerced labor, it is due to a lapse in temporary foreign worker status. So people who are in the temporary foreign worker program who are sending a lot of their money back home, they don't have a lot of rights. If they lose their job, they get deported. So an employer holds undue amount of control over their lives.
00:26:00
Speaker
So we see things like women who are working in nail salons. We see things like forced labor on farms and in construction sites, as well as domestic labor, caring for children, housekeeping, that kind of thing. If you're completely contingent on someone keeping you employed, you're not really able to
00:26:26
Speaker
say no to dangerous work conditions or raise any alarms on the threat of deportation. Then when people do go undocumented, that's when even worse things can happen because the employer is under no legal obligation to provide them with any level of labor protection or minimum wage because it's completely off the books.
00:26:52
Speaker
I mean, just two and a half years ago, we had a story come out of inspectors find foreign workers sleeping in a Burger King basement in Lethbridge.
00:27:05
Speaker
Like, like, that's kind of what we're talking about here, right? Yeah. And even less kind of shocking revelations happen all the time where it will be a bunch of people working in a Tim Hortons whose manager is also their landlord, things like that. So it's like they're working and they're also paying, um, basically like almost like a company store, right? And in these like cramp conditions, work camps, all kinds of different things that are happening, um, in, across many sectors within the Canadian economy.
00:27:35
Speaker
Well, um, that's, you know, terrible and we need to fix this. And I have faith that country music superstar Paul Brandt will as chair of the human trafficking committee, uh, appointed by Jason Candy, that he will get to the bottom of this and that we will figure this out and that we will finally end the scourge of human trafficking. Do you know why he was appointed? I have no idea.
00:27:59
Speaker
He is apparently very passionate about the issue. He has a nonprofit that he's been involved with that does campaigns on issue.
Legislative Critique and Approaching Believers with Compassion
00:28:08
Speaker
You'd have to go into Paul Brandt lore and his biography and actually figure out why he actually got the brain worm for this one. But yeah, little suss.
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's a tough one. Again, anything that comes out of that committee and the legislation that Kenny is passing, they're not going to get up on their hind legs and fight it. It's just going to pass. Anything that is going to get proposed is going to pass unopposed because no one wants to be seen as
00:28:43
Speaker
as opposing this. And it does allow a bad law to get passed. It does allow you to continue this brutal border regime that we have that separates people from their families. We have kids in cages here too, and increases the size of the police state.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like this exact pattern is what happened when SESTA FOSTA was introduced in the United States. And same with when the Bill 36 Protecting Exploited Persons and Communities Act was passed in Canada. These things, because the definition of human trafficking is so tied with the definition of sex work, people won't, politicians won't raise any critical alarms. And this really has
00:29:30
Speaker
huge impacts on people working in shadow industries and doesn't do anything to protect exploited people except for, well not except for, except what it does is empower border security and increase police budgets.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, and we're trying to defund the police here. So yeah, when this stuff comes up in your life, and you see, you know, sex worker rhetoric, you know, be mindful that it's been used, it's been used in the past, it's being used again, to increase the size of police budgets and our again, our incredibly brutal border regime. And
00:30:09
Speaker
and that they are preying on your fears that bad stuff will happen to you unless this violence is committed upon people who don't look like you, who you don't know, like if you're a white person listening to this, right? It's incredibly fucked and we need to kind of educate ourselves on it. But I do want to, I did want to kind of round up our chat.
00:30:29
Speaker
and come back to something that I think anyone who has anyone in their life or interacts with people online who are kind of true believers in this kind of QAnon stuff.
00:30:42
Speaker
which is that these people need to be, what's the right word here? I don't think they need to be dismissed out of hand is probably the best way to put it, right? Yeah, I think that a really unfortunate reaction that a lot of people have when faced with people who have fringe beliefs is to
00:31:02
Speaker
think that they're crazy or stupid. And I think that that's just the incorrect way to go. And in terms of any kind of moving people away from a certain way of thinking and more closely aligned to yours involves having compassion, trying to understand and trying to understand the roots of where this comes from. And I think it's pretty understandable right now to believe that there is a
00:31:28
Speaker
Cabal of people who are engaged in child exploitation because there is we we know that there is and we know that that no justice has been served in the case of like Jeff Jeffrey Epstein and and cases like that this vast web of people who are engaged in all kinds of exploitation of minors and
00:31:49
Speaker
These conspiracy theories, they thrive in the places where things are like occulted, you know, when they're hidden, when they're hidden from view and they're shadowy and they're not transparent. That's where this kind of thinking takes hold. And sometimes we see these like reactionary movements, like you remember when everyone was burning down the 5G towers?
