Replay | Pizzagate: Are Democrats Harvesting Children's Blood? | Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy

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Speaker 12 You're listening to Comedy Central.

Speaker 8 Blood! It's everywhere. On Children at Halloween, in test tubes at the doctor's office, in the very title of the 2007 drama, There Will Be Blood.
And it's even inside you right now.

Speaker 8 Which means you're part of this story, so buckle up.

Speaker 8 This is Jordan Clepper Fingers the Conspiracy. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know a little bit about Pizzagate.
And we'll get into that shortly.

Speaker 8 But this extremely weird idea that pedophiles are using secret symbols is rooted in the belief that elitist cabals, it's always a cabal, are rounding up babies to steal their adrenaline by consuming their blood.

Speaker 8 There are Republicans in Congress who believe this. You might have also seen it in the Netflix show, The Watcher.

Speaker 8 It's a conspiracy theory that goes way back before Hillary Clinton and Comet Ping Pong and 2016. It goes back 900 years to when Joe Biden was born.

Speaker 8 Let's get into it, as Chris Cuomo would say. All right, let's bring in our own little blood cabal.
I have two guests today. First, we have Dr.

Speaker 8 Elise Wong, a professor at California State Fullerton, who studies conspiracy narratives going back to medieval England. Elise, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 13 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 8 Yes, and my next guest is Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and extensively covers the relationship between Fox News, Donald Trump, and Trump supporters.

Speaker 8 Matt, thank you for being here.

Speaker 12 Great to be here.

Speaker 8 Guys, you guys ready to talk cabals?

Speaker 13 So ready.

Speaker 8 It's always an elite cabal. It's always elite.
There's, yeah, is there any lower-level cabals of just like guys just trying to get through it who have like a high school education?

Speaker 8 It's always elite, right?

Speaker 13 Yes, that's the point.

Speaker 8 That's the point of cabals.

Speaker 13 If you're in a cabal and you have to calculate, it's no fun to be in a like mediocre cabal.

Speaker 12 State school of cabals. I mean, yeah.

Speaker 13 So, whoa with the state school thing.

Speaker 8 I think this podcast is going to start selling t-shirts that says state school cabal on it.

Speaker 8 There really is.

Speaker 8 It's always elite cabals and the Illuminati, also very elite. They need to be more encompassing.
We need to have our state school Illuminati and cabals. We'll sell the t-shirts.

Speaker 8 Go to daily show.com, everybody.

Speaker 13 I will wear that at my state school.

Speaker 8 Elise, I want to start with you. Let's break down adrenochrome because it feels like the base for a lot of theories we're going to dive into in this podcast.

Speaker 8 First of all, is adrenochrome technically real?

Speaker 13 It is. Actually, that's a good place to start.
It is actually a real thing. It's the oxidation of adrenaline, and this can happen naturally in your body or in a lab.

Speaker 13 It's actually really easy to come by. You can just buy it on the internet, like not the dark web internet, just the internet.

Speaker 13 I think it's something like 25 milligrams for 55 bucks, 58 bucks, something like that. I looked it up.

Speaker 13 So it's not used for anything, really. There's nothing the FDA has approved it for.
It's occasionally used for things like blood clotting.

Speaker 13 There was some interest in the 1960s for treating, using it to treat schizophrenia. but it really showed no promise.
So they dropped it.

Speaker 13 The history of the endogenogram we're talking about is is sort of, it goes back to,

Speaker 13 I think Aldous Huxley was the first one to talk about it as a drug. He talked about it in Doors of Perception.
And then Hunter S.

Speaker 13 Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is really the one who cemented the myth of adrenochrome as a drug because he turned it into this kind of immortality drug, this thing that you have to get from a live

Speaker 13 source. I think the line is, a corpse is no good, buddy.

Speaker 13 And And so that, and then the subsequent movie, they're like dramatized to the effects of adrenochrome.

Speaker 14 What is this shit? That stuff

Speaker 14 makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer, man. Ginger beer?

Speaker 14 Adrenochrome. Adrenochrome? Hmm.

Speaker 13 That's really where our modern perception of it as a drug comes from. So it's from these fictional sources.

Speaker 8 Are we saying it correctly? Adrenochrome?

Speaker 13 I mean, that's how they say it in the 1998 video.

Speaker 13 And if you go, I know you're not supposed to read it.

Speaker 8 The video, are we talking about the Terry Gilliam film? That's how Johnny pronounces it.

Speaker 13 Yes, that's

Speaker 8 where we're getting our information from.

Speaker 13 Yes, exactly. Well, that's where they're getting their information from.
Like, I know you're not supposed to go to the YouTube comments, but if you go to the YouTube comments on the scene,

Speaker 13 they are all about

Speaker 13 how this is real.

Speaker 8 Yes. Based on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I will say, for me, I love that book.
Top 10 book in my world. It's a great book, but that is sort of the central, the beginning.

Speaker 8 That and Huxley's book is where the first time we actually hear the term adrenochrome.

Speaker 13 He even said afterwards that he just wanted a quote-unquote crazy drug. And so he made it up.
And so he's drawing on Huxley and then like adding his own little stuff.

Speaker 13 And adrenochrome, the way it's become, it is, as you were saying, it connects to all of the different conspiracy theories because it's a grab bag of the greatest hits, right? It's got pedophilia.

Speaker 13 It's got satanic rituals, it's got blood rituals, immortality, like satanic panic and Hollywood elites. It's got everything.

Speaker 8 It's a good one. It is, yeah.
Let's add some context to it.

Speaker 8 In this world, the conspiracy theory is Hollywood liberal elites and Hillary Clinton are murdering children in ritual sacrifices, harvesting the...

