4.7 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
This episode was originally released on August 18, 2022. In this encore presentation, host Reed Galen is joined by author, journalist, and QAnon expert Mike Rothschild to discuss how the QAnon conspiracy theory grew to be in the forefront of American political discourse, why it resonated so fervently with such a large percentage of the population, and how it continues to infect our nation’s culture today. Plus, is there a prescription to get the QAnon devout to “snap out of it” and denounce the conspiracy? For more on this, be sure to pick up Mike Rothschild’s latest book, The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, now available in paperback.
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0:00.0 | Hey gang, it's Reid. Before we get going, I just want to say thanks again to everybody for your hard work this year and for listening. |
0:06.8 | And I hope that everybody gets a chance to spend time with friends and family and take a little bit of time to reflect on what we were able to accomplish this year. |
0:15.2 | And what we have to get done in the coming two years. I know that we'll do it together and I cannot say thank you enough. |
0:21.8 | And now on with the show. Welcome back to the Lincoln project. I'm your host, Reid Gaelin. Today I'm joined by Mike Rothschild, a journalist, author and the foremost expert in this ever changing world that is the QAnon conspiracy there. |
0:44.6 | He is a contributing writer for the Daily Dot and has appeared as a fringe belief expert for a variety of outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR and Vice. |
0:55.8 | His latest book, The Storm is Upon Us, How QAnon became a movement cult and conspiracy theory of everything is out in paperback this week and available wherever find books are sold. |
1:06.6 | Today he's coming to us from Pasadena, California. Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. |
1:12.8 | All right, so last year Mike I read a book about cyber warfare called This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends and that book scared me. |
1:22.4 | But as I told the author of that book, Nicole Pearl Roth, and I'll tell you this, this book does not belong in current affairs or politics it belongs in horror because there's a lot of stuff going on in here that is frightening. |
1:37.6 | But also how quickly these things spread and across the types of people that you would think should know better. |
1:46.2 | In a time where every bit of human knowledge ever invented, creative collected is literally available in a six ounce piece of metal glass and plastic in your hand. |
1:58.4 | That things like QAnon are still so powerful and there are so many people willing to be receptive to what it stands for and what it's trying to get across to them. |
2:09.6 | Yeah, one of the things that we were told early on about the internet is that we would all have access to the library of Alexandria in our pocket. |
2:17.8 | And as it turns out, the library of Alexandria is a porno magazine rack at a truck stop. Well, you have to laugh about this stuff because otherwise you would never stop throwing up. |
2:29.0 | So yeah, the internet has put ideas in front of us and made these things extremely accessible when the ideas have always been there. |
2:39.2 | We are not more conspiratorial as people, you know, polling shows that about the same number of people believe classic conspiracy theories, as you know, back then as they do now. |
2:49.2 | But what we have now is the means not only to find any conspiracy theory that dovetails with our own personal beliefs, but to find other people who also believe these conspiracy theories. |
3:01.8 | These used to be very isolated, siloed people. They were people who you didn't want around. They weren't in polite society. You shunned them. They were on street corners. |
3:12.0 | Now they have their own communities. They have their own meetups. They have their own conventions and they find each other as these beacons in the darkness. |
3:20.4 | And the rest of us are left going, how did this happen? And why did these people believe this stuff? |
3:26.0 | All right, so then my theory is actually 180 degrees in the wrong direction, which is knowledge has never imparted wisdom or the access to it. |
3:34.4 | But the ability for information to move instantaneously actually makes these things far more available to far more people far more quickly. |
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