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THE SEARCH BAR

The hidden narrative: Why fans love pop culture conspiracies

| 45 minutes | Media Contact: University Communications

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Summary

What’s the appeal of conspiracy theories? And how did they make their way into pop culture? 

Summary 

Conspiracy theories have been around as long as human civilization. What’s their appeal? And why have conspiracies in pop culture found such a large following? Host Adam Sparkes and guest Joe Packer sit down to discuss everything from Plato’s teachings to Batman to Taylor Swift. Is there a risk of blurring the lines between fictional and real-life conspiracies? 

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Transcript

Introduction

Joe: It's undeniable that Taylor Swift is hiding messages for fans. But one of the things that my co-author and I look at is we look at a phenomenon of folks who are called self-identified as “Gaylors”. They hold the belief that Taylor Swift is not straight. If you really parse all of the Easter eggs, Taylor Swift is in fact telling you, in the same way that she tells you when the new album's going to drop, that she's not straight. If you may- 

Adam: I would love to hear it. 

Joe: -sing a little Taylor Swift. They don't Know about the night in the hotel. We were riding in the car when we both fell. Didn't leave a note on the Polaroid picture. They don't know how much I miss-What would you say? 

Adam: Body doubles. Death hoaxes. Hidden messages. Welcome to The Search Bar. I'm your host, Adam Sparkes, and on today's episode, we're talking about conspiracy theories and pop culture with Joe Packer, professor of communications at Central Michigan University. Hi Joe, thanks for coming in today. I guess we're going to kind of have a little bit of a conversation about the truth or the truth as we see it in things that we're supposed to be having fun with. At least that's kind of how I think about conspiracies, that circulate around pop culture. When I heard that you were coming in, the first thing that came to my mind were conspiracy theories as themes in pop culture and how some of those kind of jumped out and became real. So maybe 20, oh my gosh, almost 25 years ago. JFK is what came out. I think it was 1991, Oliver Stone's, JFK, which it wasn't a movie full of hidden messages. It was talking about conspiracy theories that people already had. But I think it kind of sparked an analysis of the movie that really made a lot of people kind of reignite their disbelief in the status quo of the story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  

Where did the idea of conspiracy theories begin?

Adam: I was just kind of curious to you is where you see this phenomenon starting My layperson's assessment was like, must've been JFK. 

Joe: Yeah, so conspiracy theories have really been around as long as sort of human civilization, large numbers of humans that don't know each other super well, existing in the same area. That's not to say that the nineties weren't huge for conspiracy theories in the United States, in addition to JFK, you had Don DeLillo writing his novels that were very conspiracy-heavy sort of in the literary world. You had the X-Files, which was an enormous introduction to a lot of Americans, to the idea of conspiracy theories. A lot of the Roswell discourse kind of went mainstream At that time, there was, I believe the movie Conspiracy Theory came out, right in the nineties. So just a huge number of things in the United States that really sort of brought that to attention. But if you talk to historians, they'll say that there were a lot of conspiracies in ancient Rome related to the emperors or doing this or that crazy thing. The idea that Niro was responsible for the fire that destroyed Rome, he wanted to rebuild part of it and couldn't do that because there were these existing structures. So he set the fire. 

Adam: It's like the Book of Revelations is literally that, right? Well, yeah, different podcasts. 

Joe: Yeah, well, sort of in that vein, the Knights Templar, where this huge organization in Europe at the time and the prince of France, the royalty of France, were not happy with them, saw them as a competitor, started all of these rumors about them engaging in sort of satanic worship and that kind of stuff, and then just wiped them out in one fell swoop just wiped out the Knight's Templar. So these conspiracy theories go far back. 

Adam: So not JFK, just JFK. It felt so smart. 

Joe: Well, no, in the United States, that's like, I feel like most Americans, that is it. The JFK, the Nixon, right in that vein, all of those things.

Adam: It's when America lost his innocence or her innocence, or however they say it for, I think it's gentrified when they say it for JFK, which obviously if you inspect American history, probably not then. But in terms of that cultural perception, I think that Americans had of themselves, that that was the moment. And then at least for me, that movie was like I, as a young person, even went through a phase where I was like, “what? is this? Is this real?” And it's appealing, right?  

 

What’s the appeal of conspiracy theories?

Adam: It's a very appealing thing to get into. What do you think the appeal of it is to sort of experience these pieces of media and these pieces of art and then to start going down that rabbit hole because it seems like something that is entertaining, it's fun for us right? 