Speaker 8 the chemical compound from human children, drinking their blood to ingest adrenochrome because it has some sort of elixir of life properties. Is that right?

Speaker 13 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 8 Okay. And you're telling me it may not be true.

Speaker 13 I mean,

Speaker 13 you should buy it on the internet and find out.

Speaker 8 It's at least worth at least worth a dabble. Matt, when did you first become aware of adrenochrome?

Speaker 12 I think probably around 2015, 2016,

Speaker 12 as part of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory posits that this

Speaker 12 cabal of global elites who

Speaker 12 are draining this chemical compound from small children and sexually abusing them is doing so in the basement of a Washington DC pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong.

Speaker 12 This idea spurred in some ways from emails from the John Podesta hack.

Speaker 12 during the 2016 election cycle. And I've been to the pizza pizza parlor and it doesn't have a basement that you can use to abuse children and take their bodily fluids.

Speaker 8 Did you ask? I mean, it goes one step beyond asking for a bathroom key because they'll happily give you a bathroom key, but you have to be a little pushy and be like, I need to use the restroom.

Speaker 8 I also would love access to the basement where the children are tied up and I can get the adrenochrome.

Speaker 8 Did you specifically ask?

Speaker 12 I think there probably was a time that that you could have done that. But as the conspiracy theorists seized on this,

Speaker 12 the pizza parlor started getting bombarded with phone calls from people who wanted to know more about the basement and the

Speaker 12 Pizzagate conspiracy theory. And eventually, one of the adherents to this conspiracy theory took a gun,

Speaker 12 went to the pizza parlor looking to save the children, fired it off inside,

Speaker 12 and was subsequently arrested and spent a couple of years in jail. So,

Speaker 12 you know, at that point, it becomes a little bit rude, I think, to ask the people who work at the pizza parlor.

Speaker 8 It became a, it had real consequences. And for, if, if, if this is somewhat new to anybody listening, the Podesta emails get, get hacked.

Speaker 8 WikiLeaks leak some Podesta emails and emails between Podesta and Hillary Clinton reference buying cheese pizza, right?

Speaker 12 I don't think it's him and Hillary Clinton, but it's

Speaker 12 some sort of email that references pizza that then became a sort of internet meme and

Speaker 12 brought into the broader conspiracy theory

Speaker 12 that Elise was talking about.

Speaker 8 Well, and cheese pizza becomes abbreviated to CP, which also stands for child pornography and comet pizza.

Speaker 8 And so they start to connect those links and comet pizza becomes the place to go in a nutshell, right?

Speaker 12 Yeah, that's that's about it.

Speaker 8 I on the road, I somewhat recently talked to somebody who was sort of discussing this

Speaker 8 theory, and it is amazing the symbols they see not only in the Comet Pizza

Speaker 8 background and the symbolism there, but I asked them, like, what do you need to look at? They're like, well, in the pizza chain, there's a lot of symbols that you have to stay focused on.

Speaker 8 I was like, what do these symbols look like? And they're like, well, they're predominantly circles and triangles.

Speaker 15 There's a huge push for normalizing pedophilia.

Speaker 8 How do they normalize it? Are they making pedophiles look cool?

Speaker 15 Well, if you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols. Really? Yes.

Speaker 15 They're like circular symbols.

Speaker 15 There's a lot of triangles. There's colors.
A lot of them are in pizza.

Speaker 8 Which, if you're at all into purchasing pizza, that tends to be all of the symbols you see at any kind of pizza chain.

Speaker 8 So from their perspective, they're holding a hammer and there's just nails everywhere.

Speaker 13 Well, I think watching Pizzagate happen and then from my end, watching the

Speaker 13 chat rooms and message boards and all of these things, both before and afterwards, there's that aspect of it, like the people who really get into the game of it.

Speaker 13 Like, let's find the numerology and all of the special symbols. And then there's the people who are actually mobilized around this.
And that's what really struck me about Pizzagate.

Speaker 13 It was the first time that I really saw this where you could see

Speaker 13 there was already this this theory about a pedophile ring being run by the clintons and it was kind of a theory in need of specifics and so they went out seeking specifics and they decided basically randomly that comet ping pong was going to be the place and then it started this sort of multimedia propaganda campaign where people they got people to call and harass as matt was saying um they got people to flood the Yelp reviews and the Google reviews and people to go and harass the proprietor.

Speaker 13 And then this sort of culminated in the guy who drove up from North Carolina to self-investigate.

Speaker 13 But that wasn't really the story. The story was that then people talked about it, that then it was in the national media for like 48 hours, like a whole week.

Speaker 13 And it was not only in the media, their theory was in the media. And I went back to the message boards afterwards, and they were just beside themselves with joy over this.

Speaker 13 Like, it was not, it was not a, it's not at all about, oh, our guy was arrested, whoops, or,

Speaker 13 huh, he didn't really seem to find anything.

Speaker 13 It was not about that. It was about the media exposure.

Speaker 13 And then there were... sort of further suggestions well how can we get them to keep denying it so they keep saying it so people keep Googling it? And

Speaker 13 when I was seeing that, I was like, oh,

Speaker 13 this is something else.

Speaker 13 This is a kind of savvy media campaign that I think most of us at that point were not totally familiar with. Now we know if you mention something, you have to be very careful what...

Speaker 13 what sort of buzzwords you mention because it will sort of feed the conspiracy theory monster.

Speaker 8 I'm curious in hearing that, what do you think the end goal was? How was that a success?

Speaker 8 Was it, you know, a lot of that online culture does, you know, traffic and trolling, and the successes of trolling often is large reaction.

Speaker 8 Is it that that made it the win? Is it the fact that their conversations became mainstream news that was the win?

Speaker 8 Is there still a connection to the veracity of this theory and that because it's being talked about, that that adds some credibility to it? Or is just we like shine and we got some shine?

