The Daily Show: Ears EditionIs JFK Jr. Still Alive? | Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy
Is JFK Jr. still alive? Daily Show contributor and podcast host Jordan Klepper digs deep into this conspiracy theory that’s circulating at Trump rallies and the larger MAGA world. Where did this idea come from? Where is it going? Jordan sits down with journalist and author Will Sommer and political scientist and conspiracy theory expert Joseph Uscinski to trace the JFK Jr. myth back to its QAnon origins.
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John F.
Kennedy Junior was the son of John F. Kennedy, the thirty fifth President of the United States. Tragically, JFK. Junior was killed in a plane crash in nineteen ninety nine.
Or was he? Yes, he was, of course he was. But what if he wasn't?
What if he were about to re emerge as the vice president of Donald Trump, who, by the way, is still the president.
Sound crazy?
It is.
In fact, it's one of the wilder conspiracies I've heard in my seven years covering Trump rallies. You're probably familiar with my daily show segments Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse Emmy nominated twice, lost twice, where I chat with Trump supporters at rallies.
We are not a cult.
It's an American ideal that we treat women with respect.
You gotta give me the back of that show one more time. That's too much fun. Trump, that bitch. We don't even see the irony in it.
And if you're into conspiracy theories, then there's nothing that comes close to a Trump rally.
What's on your back?
Q flag?
What those crazy people are?
Joseph Biden and commulaw are not legitimate.
What a cute hole thing that Trump will be reinstated as president.
Never look, if you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols.
Really.
Yes, it's like Woodstock, except everyone there thinks Jamie Hendrix is a hologram. Normally, when one of these conspiracy theories comes up, I have to respond then move past it because we're shooting a piece for TV and we have to stay somewhat focused. But this is a podcast, we don't have to stay focused at all. So I'm finally diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump Rallies by America's most imaginative minds. This is Jordan clapper Fingers The Conspiracy, an all new limited series podcasts from The Daily Show. So, folks, come on down from your grassy knolls and let's dig in. Let's talk about f Kennedy Junior. But to help me do that, I want to bring in our first guest, Will Summer. Will's a politics reporter for The Daily Beast and he's got a book coming out in February called Trust The Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the conspiracy that unhinged America. Well, welcome to Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy. I'm excited to have you on. You are here to help me walk through and understand what is going on in this world of John F.
Kennedy Junior. And I will say this.
I go out on the road and I start hearing people talking about JFK Junior. And initially I'm thinking, oh, they're talking about JFK. There's a long history of conspiracies with JFK. And then I'm putting together that it's JFK Junior. And then I start to see signs up. I start to see bumper stickers that have him as vice presidential Kennedy to Donald Trump. And then a month or so back, I go to a rally in the Midwest and I'm hearing sweet old grandmothers talk about John F. Kennedy Junior. And I can't make heads or tails of it.
You can you set out a little bit of where this began? What do we need to know?
Sure?
So, I mean, this is really bizarre, as you noted, I mean, the origins of this are within QAnon. Of course, there was this figure q who was giving these anonymous clues, and then at one point in twenty eighteen, Q sort of vanished for a month on the forums where the clues came out, and then someone named R shows up and starts saying, you know, all of this is really about JFK Junior, and.
So that's kind of where the where it begins.
And eventually Q comes back and kind of says, like this JFK Junior stuff's garbage. You know what, have you been tricking all my people? But the JFK Junior stuff really starts there with this idea that JFK Junior faked his death to take on the deep state and help Donald Trump sort of bring about this sort of Q and on utopia.
There's a conspiracy inside the conspiracy, it's a it's a it's a conspiracy tur duckin right now exactly.
It's sort of interfaction, and you get this situation where.
Like the kind of the mainline QAnon people will often be like, oh my god, like, you know, I believe all this Pizzagate stuff. I believe this about Hillary Clinton. But these JFK Junior people are embarrassing us. They just believe totally stupid stuff.
That's the dynamic you want there.
We're like, oh my god, can we just go back to serious things like talking about how the Democrats drink baby's blood and all this JFK Junior stuff. We're losing credibility. People were losing credibility. Put your tipoil hats back on and let's march.
Yeah.
I mean, basically they're saying, you know, these JFK Junior people are almost like a government meant to embarrass QAnon. But really, this belief has JFK Junior has persisted ever since.
So what was ours intention in this situation? Like initially that JFK Junior One is alive, so perhaps he faked his death, and two he's aligning himself with Donald Trump. It feels like there's four steps there that I'm having a hard time connecting. Why JFK Jr. And let's start with why he's alive and why that matter?
Sure, So the arc that is presented by R, and I want to point out here that R is the letter after Q, and so that's sort of the explanation for this.
Is it or is it will?
Your mainstream elitist alphabet says it's the letter after Q. But I have I only if you're moving forward through time. But that's a whole other podcast.
Exactly.
The sort of the story that's laid out is that John F.
Kennedy, the father is killed by the Deep State, you know, in nineteen sixty three.
JFK.
Junior sees this and says, oh, man, the Deep State might come for me, and I want to get revenge on them for murdering my father. And so for years he builds up this relationship with Donald Trump, you know, because they were both sort of these New York socialite figures. There are pictures of them together, and so this is used to suggest that they were like best buddies. Then in this storyline, JFK. Junior fakes his death in this plane crash to sort of go under cover and sort of lay the groundwork for the Q and On journey and eventually emerge. For a while they thought he was going to replace Mike Pence in twenty twenty on the ticket and then he would sort of kind of help Trump sort of get this final revenge on the deep State.
So in this world they see JFK. Junr As faking his own death to exist undercover and wait for the right time, still maintaining a relationship with Donald Trump throughout all of this, or did Donald Trump just come about and become sort of an avatar for a JFK Junior's ascension.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean a lot of it is a little contradictory and not super thought out.