Joe: Yeah, so a little bit of it depends on the type of conspiracy that you're talking about. And so most conspiracy theories are sort of in the paranoid vein. So the idea that there are these outside forces that are malevolent, that control the world, that are acting in ways that are hostile to us or society generally, and there is some, I think some people take comfort in that, in the sense that, well, these things are happening for a reason. There is a force to be battled with, and if that force is defeated, then all of these things will be fixed because the problems are a result of this secret malevolent force. And so even though on the one hand that seems bad, you exist in a world where there's these evil forces controlling your life. On the other hand, it's a world that at least makes sense. It makes sense why these bad things are happening the way that they are. Why maybe society is structured in a way that's difficult for you to get ahead in that society. It's not individual failure or not a failure of just sort of a million unrelated, chaotic pieces bouncing around, but it's a direct action and it's easier to both comprehend that and oppose that in a way. 

Adam: Yeah, it's always struck me as something where it takes the gray space out of understanding something that is affecting you. Like you had said, if there's one singular malevolent force that's moving all these pieces, I don't need to spend as much time understanding how these pieces make me feel. I have to get all the way to the malevolent force. And I feel like that's sort of what conspiracy does. It makes maybe some of the things that are really affecting you, just obstacles that are kind of blinding you from that kind of nebulous, faceless evil. 

Joe: And the paranoid conspiracy most common one that's most talked about. But one thing that I do research on, especially in relation to pop culture media and fan studies, is the idea of a pronoia. So the opposite of a paranoid, where instead of thinking that they're these secret forces that are inflicting harm, there are these secret forces that are kind of trying to help you out. And it's not nearly as popular, but they do exist. The idea that there's some forces, yeah, that're just sort of looking out for you in a weird way. 

Adam: That's that it, following the Easter eggs, right? Following the Easter eggs to a reward kind of thing.  

 

How do people find “hidden messages” in pop culture? 

Adam: How do people start to find hidden messages? What's the genesis of that in terms of whether they're real or not? I mean, there certainly is, particularly in pop culture, hidden messaging. It is everywhere. It's all over the place. We could see it to various levels of intention, but how do people start to pick up on that or manifest if it's not real? 

Joe: So again, it depends. With the paranoid style of conspiracy theories, oftentimes it's just humans for whatever. Humans, I think, have a desire to find patterns. And that pattern finding is helpful for us in a lot of cases. And certainly, you could see if you're taking an evolutionary perspective, why it would be helpful to our distant, distant ancestors. If you are gathering the idea of these berries grow at this time on these bushes and don't eat these ones, and finding all these patterns, or you're hunting and you're tracking the movement patterns of whatever, bison, I don't know, that's helpful to you. And so, this idea that we seek patterns, we've been trained over generations to seek patterns. And sometimes it's a little bit like how, and I'm not a doctor here, but my limited understanding of autoimmune diseases is that it's the autoimmune system functioning too well. So, the system that's designed to help you to find foreign bodies that have entered you, that are going to do harm to you, that system when it's functioning over time, it starts to identify things that aren't foreign bodies and then attacks your own body. That's the problem with autoimmune diseases. And so similarly, conspiracy theories could be thought of this pattern recognition sort of working overtime or working too well in the sense that you're seeing patterns that maybe don't exist. And so, some of it is just people finding things in media that doesn't exist. A famous popular culture example in the paranoid style would be playing the Beatles albums back and you hear hidden messages, and these are some sort of subliminal messages that- 

Adam: I'm the walrus, right?  

Joe: Right. Yeah. John is dead. I'm the walrus. And again, I'm not going to comment on each conspiracy theory whether I think it was true or not, but I don't know. And that's what people heard when hearing. 

Adam: And it seems a lot of times, correct me if I'm wrong to be, it's also triggered by other things that are happening in the zeitgeist. What are people worried about? What are they getting excited about? The one that hit me the hardest when I was a kid because I was a big dork, was wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons and my mom being pretty convinced that Dungeons and Dragons and Magic, the Gathering was evil. It was the devil. And it wasn't that my mother was completely, it wasn't that she was never exposed to just fantasy as a theme before, but that in particular became this thing that had all sorts of wild stuff attributed to it at the time, but as it turns out, was pretty innocuous. Sorry, there's nothing really there. 

Joe: You don't really hear much about Dungeons and Dragons and Magic, the Gathering, the way that you used to. And I think, like you said, it's contextual. So I don't know the exact dates, but in the eighties, there was the huge Satanic panic in the United States. There were some murders that at the time, prosecutors were saying were associated with cults, satanic cults, essentially. And that got an enormous amount of press. And later on there were questions about, was any of this real? Did any of this happen? But that was in the zeitgeist at the time, and that I think you're correct influences the conspiracy theories of the time. Absolutely. 