Speaker 13 I think it's a lot of we like shine, but I do think that there there was the

Speaker 13 jubilation of being able to make the social media to mainstream media jump. And then I think it was a huge recruitment tool.

Speaker 13 I think people hearing the name would then go Google it and then would find their way to these message boards. So I think for them, the coup was really through recruitment.

Speaker 8 Matt, what did you notice, the coverage of Pizzagate? What did you first remember seeing it and

Speaker 8 who was first to jump on that?

Speaker 12 You know, I think I want to bring in Alex Jones here because I think he

Speaker 12 has played a key role in conspiracy theories for quite some time, but I think really made almost a sort of mainstream jump. during this conspiracy theory.

Speaker 12 He was one of the major propagators, one of the people with the biggest platforms who would talk about Pizzagate and try to encourage people to look into Pizzagate.

Speaker 12 You know, we had been following Alex Jones at Media Matters for quite some time,

Speaker 12 but we always,

Speaker 12 I think as Elise was alluding to, were very hesitant to bring too much direct attention to his conspiracy theories. for fear of just sort of bringing more attention to them.

Speaker 12 And so when we wrote about Alex Jones in 2010, 2011,

Speaker 12 we were largely writing about how other people were giving him

Speaker 12 their

Speaker 12 support. Fox News personalities who would go on his show, Rand Paul and Ron Paul, who would go on his show and use the platform of someone who

Speaker 12 is one of the chief popularizers of the idea that 9-11 is an inside job,

Speaker 12 sort of bringing him into political prominence.

Speaker 12 And Pizzagate, I think, was really a turning point because we saw that someone could use those conspiracy theories, could inflate them, and that there could be a big real-world impact

Speaker 12 when people who came to believe those conspiracy theories went too far. It was a, I think, pretty disturbing

Speaker 12 time for all of us

Speaker 12 when we saw that come together.

Speaker 8 I mean, as somebody both with the Daily Show and having done a TV show after that, you know, parroting the Alex Jones talking points and what was happening in that far-right world, that was always a conversation of at what point you don't want to amplify these wild ideas, but at the same time, turning a blind eye to something that's already having an effect on culture.

Speaker 8 It's already being amplified by legitimate politicians,

Speaker 8 even the Donald Trump,

Speaker 8 legitimizing the points of view there. Like you saw people taking what they would hear from InfoWars and the conversation around that.
And it was becoming very real-world news.

Speaker 8 I want to talk a little bit more about how some of these things spread, but I want to focus one more time on the adrenochrome specifically.

Speaker 8 Elise, I want to know if we trace back this specific theory, even the origins of adrenochrome, does it go back before Hunter Thompson? Does it go back before it becomes sort of pulp in modern culture?

Speaker 8 Is there a history that dates back

Speaker 8 even earlier?

Speaker 13 It definitely does. And the way that it dates back is a little bit of sort of associative thinking.
So conspiracy theories often work this way. They kind of jump onto things.

Speaker 13 They have a very lazy logic. They jump onto things that are already fully formed.

Speaker 13 One of the conspiracy theories that is attached to Adriena Chrome or that Adrienachrome is basically drawing on and modeling itself on is blood libel, which is a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 13 dating back to the Middle Ages that Jewish people

Speaker 13 drink or use the blood of Christian children for their religious rituals, specifically at Passover.

Speaker 12 For the record, we don't do that.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 8 Thank you, Matt. Thank you for talking to me.
Thank you for

Speaker 13 specifying that.

Speaker 13 And it's designed specifically to incite violence. Like, that is what blood libel is for.
So there's that kind of thematic connection.

Speaker 13 But then there's also the fact that the main purveyors of adrenochrome, like Alex Jones, like Liz Kroken, say that it's blood libel, say that it actually dates back to that.

Speaker 13 And if you look at these adrenochrome memes,

Speaker 13 one sort of popular one that goes around has this very obviously medieval image of a baby being drained of blood with people standing around it. And it says at the top, why does this image even exist?

Speaker 13 And the image is of Simon of Trent, which is the most famous and well-documented blood libel. And

Speaker 13 it's the this particular blood libel started Passover 1475.

Speaker 13 A father had come to the bishop of Trent and said, my two-year-old son Simon is missing. And this bishop already had a story ready to go.

Speaker 13 He decided it must be the Jewish community, the very small Jewish community in Trent. He had a couple of reasons for wanting this story to be true.

Speaker 13 One, he felt like the Pope was too soft on the Jewish people and that he was too cozy with them. So this was his little power grab in opposition to the Pope.

Speaker 13 And then also, if you had a saint, if he could prove that Simon was martyred by the Jews,

Speaker 13 if you had a saint in your town, that was a huge money-making opportunity. Like you could get people from all around to make pilgrimages to

Speaker 13 your little

Speaker 13 altar, and then you would make money basically off of like brand, um, brand building.

Speaker 13 And so

Speaker 8 it was like that brand building opportunity. I was like, there, that era's cheesecake factory.

Speaker 8 If you had a cheesecake factory in town, you know you're going to get people from the suburbs who are going to come in, they're going to pay some money, it's going to help the town.

Speaker 13 That's the thing. And he wanted to kind of put Trent on the map.

Speaker 13 And so even before they start any kind of trial or anything, they round up the Jewish community, the entire Jewish community, and imprison them.

Speaker 13 And he hires a physician to write this very inflammatory autopsy that talks less about Simon's body and more about the, I think the phrase is dry-throated Jews howling for Christian blood, like this really over-the-top kind of autopsy.

Speaker 13 And then he takes this autopsy.

Speaker 8 That was the doctor? That was the

Speaker 8 doctor.

