Episodes

We're finishing up our Bircher talk here, with our discussion of the group's great crusades to keep people from having more rights, because apparently expanding civil, women's, or gay rights played right into the commies' hands. Plus, they really, really wanted to get rid of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Did they? Kinda. I mean, he retired. So Victory! Plus, you'll learn who this John Birch guy is, and why it's not called The Robert Welch Society. Next week--well, we don't wanna spoil it. But you'r...

We find ourselves falling deeper into the history of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch's baby, and the anti-communist organization that seemed so fringey in the mid-20th century, yet seems so clearly a prologue to Qanon today. Learn how the group formed, how it misjudged the communist menace, and how Welch's unique personal history shaped its worldview. See you in a couple of weeks with more exciting adventures in red-baiting! Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast...

As the title suggests, this is the moment where we hand off the story from contemporary Russia to the USA's number one Cold Warrior, a former candy magnate who founded the most successful and influential anti-Communist movement in our nation's history. The John Birch Society is truly the forerunner of today's unhinged right-wing conspiracy culture--the proto-Qanon, if you will. So let's examine what they were all about, starting with the man who founded and led the society for a quarter-century,...

Our second full part on the topic of Putin's Russia, we cover more of that fun-loving gaggle of nationalist extremist conspiracy theorists who run that place these days, and with the help of our intrepid guide, Professor Yablokov, we learn how they do that conspiracy and repression voodoo that they do...so well. Also, we explore a series of interlocking theories that post-Soviet nationalists dreamed up about US plans to destroy the USSR during the Cold War. They're ridiculous. Not more ridiculou...

Having finished our dissection of Fed conspiracies, we now move on to consider how the other great world power of the 20th Century ended up becoming a dysfunctional autocracy overwhelmed by conspiracies. We learn what makes Russian conspiracy culture unique (and uniquely damaging), so that we can better understand Q and our own homegrown crazy. Of course, part of the Q crazy also overlaps with the Russian crazy, so obviously, this whole thing is gonna take a while to dig through. Hope you enjoy....

(Plus, satanic giants found the Federal Reserve)

Episode 3! We hope you like hearing Federal reserve conspiracy theories debunked, because boy, that's what you're getting this time. Thrill to the history of monetary policy. Experience the chills of arguing with bitcoin enthusiasts on Twitter! Seriously, though, our interviewee is great, and we think this is a really rare opportunity to learn some super-interesting stuff about the way the most complex and hidden parts of our economic system works. We hope you agree. Next time, a bunch of Really...

Second episode! Which means the introduction to this series literally took up an entire episode. Does that mean we're getting better or worse? Hard to say. This time, we're taking on the conspiracist view of what actually transpired on Jekyll Island back in 1910. Was it a conspiracy? Yes! Did mainstream historians already know that? Yes. What does it have to do with Qanon? We're more than happy to show you. Hope you enjoy it--see you next time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out infor...

We're back, bay-bee! For the next umpty-bajillion episodes, we're going to take a new angle to look at Qanon. Why, when we've already done Qanon several times? Because we believe the Qanon conspiracy is...in a sense "eating" other conspiracy theories. Because we think it's metastasizing into the one uber-conspiracy theory that rules our current moment in time. But more than that, we want to know how it got here, by tracing the historical and cultural threads that fed into the Q morass. And most ...