Adam: And I think it also, while it was hurting card games and role-playing games, it made that late eighties, early nineties metal scene really explode because it became appealing to be part of the occult. So it was sort of, right. I mean, that was the time when Slayer and Ozzy Osborne, and I think everyone leaned into the even darker imagery that was associated with those. So it's funny how there's that paranoid reaction to it, which was that I couldn't get caught going into a comic bookstore, but about three years later, I really wanted to buy Bark at the Moon or whatever the Ozzy Osborne album was. 

Joe: Yeah, yeah. It's weird how that works. It was sort of like a reaction to the reaction in a way, 

Adam: Right? Well, people want to explore it. I mean, I think even I live with teenagers, I live with Swifties and the Taylor Swift. It's not really conspiracy, but it's finding those hidden messages. When's the album going to drop? She's telling us, I don’t know if you've engaged with that, but that's massive. I mean, it is a massive, massive thing. 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So that's an interesting one because it's undeniable that Taylor Swift is hiding messages for fans all the way back to her early. She had hidden messages in the liner notes where the lyrics of the song, certain words would be capitalized, and you take all those capital letters and would spell out messages to her fans about all kinds of things. So it's undeniable that Taylor Swift is hiding messages in her fans. She has YouTube videos where she says, this is, I hide Easter eggs and here's some examples, and this is what to look for. And so that would be not necessarily a conspiracy, I mean, it's just a fact, right? But one of the things that my co-author and I look at is we look at a phenomenon of folks who are called self-identified as “Gaylors”. So gay Taylor Swift fans. And not all gay, but they hold the belief that Taylor Swift is not straight, that she is either bisexual or she is a lesbian, which seems strange in a way, because in once, obviously she's an amazing musician. But another thing that she's famous for is she has all of these famous boyfriends. And so people talk about that and how various songs are about different boyfriends. But the Gaylor take is that if you look deep enough, if you really parse all of the Easter eggs, Taylor Swift is in fact telling you in the same way that she tells you when the new album's going to drop, that she's not straight, and that she has had relationships with all kinds of famous female celebrities. So the model Karlie Kloss or Dianna Agorn, who is on the television show, Glee. Yeah. So that would be an example of sort of a pronoia conspiracy theory. The idea that Taylor Swift wants certain people to know people who are cool or chill or queer. I'm secretly letting you know this secret that I'm not telling anybody else. And if you put together all the pieces, you'll know this and other people won’t. And it's interesting. And I went down a deep TikTok rabbit hole. So the writing is basically essentially me analyzing 70 TikTok videos of Gaylors who are like, if you look at this music video and this shot and this imagery or this lyric, an example would be, and I brought one with me, and I didn't trust myself to quote it from memory. I like Taylor Swift, but I'm not that deep. So if you may, 

Adam: Yeah, I would love to hear it. 

Joe: Sing a little Taylor Swift. Okay. I'm not going to sing.  

Adam: I'm going to play it back for my daughter. She'll let you know how you did. 

Joe: Alright. They don't know about the night in the hotel. We were riding in the car when we both fell, didn't leave a note on the Polaroid picture. They don't know how much I miss. What would you say? I'll read that again. Let's see. What would the rhyme be? They don't know about the night in the hotel. We were riding in the car when we both fell. Didn't leave a note on the Polaroid picture. They don't know how much I miss her. 

Adam: Her. Oh, it was her. Her, yeah, oh we got it. Okay. Thanks Aaron. Thanks. 

Joe: Alright. But that is not the lyric. The lyric is how much I miss you. So Gaylors are like, come on, it's got to be her. It's got to be her. Right? The rhyme scheme is broken. This doesn't make sense. Maybe it originally was her, but then she didn't feel comfortable. Or maybe this is a secret message. And there are a few other lines from that song that also end in you. And the rhyme scheme would suggest it was her. So that's an example. She in a music video, You Need to Calm Down music video, which is about sort of queer rights. She wears a wig that is the colors of the bisexual flag. And they're like, come on, this is so obvious. But is it? I don't know, that's the case that they're making is that they're all of these pieces that add up to Taylor Swift telling her fans that she's not straight. 

How has social media amplified the spread of conspiracy theories in pop culture?

Adam: How do you feel social media has proliferated this? I feel like particularly, I mean obviously in the last 15 years, but really in the last four years since Covid where things like TikTok have come out and these kind of small pieces of media have been re-shared. I think one of the things that TikTok did really well was we started to see old media, old songs come up. And I know just celebrity death conspiracy sort of came back suddenly. We're talking about Tupac Shakur being alive again because of TikTok, things like that. How important is social media in terms of these conspiracies developing? 