Speaker 8 That's some really high-end literary anti-Semitism. Yep.

Speaker 13 And well, it gets more high-end because then he takes this and he sends it around to poets and to artists and is like, make stuff from this. And they do.

Speaker 13 Like the poets start writing poems about Simon of Trent and the woodcutters start making images.

Speaker 13 And that's the image that shows up in that adrenochrome meme is this sort of propaganda campaign by this. Italian bishop who decided he really wanted his own little ritual cult.

Speaker 8 Those

Speaker 8 woodcutters,

Speaker 8 they just will take money whoever puts it out. Where is the artistic integrity in 15th century woodcutters?

Speaker 8 I hold them in such high regard. I love them.
I think it's the best century for woodcutters.

Speaker 8 And yet, they are so willing to turn a blind eye to the social responsibility of being a woodcutter in that time. They're taking dirty money to put out anti-Semitic propaganda.
Shame, shame on that.

Speaker 8 I'm never buying 15th century woodcutter art again.

Speaker 8 Shame.

Speaker 13 I feel like the parts of this that are really useful, though, is kind of, it's kind of that, that like, it was the propaganda campaign that really made this take off.

Speaker 13 It wasn't like this was kind of a grassroots rumor that was rooted in sort of general anti-Semitism. I mean, that's why it took off, was sort of latching onto generalized anti-Semitism.

Speaker 13 But the actual formation of the blood libel was very intentionally crafted for a political end by someone who was powerful.

Speaker 8 I had never heard of that. I think it's so easy to

Speaker 8 look at

Speaker 8 those in power and also the

Speaker 8 religious heresy at the time and the institutions at the time and the points of view they wanted to get out. But the fact that they were using artists to spread that message to affect culture.

Speaker 8 I mean, you see obvious comparisons to what happens today, but that even then it was still important. You want this thing to stick.

Speaker 8 culture needs to stick and the fact that we're using those images yet today as proof of what hillary clinton is doing is is bonkers well i'm going to take a short ad break when we come back we're going to talk more about how adrenochrome spread as an idea even before the internet was even around we'll be right back

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Speaker 8 Welcome back to Jordan's Upper Fingers, The Conspiracy.

Speaker 13 I mean,

Speaker 13 I didn't actually plan to work on conspiracy theories. Like, I'm a medievalist.
I'm like a huge nerd.

Speaker 8 I like books. And

Speaker 13 this was not the way I saw my studies going.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 8 here we are.

Speaker 8 It just, you basically stumbled on it and we're like, here we go. Also,

Speaker 8 is that something was in the ether,

Speaker 8 the modern ether that you saw a connection between the two?

Speaker 13 Yeah, it was basically in 2015. I started, I mean, like all of us, I think I was a little bit concerned and uneasy about the fake news phenomenon.

Speaker 13 And in particular, this epistemology aspect, this, you can't trust anything that you see.

Speaker 13 And I started hearing echoes with the stuff that I study.

Speaker 13 speech patterns like

Speaker 13 that's what they want you to think do your own research um

Speaker 13 I've heard or people are saying these kinds of gestures towards sources. I started seeing those things.
I was like, uh-oh, that doesn't, that doesn't sound good. That sounds familiar and not good.

Speaker 13 And I just sort of started following that.

Speaker 13 And now my autocorrect knows Adrenochrome.

Speaker 8 So here we are.

Speaker 8 In the case of these historical conspiracy theories and the beginnings of blood libel, how do you see these theories spread before modern news and communication and memes and 4chan and 8chan and parlor and true social and should I keep going?

Speaker 8 I'm not going to keep going.

Speaker 13 Well, they spread remarkably well.

Speaker 13 I think that the essential shape of blood libel was a very compelling shape. It was, you know,

Speaker 13 there are evil forces that are out to get Christian children. And there was also the fact that it was pretty common for medieval children to die in accidents or disappear or fall into a river.

Speaker 13 Like child death was quite common. And so it became kind of a predictable thing that if a child died in a Christian community, that pretty soon suspicion would fall on the Jewish community.
And

Speaker 13 it did spread by word of mouth, but it also spread by all of these sort of cultural productions. It spread by these woodcuts, it spread by

Speaker 13 these poems that were written in honor of Simon. And it also spread because these stories got baked into the official histories.

Speaker 13 These historians think of themselves as, you know, responsible, reliable,

Speaker 13 and they go back to the local histories and they just sort of draw from whatever the local history is. And so these blood libels get baked into

Speaker 13 sort of accepted history as fact. And then anyone who reads that will, that will be their primary

Speaker 13 interaction, basically, with the Jewish community for a lot of places because these pogroms have already taken place. Magda Tater has done a really great job.

Speaker 13 She studies blood libel, and she's done a really great job of showing how, actually, before the printing press,

Speaker 13 word of mouth didn't work that great. It really needed to be written down.
And that also shows that it was mostly educated people, mostly higher-class people who were spreading blood libel.

Speaker 13 It wasn't a low-class theory.

Speaker 13 It was a kind of upper-class theory.

Speaker 8 And that's interesting. And I mean, mean, there's a great book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that talks a lot about how the mediums affect the message.

Speaker 8 The invention of the printing press affected not only the way information was spread, but the way we think about information, the way we process information. And then you suddenly have television.

Speaker 8 come out and out the way in which we communicate and the way we process information is very different than the way we used to with the printing press.

Speaker 8 I think it's fascinating to think of that in terms of like who is spreading information and that it was

Speaker 8 an elitist thing. You had to be able to speak that language then.
But now that we see information changing, the technology changing, Matt, I want to bring you in here.

Speaker 8 How are you seeing conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and other Q theories spread given the new technology that we have?

