Hey, everyone, Mary Harris here. Before I press play on the episode today, I just wanted to say,

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All right, on with the show.

For the last few weeks, Ruth Graham,

she is a reporter over at the New York Times,

has been logging on to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, to eavesdrop.

Ruth reports on religion.

She was interested in QAnon at first.

And then it turned out that there were all kinds of interesting conversations happening there.

It's just a much more freewheeling space, I guess you could say.

It's hard for Ruth to describe what she's hearing.

Is it religious chatter, political?

You know, on some of these topics, it is so hard to disentangle the political from the religious.

I would say it was political conversations that were completely woven through with faith.

So people sharing prayer requests, but then the content would be political, praying for Trump, praying for Trump's return.

And then also people sharing a lot of personal

anecdotes, you know, feeling like it's a quasi-private space. Lately, these personal anecdotes have

started focusing on one topic in particular, whether your job can require you to get a COVID

...