Joe: So, I think enormously important, especially for pronoia conspiracy theories, because the idea is that in a paranoid conspiracy theory, you are discovering something that you aren't meant to discover. But if you have pronoia, you're thinking there are these forces out there that are putting these hidden messages just for you, then that's your job. And they want you to discover these things. And it's a little bit, if you believe that these things are not true, if you believe that these are sort of manifestations of the people who are saying it, it's a little bit like DnD or an improv session where everybody gets to say, okay, well, you said that this lyric may suggests that Taylor Swift isn't straight, but then also this lyric, and then I'm going to post my video, and then you repost. And it's all sort of a collaborative world-building exercise where everyone has an opportunity, and you can get the likes and you can get the views because you're playing within this game that has these rules about what's expected of you and how you're supposed to do it. And I don't mean to pick on this brand of Swifties, this happens a lot. So, in the book that I'm working on- 

Adam: She's the biggest artist in the world right now. So it's an easy one to get examples from.  

Joe: So, you see similar things with, I mean, Q Anon is often thought of as a paranoid conspiracy. 

Adam: Is it though? 

Joe: But yeah, exactly. Is it, right? They think that, okay, actually there are these forces for good that are working with us within the government and they're sending us these secret messages. And so, there are a lot of Swifties who are Gaylors who are like, yeah, I'm a little uncomfortable with the level of similarity there is between us and QAnon. Even though they don't think they're wrong, they're like, it does seem similar to us in a way that we're not fully comfortable with, but we're right and they're wrong usually. 

Adam: Yeah. Q Anon was one I was going to bring up because in a weird way, I think that is more of a pop culture conspiracy than a government conspiracy because a lot of the ideas that are in Q Anon, I don't necessarily want to dig into the specifics because some of them get offensive, but they weren't necessarily born out of current events. They were born out of people who had become famous for posting on, well, oh gosh, I'm going to screw this up. It's 4chan at the time. And it eventually...

Joe: 8chan.

Adam: Migrated to 8chan because it got chased off. But it was one of those deals where nobody was in fear of any direct danger for espousing these views. And I think that was the thing about Q Anon that always kind of struck me as it was like, we're not going to whisper about this in some private chat room. We're going to make t-shirts about it. So, in a weird way, it kind of became an Easter egg hunt that was a little bit more pop culture. They just didn't have, well, I guess Donald Trump is a celebrity. It was kind of anchor in the center of it. 

Joe: And it works because it's not, there's this person who's Q and he leaves these hidden messages that are sort of cryptic and weird, but it's not unidirectional. It’s not just, okay, we have the messages now we know what Q Anon is about. What makes Q Anon work, in my opinion, and what makes it so popular and what has made it spread is that it's open to interpretation and that other people can play along. So, it's okay, this Q message dropped. I'm going to interpret it in my own way. I'm going to create a YouTube video. This allows me to be a participant in this conspiracy in a way that you couldn't in other ones. So, if you're talking about sort of Roswell, right? If I'm just an average person, I've never been into Roswell. I can read the reports of the military insiders who say they're aliens there or whatever, but I can't participate. There's nothing I can add. But because the Q Anon is about interpreting messages, people can watch a speech by Trump and say, well, Trump said they had a whole thing about Easter bunnies and hippity hop, and he said...  

Adam: Tapping the finger to make a Q or something...

Joe: Just like, but anyone could do it. Anyone could sort of log in. And I'm not saying that these folks aren't sincere, but I'm saying that there are avenues for participation in the construction of this worldview that there aren't in other type of conspiracies. And that aligns with what you're saying about something unique about the particular media age that we're living in that's sort of a more participatory media age. And that I think has led to the longevity and widespreadness of these conspiracy theories. 

Adam: Yeah, it's really interesting too, because it always strikes me as something where while there are elements of things like Q Anon that obviously had become destructive, but with more of the pop culture ones too. And actually for Q Anon too, it's community. It's a generating a community. If you're out solving a mystery together, what's more fun than that to me? I'll go back to the Dungeons and Dragons analogy since we used it, and I love Dungeons and Dragons. When you play a game like that, even though it's not real, sometimes the memories become real. Guys, I played Dungeons and Dragons with over the years gals, I played Dungeons and Dragons over the years. Friends we've talked about, when you talk about the time that you did this crazy thing in the game, even though it's completely imagined, it's ridiculous. We're all adults talking about it. When we are getting together and going, remember the one time we were playing and you rode two great white sharks like water skis or something, which to somebody who's never played Dungeons and Dragons, it's like what? It feels like a real shared memory. And I feel like a lot of these conspiracy communities are sort of giving people that same thing where even regardless of how deep someone buys in into it is, because some people are doing this and it's fun, they are suspending some disbelief to have fun, which is the DnD version. Some people are all the way in, but they are all having a shared experience that is that part of it's real, right? Yeah. Experience is real. 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And it's really, it's not structured in a zero-sum way. They're all playing by the number one rule of improv, which is yes, and. So, you don't see a lot of people say, well, you said this speech could mean this, and here's my 10-point rebuttal to that, and we're in a fight. Everyone's like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And this other thing makes sense and this other thing makes sense. And it is community-creating and bond-creating in a way. Absolutely. 