Speaker 12 Well, the core benefit that social media companies will say that they provide to their customers and that internet companies say they provide to their customers is the idea of bringing the world together, giving people an opportunity to find communities, to communicate with people across the globe and to sort of find a common purpose together.

Speaker 12 And I mean, there's a dark side to that. It also has made it much, much easier to find a community of conspiracy theorists, to share your ideas about the

Speaker 12 dark hidden messages in the world's events

Speaker 12 to share your views about the Illuminati or whoever else is manipulating what's going on around you.

Speaker 12 And that's just an incredibly powerful force. The barrier to entry for producing one of these conspiracy theories is much lower.
You don't, you know,

Speaker 12 the JFK conspiracy theories,

Speaker 12 you know, you had to like write letters to people later on as Xeroxes and faxes and so on and so forth.

Speaker 8 It's just very lazy now. How lazy conspiracy theorists are now.
Can you imagine if you had to write letters to spread just some BS you read on Twitter? You're like, oh, I want to put that out.

Speaker 8 Elon Musk, he would not be pushing conspiracy theories if he had to write a letter to get that thing going. Do you also look at places like Fox?

Speaker 8 Like, you know, we look at what's happening with social media, but more of the mainstream media outlets. How are you seeing that affect this

Speaker 8 conversation, specifically with something like Pizzagate?

Speaker 12 Sure. So, I mean, the reality is that we live in a bifurcated news environment.

Speaker 12 There is one set of sources of information that is generally used by people in the left and the center, just sort of mainstream news outlets.

Speaker 12 And then you have this entirely separate

Speaker 12 realm of right-wing media outlets that speak very clearly and directly to a right-wing audience.

Speaker 12 You know, the way we see conspiracy theories moving these days is they'll start at this sort of

Speaker 12 message board and social media platform level with a sort of army of individuals who are coming up with their own spin on what's happening on a particular event.

Speaker 12 It will spread from there through a network of hyper-partisan news sites, places like Gateway Pundit, that do not have standards of any sort, that are not interested in the basic rules of journalism, but that want to have political impact and make money off of advertising.

Speaker 12 And from there, you can see them sort of

Speaker 12 get woven into the broader debate. You know, the reality is that the right-wing media figures at the sort of higher level, your Fox Newses,

Speaker 12 are not interested in batting down those sorts of conspiracies. They're not interested in challenging their audiences and telling them that what they might have heard is incorrect.

Speaker 12 Instead, you'll see either them ignoring it altogether or providing a sort of wink and a nod at the conspiracy theory or telling their viewers that it's okay, more or less, that like that there are reasons to be skeptical of things that are happening around you, that

Speaker 12 the elites want to keep you from talking about QAnon or what have you,

Speaker 12 and that

Speaker 12 whether or not that's true, it's not a danger the way

Speaker 12 other people will tell you.

Speaker 8 I mean, if this is an issue with right-wing media, they have this weird rhetoric that is politicizing children in the name of protecting them.

Speaker 8 Anything from disturbing conspiracy theories to don't say gay bills, anti-trans bills, et cetera. Do you see a connection there?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these conspiracy theories get rolled up together. There was a big push over the last year and a half

Speaker 12 or so on the right, you know, throughout the entire ecosystem to talk about the idea of groomers of save the children. Save the children, absolutely.

Speaker 12 Basically, that teachers are trying to turn your kids gay, turn your kids trans,

Speaker 12 possibly molest them. It all kind of gets wound up together.
There aren't really firm barriers to a lot of these conspiracy theories.

Speaker 12 People who start to believe one of them tend to start adopting others as well.

Speaker 8 Elise, historically, has there ever been a way to get people to stop believing? conspiracy theories?

Speaker 13 I mean, it's a complicated question, right? It depends on who you're talking about.

Speaker 13 Like, I don't, Johannes Vint Hinderbach, the bishop of Trent, I don't know that he actually believed that Simon was killed by the Jews. That was sort of

Speaker 13 beside the point. I think he believed that Jewish people are evil and he wanted to drive them out, and this was a convenient way to do it, plus a bunch of other political benefits.

Speaker 13 I don't know that he actually believed it.

Speaker 13 So if you're talking about these sort of

Speaker 13 cynical purveyors of it who use it for radicalization and use it for their own sort of economic and political gain.

Speaker 13 I think you just have to take away the gain. And then, like, that will, that will kind of kill it.

Speaker 13 For everybody else, I think it is a complicated question because the thing about conspiracy theories is they're not about the details. They're not about the story.

Speaker 13 They're, I mean, I feel like your segments, Jordan, have really shown this well. As soon as you ask them a question, like, that's the end.

Speaker 13 Like, there's, it doesn't go anywhere. You can't actually have a conversation about conspiracy theories.

Speaker 13 I don't even think that conspiracy theorists could have a conversation with each other about it because it's fundamentally not discursive. It's not something you can have a discussion about.

Speaker 13 It is just an attempt to make this sort of core story about yourself match up with the world. And every conspiracy theory has this same core story, and that's why it's so powerful.

Speaker 13 It's the story that the theorist holds on to and then sort of tries to match up with the world in a kind of messy way. The story is basically, once upon a time,

Speaker 13 we were

Speaker 13 happy and everything was good and we were in charge and we were safe. And then the monsters took hold, but no one knew that they had.

Speaker 13 And these monsters are not of the sort of vaguely threatening variety. They have to be absolutely gigantic, demonic, sort of the most hyperbolic thing you can think of, go another step.

Speaker 13 So it's always children, Satan, mutilation and torture, pedophilia.

Speaker 13 And the story goes that everything seemed fine because the monsters made sure this was all kept secret. So the monsters control what you know.

Speaker 13 And only the heroes of the story knew the truth and then they arrived to save the world.