Real-World Impact of Conspiracy Beliefs
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, I remember reading the stories. I don't think it happened near us, but yeah. No, but when people were burning down the 5G towers, believing that it was causing cancer and disease, and there was a lot of stories that were kind of making fun of these people and talking about how they were really stupid. And this is actually extremely beneficial for people in the tech sector, right?
00:32:40
Speaker
This is a great thing for people to be able to expand this network. I don't think that there's anything wrong with 5G, don't get me wrong. But I also don't want the telecoms that have a stranglehold on the country to be able to move through the country without any kind of opposition. So it's just like, who is pushing these narratives that these people are nuts?
00:33:02
Speaker
Also, if it's someone in your family who is going down this rabbit hole and it's interfering with your relationship. I'm talking more IRL here. I'm talking about when it's someone who you know. What if it's some fucking idiot on Twitter or Facebook? Who cares? Just block them. Don't worry about it. You're not going to change anyone's mind in that context. But if it's someone who you actually have an actual relationship with,
00:33:28
Speaker
approaching it from a level of compassion and understanding is going to be far more useful to you actually continuing to have a relationship with that person than just calling them a fucking idiot. I think that's what I'm trying to get across here. And it's hard. I mean, what they're, what they're talking about, what they believe in is
00:33:43
Speaker
like batshit. But it comes from a place of like, you know, we live in a fucked up world and our society is deeply broken and ill. And this is a reaction. This is one of the many reactions to it. And and fundamentally, it is I think QAnon is an extremely harmful thing in the discourse for it to exist. Like there are conspiracy theories that pop up that are like, oh, whatever, you know, like Obama was born in Africa, whatever.
00:34:12
Speaker
Like that's just like a stupid conspiracy theory that that idiots want to believe. And that's I would I would equate that more to the like the common flu. But I think I think QAnon is something a little more is a little step higher up in the kind of hierarchy of conspiracy theories because ultimately the political opponents of the people are literally committing child torture and sacrifice. And anything you can do anything to those people and be justified in it. Right.
00:34:40
Speaker
You can derail a train or go to New York with 19 knives in your car to kill Joe Biden. That's a rational response to people doing large scale human sacrifice.
00:34:57
Speaker
Yeah, there have been real instances of people who believe in Q like doing violent things and they're listed in the story. And even when we look at examples in other countries like the genocide or the mass murder however you want to frame it in Indonesia, which is detailed in the Jakarta method, the whole
00:35:18
Speaker
They killed communists and suspected communists in that genocide slash mass murder, whatever you want to call it. The inciting incident for that whole thing was something that literally sounds like a Q drop. Sex witches were magic king army officers and cutting off their dicks. The details are as insane and as gross as anything dreamt up by Q. That was literally the excuse to pop off
00:35:43
Speaker
the murder of a million political enemies of the ruling junta. And it's like these things do matter and these things do end up justifying things down the line. And they are electing, Q is electing, Q and non-believers are getting elected to Congress. You know what I mean?
00:36:00
Speaker
And I think we want to avoid this discussion of the idea turning people radical because I think that the vast majority of people who follow these conspiracies, the goal is actually to depoliticize you.
QAnon's Depoliticizing Influence
00:36:16
Speaker
The goal is to make it so that there's a secret war, which you can interpret and you can play detective for, but that it's being fought on the kind of psychic battlefields of the digital army, right? It's not something that most people who are going to read about it, most people who are really into it are going to necessarily act upon.
00:36:38
Speaker
But when you have a confluence of things like complete precarity, mental illness, you know. Climate breakdown. Access to weapons. That's when these kinds of violent rhetoric turn, spill over into real life. Yeah. And ultimately like.
00:37:01
Speaker
The only thing that is to be done is to defeat and overthrow capitalism. These things are born out of a deeply ill society. And I think the structure behind all of that is the way our society is structured, the way it assigns value. Who amongst us is not mentally fucked up right now in the middle of this pandemic? Not me. I've grown extra powerful.