What are some examples of conspiracy theories in pop culture that have taken on a life of their own?

Adam: What are some of your favorite ones right now that are active? What's out there? What's been interesting you in terms of your research? 

Joe: I think that my personal favorite is probably Gaylor. I love it. It's fascinating. As someone who is also a debate person, a debate coach, and former Debater, just they go so deep, they make so many arguments. They do such high level analysis that even though some of it, I'm like, okay, but I don't know. It's cool. So that's probably my favorite. One of the ones that I think is most fascinating. It's certainly not something that I like, is that there is a segment of white nationalists who really like the Christopher Nolan Batman series and- 

Adam: Oh, I'm not familiar with this one. This is going to be great. By great, I mean fascinating. 

Joe: We know. So they love the Christopher Nolan Batman series, and they are convinced that if you read between the lines of it, it is really a defense of white nationalist revolution. And you're like, this makes no sense. And how do they get here? How do they do this? And the way that they do it is they interpret the film with the villains as the heroes of the films. So for them, Batman is living in Gotham. Gotham is a disaster. It's corrupt, it's falling apart. And they're like, he's going about it the wrong way. The real heroes are in the first one, the League of Shadows. They want to destroy the city, restart over. And that's essentially what they think should happen in the United States is basically a destruction of society as we know it, so it can be sort of reborn in their image. And Bane, they're huge Bane fans, I guess. And so yeah, that's their interpretation of the film and tons of writing, very in-depth, almost academic analysis of these films and the hidden messages. And they think Christopher Nolan is a fascist. 

Adam: These are the Thanos was right guys gone completely crazy. 

Joe: Right? Yeah, right. Yeah. That guy's name who got punched in the face. 

Adam: Oh, Spencer.

Joe: Yes. Richard Spencer. Yeah, Richard Spencer is like, this movie is fascist and I love it.

Adam: Oh, really? 

Joe: Yeah, he's on a podcast with some other, and he's just like, these movies are super fascist and I'm here for it. Christopher Nolan is a fascist director, and there are hidden fascist messages. And you saw a little bit of this from- 

Adam: Christopher Nolan is so nationally British that I don't think that there's any chance he's a Fascist, I love it. 

Joe: I'm not calling, we're not calling Christopher Nolan a fascist, let me be clear. I'm saying this is what they say about him. So yeah, just a totally bizarre pronoia conspiracy. They were like, yeah, you can't obviously make a Nazi film, so you have to hide it, and this is how you would hide it in a major blockbuster movie. Our ideas are there, but they're hidden and you have to kind of discover them. So that's one of the things that we look at. That's totally bizarre to me. Another thing that we look at, and this one's a little bit weird, is that there are, it's not sort of in the same vein because most of these are kind of fan communities, folks who are fans talking about media objects that they like. But one of the things that we talk about in the book is that there is the School of Academics, and they kind of trace their way back to this figure called Leo Strauss. And Leo Strauss made the argument that if you look at all of these ancient philosophical texts from Greek thinkers like Plato, and Maimonides-he was not Greek, he was Arab, and they actually have these hidden messages, their philosophy. So if you take Philosophy 101 and you read Plato's Republic literally, then you have gotten none of the lessons you are supposed to get, right? You have to do these secret readings of it to actually uncover the real knowledge that Plato wanted you to have. And this is sort of a school that's existed since the mid 20th century on, and they read things like Shakespeare. They're like, oh, Shakespeare also had these hidden messages in it. And our argument is sort of that they're taken seriously. These are professors who have tenure, but this is very similar to some of these other things. This is how different are the Gaylors from these academic Straussians. They were pretty close, I think, in a lot of ways. And again, that's not to say definitively that they are wrong or right, but just the way that they go about thinking about these things is close. It is very close in the way that they analyze things, the way that they think about things, the way that they choose to approach and interpret the world is very close. So, yeah.

How do real-world conspiracy theories compare to those found in fictional stories or pop culture?

Adam: It seems like the question I was going to ask is how do these conspiracy theories differ from the ones that are more rooted in these tangible cultural events? And I was thinking about asking you this question as we've talked, they seem really interchangeable. It's kind of the thing that's starting to strike me as you're describing the research and stuff, is that the difference in believing in chemtrails and obsessively researching chemtrails and being a Gaylor, maybe in terms of the psychological impetus to do it, is probably not that different. It's more just the medium in which you're getting the information. I mean, although all of it's online now, but the idea of the chemtrail was originally like, 

Joe: Yeah.