Speaker 13 And that's the benefit that you get from it. You get that worldview about yourself, that you are a continuously

Speaker 13 just sort of horrifically embattled hero of the story. And you can't really give up on this self, like this self-image of embattled heroism.
It's very difficult to give up on.

Speaker 13 It's not just the high of thinking of yourself as a hero. It's also that you...

Speaker 13 convince yourself that you are in this battle of absolute good and absolute evil. And so then you get to issues of like, if you ask about democracy or fair play, what are you nuts?

Speaker 13 Like, this is about, this is about the end of the world.

Speaker 13 So it makes it impossible to sort of dial back to

Speaker 13 issues of fairness or accuracy. It's actually not about that.

Speaker 13 And I feel like you can kind of hear that when you're talking to these QAnon followers, when they try to answer your questions, they aren't actually trying to say, like, you say, so what did actually happen in January 6th?

Speaker 13 They'll They'll say FBI, CIA, Clinton, just sort of a grab bag. But what they're actually trying to tell you is this story, that the monsters are out to get us, and I'm trying to save us.

Speaker 13 There's kind of no other point to it. That's the whole ballgame.

Speaker 12 And when the monsters, when there's a partisan overlay on that, when the monsters are one party and the people who are trying to save you are Donald Trump, I mean, there's no room for debate at that point, right?

Speaker 12 Like there's no room to talk about it's important to respect

Speaker 12 electoral defeats, right? Because if the people who you are losing elections to are

Speaker 12 monsters who are abusing children, then you have a moral responsibility to go try to subvert those election results.

Speaker 13 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And the resistance is kind of like baked into the story, because the story is that the monsters came and took over and they kept it, they covered it up.

Speaker 13 They kept everybody from knowing.

Speaker 13 so any information that you get in from the outside is suspect even even information that you might get from sympathetic sources so the only thing then you're left with is kind of like going with your gut and what feels true it feels true that i am a victim and it feels true that i'm the hero of the story and so let's just go with that so you're telling me i shouldn't read this story to my son every night before going to bed he loves it it's it's the it's a dark eric Carl story, but I like it so much better than that Hungry Caterpillar.

Speaker 13 You might be unhappy with the results of raising your child this way.

Speaker 8 I tell you, all of his peers are reading it. They seem to really be into it.
That hero's journey.

Speaker 8 After the break, we're going to talk about how the adrenochrome conspiracy theory is related to the attack at Nancy Pelosi's house. It seriously is.
This is Jordan Clepper Figures the Conspiracy.

Speaker 8 We'll be right back.

Speaker 8 Welcome back to Jordan Clepper Figures the Conspiracy. I'm here with Dr.
Elise Wong and Matt Gertz, two experts who follow conspiracy theories.

Speaker 8 And we're talking about Adrenochrome, how Democrats are drinking baby's blood, allegedly, allegedly, and what that means for American politics.

Speaker 8 Now, recently, Nancy Pelosi's house was broken into by a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He was looking for Pelosi and ended up attacking her husband with a hammer.

Speaker 8 But Matt, you've written about how the conspiracy theories this attacker specifically believed and how he was radicalized in the ecosystem of right-wing misinformation. How does this all connect?

Speaker 12 Well, the alleged assailant

Speaker 12 had a substantial internet paper trail.

Speaker 12 He had a couple of blogs, various other social media platforms, and what he posted on those

Speaker 12 sites was very much the kind of textbook

Speaker 12 online right-wing conspiracy theory radicalization pattern that we've been seeing for years now.

Speaker 12 His social media and blogs are filled with references to QAnon, to Adriena Chrome, to Pizzagate, to Gamergate, as well as a sort of grab bag of bigotries related to black people and women and Jews

Speaker 12 and gay people and trans people.

Speaker 8 It's a grab bag. Yeah, no,

Speaker 12 it's the greatest hits. Honestly, I spent some time looking through these websites on Friday and I was like, oh, it's just, it's all of it.
From there, and this happened very, very quickly,

Speaker 12 you did not see people on the right saying, oh my God,

Speaker 12 the

Speaker 12 things that people on the right are saying are

Speaker 12 leading to political violence.

Speaker 12 Instead, a story about political violence committed by someone who believed right-wing conspiracy theories about how Democrats are depraved

Speaker 12 was turned into another right-wing conspiracy theory about how Democrats are depraved.

Speaker 12 The story that developed over the following hours was that the assailant had not broken into the house, but in fact he had been invited in by Paul Pelosi because they were gay lovers,

Speaker 12 and that the violent attack on Pelosi was, in fact, some sort of gay lovers spat.

Speaker 12 That's what they came up with, and that spread remarkably quickly, as it tends to do through this right-wing information ecosystem

Speaker 12 until you had Elon Musk tweeting out a link to a sort of hyper-partisan fake news website on Sunday morning. So it was, you know, 72 hours, 48 hours

Speaker 12 from the assault becoming known to the conspiracy theory reaching the wealthiest man on earth.

Speaker 8 Elise, something like this pops up. Is this how you imagine it playing out this quickly and evolving or devolving in this similar manner?

Speaker 13 Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me. I do think the speed is different from sort of the history that I study, but the manner in which things spread is really not.

Speaker 13 And I think a few things are key that the platform matters. It depends on who is picking this up and who is running with it.

Speaker 13 And then there's also a durability to conspiracy theories that because they have this sort of epistemological challenge built into them, by that I mean they challenge how you know what you know.

Speaker 13 And they say these things that you think you know, you don't know, but it doesn't replace it with anything. So it's just sort of epistemic destabilization.
So you just don't have anything to stand on.

Speaker 13 And that creates an environment in which conspiracy theories really thrive. Because

Speaker 13 once you can't trust anything, then the only thing you can trust is your own sense of the story that you like or the one that sounds good to you.

