This is the reason interview with Nickillespie.

Thank you for listening.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp online therapy.

That's Better Help, H-E-L-P.

More on them later in the show.

So I don't know about you, but most of the people I know went nuts.

Little nuts or a lot nuts

during the COVID lockdowns. Absolutely true that many of us, or, you know, many of our

country's leaders and people in the media went absolutely bat-shit crazy, often to disastrous ends.

Exactly why that happened, why the flip-out, the freak out, the, you know, just bubbling over

of bizarre conspiracy theories, of overreaction, of panic, of hate, of contempt, of all kinds of

social contagions. Why that happened is the subject of

author John Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast series that explores

the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades

ago that we've mostly forgotten about.

So he's my guest today, and I talked with Ronson, for instance, about why he believes

the creation of a fake medical condition called Excited Delirium back in 1988 in Miami in a case

by a medical examiner who was tracking down serial killers, ultimately led to

the death of George Floyd in 2020. We talk about the episode where he discusses how law enforcement

fixations on militias and white supremacy completely warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan

Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We also talked about how the director of the massively influential

plandemic documentaries, there's three of them, was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.

...