Adam: I would look up and I'd go, what are those? I need an explanation. And if you got a fantastic explanation, you liked it, you could roll with it 

Joe: Yeah. I think that that is you're, and I'm not a psychologist. I'm not, I think probably, yes, there are some interlocking pieces there, or motivation-wise, I do think implementation is different in the terms of paranoia versus pronoia, but also the ability, if I'm like, what's up with these chemtrails? They seem weird. And then I see some people writing about it. I just have nothing to contribute to that. I can do my own research and then find a bunch of articles written about chemtrails, but I just can't contribute it to anything. Whereas if I'm a Gaylor, I can 

Adam: Listen to Taylor Swift albums day in and day out at the same level that everyone else can 

Joe: And find something, a connection or a way of interpreting something that other people can't. And so I think that that would be a big distinction. 

Adam: Yeah, I mean, it got me to thinking about, what's his name? Dan Brown, right? Dan Brown wrote all these novels that are implying a lot of things about the Catholic church. And I think there was for a long time, a lot of things where, correct me if I'm wrong here, where Dan Brown really knows, and I don't doubt that Dan Brown did his research about the Catholic church, and I'm certainly no expert on the issue, but I remember that being just this massive, massive thing. And that was also late nineties, 

Joe: I think that, yeah, it's been a while, right? 

Adam: Well, that was the movies in the late nineties. Anyway. Da Vinci Code was late nineties, so he probably wrote them in five to six years before that. But that one kind of struck me as also one of those things where it was like, we're kind of grasping ahold of this and we're going, what does he really know? People kind of took off with what does he really know? And you heard about it for the longest time, but fizzled out a little bit doesn't have the staying power that some of these other ones do. 

Joe: Yeah, that's interesting. And I don't know a ton about that, but yeah, I think my understanding was he picked up on some stuff that was already existing, wrote about it, and then people were like, well, he must have the knowledge. But really, he probably just sort of did the research about this other existing, 

Do you think there’s any risk in blurring the lines between fictional and real-life conspiracies?

Adam: Fictionalized it a little bit. Are there risks for people who are blurring the lines between reality and these things? Is there a danger to anyone who's participating in it? Can we get too far down the rabbit hole, even if it's a positive conspiracy? 

Joe: Yes, absolutely. I mean, the most obvious case of this is probably Q Anon, which I think that if you look at the data, it's not good mental health-wise. It ruins families, breaks people apart. Folks are just sort of living in a totally separate reality in a way that makes it difficult for them to maintain relationships with folks that are sort of out of that sphere, and then that's replaced by these connections that are possible in online spaces. But then if they ever want to get out, then they've lost all of their connections that are still remaining. And so I think that that's true. I know that for the Gaylors, when something comes out that they can interpret as Taylor Swift being queer, they feel really good. But then she'll say something along the lines of, don't speculate about my personal life, weirdos or whatever. And they're like, was that about us? It wasn't about, and then we still love you, Taylor. Yeah, right. It's like they feel bad and hurt and they take it personally. So yeah, I mean, I think that sort of being disconnected from reality is just generally dangerous territory. 

Adam: In your estimation or observation, I guess. So I guess this could be anecdotal answer. I want to preface that for everyone. Is there a ratio, how many people are in it so deep where their judgment is becoming clouded, and how many people are just in it for fun on these types of things? If you can't answer it because it's impossible, you can tell me. 

Joe: Yeah, I don't know mean there are definitely a lot of people who are in it, in it. That's all I can say really. 

What advice do you have for people to distinguish between legitimate analyses and conspiracy theories?

Adam: So, with that said, I mean, that would be the approximation I would make with nothing to qualify as well. I would kind of look at that situation and say, hey, it seems like people are really deep into these conspiracies. Where does media literacy come in here? Because I do feel like while something like the Gaylor conspiracy feels mostly fun, it feels pretty harmless. Some of these things do become all-consuming and they can create social and societal tension in the case of QAnon. And are we failing to distinguish the royal we between what is real and what is just kind of conjecture online? 