00:37:31
Speaker
Yes. I'm levitating right now, yeah. And in chaotic times like these, we have to be more mindful and be more compassionate of our neighbors more than ever. And it's hard work. It's a lot easier to just be like, oh, there's a super powerful cabal of people who are actually controlling the world. And I can't do anything except follow along on Twitter. Yeah, exactly.
00:37:59
Speaker
And that's the fundamental, I think, limiting power of a conspiracy theory is that it's really hard to bridge that, bridging that thing between like really believing in conspiracy and action is like crossing that bridge is the really hard part. And the scary part with Q is that it keeps happening, is that enough people believe it. And it's so kind of, it's penetrated so far into the consciousness. Like what was the,
00:38:28
Speaker
What would the poll, the polling stats on Republicans who believe in at least part of QAnon? About 50 percent of people they polled. So that's pretty disturbing. And the thing with Q is because it's so participatory, there is something in it for everybody. So it's kind of like an inkblot test. There is kind of a central theme of Q, but there's so much within it and so many factions that believing in all or some of it is quite easy.
00:38:59
Speaker
Yeah, and I just listened to an excellent podcast on perhaps the person who is Q, at least right now, by a reply all. And yeah, I would encourage you to listen to that one. I'll put it in the show notes. The operating theory out of that podcast, and which is a fairly popular thing, I think, is the idea that the person who is Q now is Jim Watkins, who is the, what, the founder? Not the founder, the person who runs 8chan.
00:39:27
Speaker
or whatever 8chan's called these dudes. That's what the original coder and developer for 8chan, when it first started, he's completely divorced from it in his campaigning to get it taken down. He thinks that it is Jim Watkins. Yeah, the podcast essentially is a long feature interview with that guy, who is a weird fucked up character all in himself. I love him. Oh yeah? Yeah, he's my friend. He's my boy.
00:39:56
Speaker
He's the, he's like, he, what he has, he has the like the thing from glass, right? Like the brittle bones. Yeah, exactly. He's super Catholic now too. Is he? Okay. Yeah. Uh, he got out of the dark web and into the arms of Christ. Oh, well, uh, probably better in the end.
00:40:19
Speaker
But so is there anything else about that? I mean, we've talked a lot about your story. I think I think it's if I could beam it directly into the heads of 50,000 fucking boomers, I would. You know, is there any other any other kind of nugget in that story that you want to talk about before we wrap up?
00:40:35
Speaker
Um, I think that the important thing to realize especially with Save the Children is that it's not a boomer phenomenon. It's actually something that's quite crossing through over to all kinds of different people.
00:40:50
Speaker
Scary, right? That's a nerve-wracking thing that they're being very effective organizers in terms of getting their message out in a way that's digestible for people and kind of sending them down this road. There's also very well documented. We can see very clearly that there's a lot of crossover with things like new age, anti-vaccines, anti-establishment kind of thinking.
00:41:12
Speaker
anti-masking probably, COVID vaccines. Yeah, exactly. Which also very nicely dovetails into save the children and therefore QAnon. So I think that the base of Q is becoming more diverse and kind of cutting across racial lines and generational lines in a way that makes it a real political force that needs to be reckoned with.
Podcast Support and Engagement Encouragement
00:41:39
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on the pod. Thanks for the piece. Again, it'll be linked in the show notes. Do you have anything to plug these days? If you have, if you do, now is the time to plug your pluggables. No, you can just come like my jokes on twitter.com at underscore satin return.
00:41:55
Speaker
Sweet. And if you like this podcast, you want to keep hearing more podcasts like this. One easy thing that you can do is to like us, rate our podcast, and subscribe. If you do all three of those things, I'll be very grateful. I will send you a thumbs up emoji on Facebook Messenger. If you Facebook Messenger the progress Alberta account, I will do that.
00:42:18
Speaker
Um, the other big thing you can do, uh, that's really helpful, um, is if you have the resources and you have the ability, if you want to join the 250 other folks who make a small monthly donation to keep this independent media project going, we'd be very grateful.
00:42:34
Speaker
The average donation is around $12, but if it's five, 10, 15, whatever you can spare, we'd really appreciate it. Also, you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, you can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communists for the amazing theme. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.
00:42:55
Speaker
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