Yes, we are at war. Very definitely we have been at war. It's an economic war. It's a war of subversion. It's a war of espionage. It's a war of ideas. And it's a war of terrorism and infiltration.

Is it as serious a war as it would be if there was an exchange of nuclear weapons?

No, it's a type of war we're in is far more sophisticated than an exchange of gunfire or nuclear weapons because it's a war of attack upon institutions. It's a war of attack upon every segment of a society. It is total war.

That was Larry McDonald, the Democratic Congressman from Georgia back in 1982. Speaking about the menace to America from communist subversives and their allies inside the US government.

A threat so grave he called it total war.

McDonald is barely remembered today. He died the next year on a Korean airline flight that was shot down by the Soviets when it mistakenly crossed into Russian territory.

But the views of McDonald who served as national chairman of the John Birch Society, eerily anticipated some of those held by the QAnon movement currently plaguing the American political dialogue.

Like the QAnon cultists McDonald saw conspiracies everywhere. Like QAnon he saw shady and disloyal operatives embedded inside the country's intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

And like Q, the anonymous top secret insiders supposedly seeking to reveal this grave plot against America, McDonald nearly 40 years ago vowed to expose the vast conspiracy, even creating his own private intelligence service to do so.

We'll talk to Zach Dwarfman of the Aspen Institute. We wrote a groundbreaking article about Larry McDonald and the striking parallels to our current conspiratorial culture on this special bonus episode of conspiracy land brought to you by Skull Duggery.

Because people have got to know whether or not they're presidents of crook, well I'm not a crook.

I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostage. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

There will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth and nothing else.

I'm Michael Isgoff, Chief Investigator correspondent for Yahoo News.

And I'm Dan Clyde, Minister and Chief of Yahoo News.

So we have spent a lot of time on conspiracy land and Skull Duggery talking about QAnon and its bizarre views about the deep state plot involving pedophiles and Satan worshipers who were threatening the country and the role of the mysterious Q, the guy who supposedly is on top of this plot to sabotage Donald Trump's presidency.

And how this has grown and developed this very large following. And I was looking at a Twitter thread recently and I saw our friend Zach Dorfman weighing in mentioning Larry McDonald and suddenly the light bulbs went inside my brain.

I sort of vaguely remembered this guy from the late 70s, early 80s and his strange views about communist subversives everywhere. And I immediately reached out to him.

And you know what he told me that's just when we were talking, absolutely fascinating. Larry McDonald represented a district in northern Georgia.

It's pretty much the same district that is today, the candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is running in.

She's the Republican candidate for Congress in that district who is notoriously a follower of QAnon.

You know, I don't know if there's something in the water in that district. I suspect not. I think it's, you know, what Zach's story, which we'll talk about, shows is that there is this really deep vein of paranoia in American political culture, you know, conspiracy theories about, you know, elites that are out to get us.

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