Joe: Yeah, so I'll say sort of two things on that. The first is that I think people, and specifically universities have a role in training people to be more, I guess more media literate or more just doing your own research involves seeking out what you can find, not just things that confirm your priors. And so again, as someone who is a debater and debate coach, that's enormously important for what we do. So it's about, okay, I saw this article that chemtrails are dangerous, but what would people who don't think that have to say and really put in the time to do investigating on both sides of it. And there are numerous times I have this one friend, I won't name them, who will send me things and I'll look at it and I'm just like, this can't be real. And then I Google it, and then I'm just like, this isn't real. And he's like, oh, I didn't look. He is like, I just saw the thing and sent it to you. It's like, come on guy. And he's a smart guy, so he knows who he is. It's just like you got to do little extra research. And so that's something that's trained, that's something that you can instill as both teach people how to do it and instill it as a value that a part of being a good person or a good citizen or a good human or whatever is a willingness to just not take things on face value. And I think especially you and I grew up at a time where a lot of people today, it maybe exist in online environments that are very curated. So people spend their time on Facebook or Reddit or whatever, number of few things where we grew up in the wild west of the internet, you could say anything. It's just like you had to know that things could be out there that were wrong or dangerous because people were trying to infect your computer and steal your money or whatever, or just say totally stupid things online. And so I think that that lawlessness of the time that we were growing up maybe instilled in us the sense that, hey, don't take everything at face value. And so hopefully that's something that we can be better about teaching folks. The other thing I wanted to say is that while obviously, or maybe not obviously, but I think conspiracy can be dangerous, and I think we're seeing the effects of that. Certainly sometimes it's just fun and not that big of a deal. The Gaylor thing I don't think is particularly harmful to anybody. It does build this community for a group that I think feels pushed out of society in some way. And so I think generally, even if it's not true, it's not that big of a deal. Conspiracy, I think in some other cases can be dangerous. And the flip side of that though is that we need to be careful about, it's very difficult to define what a conspiracy is. And folks will just call things that they don't like conspiracies. And so on the one hand, we have to teach people how to uncover conspiracies, but we can't make people just so afraid of like, oh, that's a conspiracy. And then that's the end of the discussion. It can't be a discussion-ending thing because there's no limit on what could be called a conspiracy, 

Adam: Especially for the people that are maybe wrapped up in the conspiracy. If they feel that's demeaning, then they're probably just going to dig in deeper. I want to take a little bit of a step back. You're talking about being a debate coach, and one of the things with media literacy that kind of strikes me and tell me if you agree with this is there's sort of this, you're saying, trying to discern what the good information and the bad information is really important to debate. But I think also being good at debate sometimes is one of the best deceptions, right? Because if somebody makes a really great case, that isn't always a true case. It's a great case. So I'll use a ridiculous example. If I've never participated in any kind of structured debate, and if I had zero prep time and you and I were going to do a debate right now and I was going to take the side of, you can breathe underwater, or I was going to take the side, you can't breathe underwater and you were going to take the side of, you can breathe underwater, no breathing apparatus, you might be able to stand here and to Aaron and Michael producing the show completely convince them, or at least have the much better, more well-rounded sounding case of you can breathe underwater, just go do it. Just go try it. And since I only had 30 seconds to prepare and I've never done this before, suddenly something that may have seemed wild, then I'm using an obviously ridiculous example can become appealing to people. And that can be, I think, difficult for folks to suss out at times. 

Joe: Yeah, I mean, I have sort of an amusing take on that is that I have a friend who's really into conspiracy theories and I, he's good. He's ready to debate. And if I didn't have time to go collect my thoughts and look up the things I would be like, okay, well, you're kind of crushing me here. And once or twice I've been like, okay, maybe there's something to this. That's sort of the funny version of this. The very sad version of this is that in the 1980s, there was a public debate that was hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, and this was, most scientists at that time thought that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus. 

But there was a small segment of scientists and sort of natural health folks who thought that that was not the case, that there was some other cause. So you could get HIV, but it wouldn't necessarily result in the symptoms of AIDS. And so they had this public debate where they invited this doctor who was a specialist on viruses, whose area was HIV, and they invited this other person who was just this woman who had this natural health practice or whatever, and this doctor was like, yeah, I'll just show up. No problem. And this woman actually had HIV. It hadn't manifested in AIDS at the time, and so she was just like, I'm not worried about it. It's not a big deal. She has this debate and destroys the doctor in this debate, absolutely crushes the doctor in the debate because the doctor is not prepared to have a public debate, hasn't really thought about these weird arguments he hasn't really heard before. It's just like, this is obviously true. We all believe this. They here are the tests, but is not translating it in a way that's good for a public audience. And they have the debate. He gets crushed. They go to dinner afterwards. He is looking absolutely crestfallen because there's the whole audience of people who now maybe believe that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. And then at the dinner, this woman who is HIV positive is breastfeeding her child. She dies of AIDS, child dies of AIDS later on. It's just like she won this debate. She was ready to have the debate, and she won the debate. Doctor thought that the facts alone were sufficient to win. The debate didn't work. So I agree that just because someone is effective at debating doesn't necessarily mean that what they're saying is true. 