Speaker 13 This was definitely true in sort of the medieval and early modern period of blood libel. There were often people who

Speaker 13 powerful people who opposed blood libel.

Speaker 13 for Simon X the reason why we have so many documents on it is the Pope tried to intervene in this he tried to put a stop to it and then the very first blood libel in the 12th century this was a boy named William of Norwich the Norwich sheriff actually got involved and protected the Jewish community so there's always been pushback from kind of mainstream sources and yet these conspiracy theories just thrive if there's already a a kind of destabilized trust in the regular sources of knowledge.

Speaker 13 So I think the modern speed, that is new,

Speaker 13 how quickly that happens. But you would have a blood libel come out and the next week all of the Jews in town would be arrested and tortured.
And

Speaker 13 it was pretty fast. It happened pretty fast.

Speaker 8 Well, we mentioned the platform here. And Matt, you brought up Elon Musk in the tweet that he had, adding to this confusion.

Speaker 8 He referenced a website that claimed Hillary Clinton died in 2016 and was replaced with a clone. So what does this say now

Speaker 8 in this new era of Elon's Twitter? What is that going to do to these conversations?

Speaker 12 I mean, I think it's going to continue to accelerate them. I think there has been

Speaker 12 some effort by the social media platforms some of the time to try to rein in the most extreme and dangerous forms of misinformation.

Speaker 12 It's been haphazard, it's been imperfect, but Elon Musk's Twitter is going to do is kind of toss that aside.

Speaker 12 He himself is quite obviously a bit of a conspiracy theorist, someone who has, you know, accused people of being pedos.

Speaker 12 That's just sort of

Speaker 12 sort of his wheelhouse, so to speak.

Speaker 12 And it's difficult to imagine Twitter being interested in throttling conspiracy theories that its own owner is spreading. That's just not going to happen.

Speaker 12 And so, you know, I think that platform is going to become less stable. It's going to become a less valuable source for credible information because of that.

Speaker 8 Elise, I'm curious, can you talk about the progression of belief into action? Like, what takes somebody from Pizzagate to an actual act of political violence in 2022?

Speaker 13 I mean,

Speaker 13 this is what scholars of radicalization study, right?

Speaker 13 How do you come from an idea into actual action? Radicalization online is part of the story. It's not the whole story, but it certainly

Speaker 13 directs your any sort of anger or dissatisfaction you already have, it validates it and it amps it up and it focuses it on a target.

Speaker 13 So it's a little bit like pointing a loaded gun at a specific target. And can I go back to the Elon thing for just a sec? Yes, please.

Speaker 13 The whole verification thing really struck me because I think,

Speaker 13 you know, it's clear the money of it doesn't actually matter. Like he's like $20, $8, whatever to sell verification, right? That's his new thing.
He's going to sell verification on Twitter.

Speaker 13 What really struck me is that this is not an attempt to get the money, it's an attempt to devalue verification in general.

Speaker 13 Because verification is meant to show you which sources are trustworthy, right?

Speaker 13 It was meant to sort of identify members of the media and corporations, and so that you knew that it was actually coming from that source and you knew that you could trust it.

Speaker 13 It was not a sort of celebrity thing originally. That was not the purpose of verification.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 by turning it into something that you can buy, it just completely devalues verification. And it gets rid of that layer of validation so that you know what you can trust, which sources you can trust.

Speaker 13 It gets rid of that sort of, you know, it's destabilizing the way we know what we know. And that seems to me to be the point of the whole verification thing.

Speaker 12 Aaron Powell, Jr.: In fact, because Musk is so polarizing, we could see a situation where his supporters who are largely on the right are much more willing to actually shell out the money

Speaker 12 than

Speaker 12 more credible mainstream journalists are.

Speaker 12 Those less credible sources will get sort of algorithmically accelerated more than everybody else and become a bigger part of the conversation.

Speaker 8 I'm curious what advice you would have to consumers, specifically of Twitter. I think a lot of people are looking at this.

Speaker 8 They see these issues, see the problem, and are asking themselves the question, do I divorce myself from this platform?

Speaker 8 I don't know if the answer is to step away from it and not be a part of the conversation or understand the conversation, but are you complicit in what is becoming a less and less trustworthy place?

Speaker 12 So I think part of the issue here is I don't really view it as a place for conversation.

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 12 I use it.

Speaker 8 Queen at me, Matter. I've got a lot of interesting things.
It's like, come at me. We'll go back and forth.
It's fun. We'll be playful.
I got some gifts. I'll send you away.
It's a really fun chat.

Speaker 12 The way I use Twitter, I use it as a broadcast medium, right? It's a way for me to get my views and my work out into the public. It's a way for me to hear views from

Speaker 12 people who might have interesting ideas or thoughts.

Speaker 12 But I don't do that much interaction with it because I think it's actually a really bad medium for having debates of any kind.

Speaker 12 If I want to have a conversation with someone, I will try to follow up with them and start an email conversation or phone or what have you.

Speaker 12 It's hard to have a substantive discussion with the rest of the world trying to involve itself in that. I will use Twitter less if that becomes less feasible.
If I think that

Speaker 12 my

Speaker 12 tweets aren't getting read or if I think that I am not able to easily find credible information that I want to be reading,

Speaker 12 that's when the value proposition will fall to basically nothing.

Speaker 13 I feel like this is where our disciplines come into play because you're in media, I'm in medieval studies. So I have a very,

Speaker 13 my following, what you will be shocked to hear is tiny.