Adam: Yeah, that one always sticks with me because I feel like there's, particularly in online spaces now, debating as a culture is sort of like a win-lose thing, and facts aren't always what make you win a debate. So I don't know. For me, I've kind of ascribed that to some conspiracy theories is that the thing that makes them exciting and makes you get behind them is if they're really well presented to you at times. So if you jump into one of these communities and the ball is already rolling and there's leaders in those communities and you go, man, they sound so smart. It can be hard. It can be hard to convince yourself otherwise. And just for people who might be listening and kind of go, it's easy to roll your eyes at folks who get caught up in this stuff. And I consider myself a pragmatist. I in my adult life, gone down the tunnel on a lot of conspiracy theories in any serious matter. But I do empathize because I can see where the appeal comes from for sure. 

Joe: And I mean, sometimes what happens is that the non-conspiracy side is just sort of like, we don't know or would be strange for this thing to happen, but it still could have happened this way. We don't know the exact details. It's weird, but it's certainly possible that it happened in this way. And the conspiracy theorist will say, actually, I can tell you exactly how it happened. These are all the details. And that's a lot more satisfying than just sort of like, we don't know exactly, but we're pretty confident this is what happened. And so yeah, it's more certain. 

How can students or fans practice media literacy when interpreting pop culture content?

Adam: How do you encourage people or maybe your students how to critically assess media before they get into these spaces? What are some things you can do upfront to prepare yourself to stay in reality if you want to? I mean, maybe you don't. 

Joe: Yeah, I don't have a great answer to that to be honest. My approach as a debate person, as an argumentation person is mostly focused on what is a good argument and assessing evidence and that kind of stuff. I do less on is this source a good source versus a bad source. But there are folks at this college who I think would be more helpful there. 

Adam: Yeah. How do you feel about the, one of the things, this is a conversation that I feel like I sometimes have to happen with my mother. She's not listening. Don't worry. The simplest answer is usually the answer sometimes too. I mean, I think Occam's Razor is always a good place to start with this stuff. If it starts getting too, if it starts getting too crazy, it's probably not the solution to the problem that you're looking for. It's probably not the path to the truth. Some things are complex, but usually simple answers get us where we need to go. It's like the old adage, follow the money. Who stands to profit? 

Joe: That's probably true. It's tough to say. I mean, I think if you're a JFK Conspiracist, you would say the simplest answer is not that this bullet zoomed around in a weird way. It's that there was a second.  

Adam: See, and they're prepared for the debate right there, right? 

Joe: So yeah, I agree that a lot of these folks probably make the world a little bit more complicated than it is. Think people are smarter than they are. Think people are better at hiding things than potentially they are. 

Rate that conspiracy theory!

Adam: Okay, Joe, we're just going to really quick rate some conspiracy theories. Just how good is the community, how much good information they got. What do we want to do with number scale one through five here? I like the one through four because then you can't put one in the middle. You have to make a decision. We have a coworker here that does it. Just rate it one through four. I don't want any threes. 

Joe: Yeah. Okay. Alright. 

Adam: Alright. We'll do it one through four. Okay. One to four stars. Alright. Katie Perry is in fact JonBenet Ramsey. 

Joe: You give that a one. 

Adam: Okay. Avril Levine has been replaced by an Avril Levine body double. 

Joe: That's a four. 

Adam: I think that one's a four too.  

Joe: That's a good one. Good work out there. 

Adam: Justin Bieber is a lizard person. 

Joe: I don't mess with the lizard people. It's a fun idea. But that guy's a sketchy dude. 

Adam: Okay, so we're not going to do Hillary Clinton as a lizard person. Then, next. 

Joe: Yeah, one's for the lizard people. 

Adam: OJ Simpson is Khloe Kardashian's dad. 

Joe: Two, two and a half. I'm giving it a mid, I'm doing it anyway. 

Adam: Gaylor. 

Joe: Oh four. I love it.

Adam: Yep. The moon landing. Totally fake. Done on a sound stage. 

Joe: No, we went to the moon. I'll give it a one. 

Adam: Princess Diana was murdered. 

Joe: Two. 

Adam: Yeah, I'm with you on two. That one's still suspicious. Walt Disney's head is frozen in a jar. 

Joe: I didn't even know that was a conspiracy till today, so I thought that was real. I'll give it a three. 

Adam: Alright, we will do one more. Tupac lives on a desert island with Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain. 

Joe: I hope Tupac made it, but I don't think so. I'll give it a two. 

Adam: All right. Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun having you come in. I'm going to end up going down some kind of a Wikipedia rabbit hole as a result of this conversation tonight. My wife, thanks you when I complained about being tired tomorrow morning. 

Joe: Alright, happy to be here. 

Adam: Good to meet you, Joe. Thanks for stopping by The Search Bar. Make sure that you like and subscribe so that you don't have to search for the next episode.

 

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The views and opinions expressed in these episodes are strictly those of the host and guest speaker.