Speaker 13 I'm also locked. So I really just use it for conversation.
Like I really just use it to connect with other people in my field or who study the same things that I do. And I think one of the really

Speaker 13 one of the reasons a lot of people are mourning this is it has been an incredible tool for people to connect

Speaker 13 within their own tiny little subfield. Like I feel more connected to other medievalists of color on Twitter because we have kind of created our own little ecosystem than anywhere else.

Speaker 13 And I wouldn't get that anywhere else. I would miss it for that.
And obviously, if, again, if like you said, if that becomes impossible, then

Speaker 13 like I'm not going to use it anymore. But

Speaker 13 I also think this whole question of, so do you stay, do you go? Do you pay the $8, $20, whatever it ends up being, I feel like that's a very American question.

Speaker 13 Like, how can we make this the individual responsibility to decide what to do?

Speaker 13 This is the

Speaker 13 robber baron has screwed up the system and now we are responsible for fixing it. And, you know, my recycling or not recycling my water bottle is really what's leading to climate change.

Speaker 13 Like that's, that's really, that's really the thing. The sort of individual responsibility for these things.
And I think that's kind of what gets us into trouble with conspiracy theories.

Speaker 13 to begin with, right? Do your own research. Find out for yourself.
The thing is with huge platforms and huge areas of knowledge, you just can't do it yourself.

Speaker 13 I mean, as we all discovered in the pandemic when we all became amateur epidemiologists, right? We're not very good at this. I don't remember high school biology very well.
I'm not

Speaker 13 going to be good at making choices, personal choices about my own level of risk and my kids' level of risk. And, you know, I am not a good person to put that decision on.

Speaker 13 And that's kind of how we've offloaded it. And so I feel like that's maybe not, I know that it's sort of going to be personally difficult for a lot of people to figure out what to do about Twitter.

Speaker 13 But I don't really feel like that's where the change comes from.

Speaker 8 I want to wrap this up kind of looking specifically at what happened with Nancy Pelosi's husband and what we've sort of been discussing here, but sort of to zoom out as well.

Speaker 8 how do politicians like nancy pelosi

Speaker 8 try and convince people that they don't partake in ritual children sacrifices

Speaker 8 at a rally weeks ago and a man was convinced that nancy pelosi is a vampire and drinks children's blood he was convinced I followed up and I asked, you said literally. Did you mean literally?

Speaker 8 He said, literally. You see Republicans on one side and the devil on the other.
Are we talking metaphorical devil? Like, oh, they do bad stuff? No, literally, you know, vampire drinking blood.

Speaker 8 I don't want to nitpick here, but vampires tend to be eternally youthful. And I look at Nancy Pelosi and she's a lot of things, but I guess I don't think vampire.

Speaker 8 Somebody in her party definitely drinks blood. How does someone like that attempt to knock down this issue?

Speaker 8 And with those difficulties, what does that say about where we're at politically if we struggle to to even do that? Matt?

Speaker 12 I don't know, honestly. I mean, it's very difficult to

Speaker 12 reach someone who believes that you drink the blood of children.

Speaker 12 I think that it's just a hard problem. And so we end up talking around it, right? We end up talking about what are the ways that policy can weaken the structures that are in place that

Speaker 12 allow these conspiracy theories to flourish.

Speaker 12 Because, as Elise says, these conspiracy theories have always been with us, but it has become easier

Speaker 12 for them to propagate and easier for people to come to accept them. And I think that's really

Speaker 12 the available channel.

Speaker 8 Elise,

Speaker 8 is there any advice you have for Nancy Pelosi or anybody else who looks at this, is pulling out their hair, just attempting to

Speaker 8 try to knock down what seems like to be the inconceivable?

Speaker 13 I mean, I think there's sort of the the media answer and then there's the personal answer about approaching this person personally.

Speaker 13 So the media answer, like I don't, I'm not a media expert, and so I wouldn't know exactly how to do this. But I think that

Speaker 13 platforms really are the key, the platforms that we give people to propagate these ideas.

Speaker 13 I think that, you know, when Alex Jones got involved, things really took off. And when Alex Jones was taken off of Twitter and sort of deplatformed from a bunch of places,

Speaker 13 his influence really did die down for a little while. Like it actually had an influence.

Speaker 13 And I think deplatforming and treating social media as the sort of communities that they are and the news sites that they are and having even stricter standards for them than we do for

Speaker 13 sort of in-person conduct, I think is

Speaker 13 not going to happen. But that would be my suggestion for the media side of things.
I think you have to control the

Speaker 13 amplification of these conspiracy theories. And there's also just sort of the larger problem of

Speaker 13 society-wide radicalization. And

Speaker 13 that is a bigger question than just conspiracy theories.

Speaker 13 The only people who can really get to people who are deep into it are those who are already intimate with these people, who are already friends with these people, who already have some other form of connection with them.

Speaker 13 You're not going to get through to them.

Speaker 8 That's not, sorry.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 I know.

Speaker 8 That's on you, family.

Speaker 8 Family out there. Talk to those you love.
I mean, you also speak to something there.

Speaker 8 There's the intimate relationship people have with their computers when they're alone in their room and that person, that interesting video.

Speaker 13 It's like a parasocial relationship. Yep.

Speaker 8 Yeah, exactly. And I see going to these rallies.
This myth of American exceptionalism, we talk with such rhetoric of everybody on their own hero's journey.

Speaker 8 And I will say a lot of those MAGA rallies, you talk about all the problems in the world and then somebody gets on stage and they says, you're a patriot, you can be a hero, you can do this.

Speaker 8 Yeah, well, guys, this has been lovely. Elise Wong, Matt Gertz,

Speaker 8 I leave this conversation energized as if I've sucked on the blood of a child.

Speaker 8 Thank you. That's all I could ask for.

Speaker 8 I appreciate your insight and your thoughts. Thank you, guys.

Speaker 8 Thanks for having me. Thank you.

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