You know, that might surprise you right now. But basically the idea is that.
You know, back in the nineties or the eighties, they kind of cut this deal and they said, Donald Trump said, man, this stuff is really messed up, you know. And then and JFK Junior said, tell me about it. You know, they shot my dad, and so then they sort of teamed up and JFK Junior went into hide it.
Tell me about it. They shot my dad. Oh wow, Yeah, you're right, this is messed up. Let me run for president a few decades from now and make this thing happen. You're helping me connect that circle.
If it's a circle. What I'm confused about.
I go out there. JFK famously not a Republican John F. Kennedy Junior, at least from my perspective, New York elite, not political, but somebody who is a magazine magnate and Seinfeld character doesn't exactly match up as the type of person that this often far right group would would align themselves with. Why do they see this potential in somebody who's so outside of the norm, you know.
I think that's a great question. What is the emotional resonance of JFK Junior? Why Why is it JFK Junior they fixate on rather than another celebrity who died in the nineties. So I think the answer to it is that when we think about the QAnon believer, and I think in particular the people who go for the JFK Junior stuff, they're usually baby boomers, and I think the JFK assassination had a huge sort of emotional impact on them. And I think also JFK Junior was sort of seeing there's this very like prominent baby boomer, sort of an avatar of his generation, and so in that way, I think there is this kind of this very emotional connection to him in a way that there wouldn't.
Be with another celebrity.
I think also the idea of JFK as like the last good Democrat is something that has persisted among Republicans even before QAnon. This idea of kind of this popular martyred president and alway, isn't it terrible that, you know, LBJ the in the sixties took being a democrat into such an awful direction. So I think JFK himself still has a lot of resonance with Republicans and QAnon believers. So I think there's a lot of kind of like emotions tied up in all that.
When you look back on JFK conspiracies, does it seem quaint? Does it seem sort of like the initial modern conspiracy theory that Americans have sort of built a mythos around.
I mean, I think obviously we've had conspiracy theories throughout American history, but the Kennedy assassination is such a sort of an epical one that I think gets a lot of people into conspiracy theories, and it is certainly, I think the biggest and the richest one to dive into in modern history. It also sort of brings everything full circle incorporating Kennedy. QAnon is this sort of a super conspiracy theory or a mega conspiracy theory that where you can sort of get whatever you want out of it. And so we see a lot of Kennedy conspiracy theorists drawn into it. I talked to a guy who is a really big QAnon leader, and he had for decades been just like AFK Crank. I mean, he was going to all these convention stuff like that, and then QAnon arrives and he says, oh, you know, I can sort of incorporate my Kennedy beliefs into QAnon and sort of broaden my worldview and see more of the world explained.
To me in that way. So I do think that's an aspect of it as well.
It's interesting.
I think what a lot of people miss is just how fun conspiracies are. They are engaging, especially if you're on a computer. One of the most fun things you can do is go down that rabbit hole and also come away with something that empowers you because you feel like you know something somebody else doesn't. I did a job down in Dallas a decade ago, and I was walking through the grass knoll multiple times right there in de Plaza, and people would approach you and they would tell you things that you should know and shouldn't know. And so there was it was like a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists to give small little tours take you to places that they tell you what happened and what they're not telling you, and it's easy to get wrapped up in that, and you see the people starting to develop, you know, not only mindsets out of it, but it gives them importance. It gives them in some cases a job, but it makes them important in that little place. And I start to see that pop up at some of these Trump rallies that I go to, seeing people who now own part of these little conspiracies and they become many celebrities at these rallies that we see and looking at this JFK Junior coming back as part of there's been discussions of his reappearance, and there's been groups, one group called Negative forty eight who has staged events waiting for his return. Can you tell us a little bit about Negative forty eight.
Yeah, So Negative forty eight is a group that is very convinced that JFK, not only JFK Junior, but Kennedy, JFK himself and all sorts of sort of a bevy of other beloved deceased celebrities are It's not that they're going to come back to life, but they've sort of been in occlusion. They've been in hiding and that they're going to come back and sort of usher in this QAnon world. The reason they're called negative forty eight is because they they this is kind of hard to explain, dude, to someone who's not really deepen it, but essentially they believe in this thing called Jamatria where they assign numerical values to letters and then they derive meaning from that.
A equals one, B equals two, and so on.
But essentially they would say, like Jordan Klepper twenty trust the Plan twenty make America great again twenty five, and they just sort of speak in this language that doesn't really make sense to anyone outside of it, but they they see importance in these numbers and in these these coincidences, and so from there they essentially kind of whipped themselves up into believe eating these things like JFK Junior is coming back.
I found out what Jamatria was real quick.
What are the rallies? I went to when a woman kind of walked me through this. She brought out a Jamatria calculator and started typing in my name, typing in Trump's name, and connecting all sorts of numbers.
It was.
It was wild.
It was real fun. You can kind of make anything make sense there.
Type it in the calculator, you get these numbers.
And so Michael Jackson's last concert was this is it comes to one.
Thirteen an you know what that means?
Do you?
I don't know what that means.
So one thirteen means not true.
So Michael Jackson that wasn't his last concert, and he's a lot. It's not necessarily a conspiratorial thing, although it's used in that sense. It's correct me if I'm wrong. It's essentially a mathematical way of turning letters into numbers, and religions have been using this for centuries just to try to find and try to derive meeting, trying to look deeper into biblical texts and what have you. And I thought that was a key component when I talked to this woman, because the way she talked about Jamatrium was beyond this is a conspiracy. It's fun. I have power because I have knowledge. It was also I'm serving a biblical character. There's religion attached to this. I think that's where the real danger comes here, where you have people who are serving serving religion and serving God through this fun little weird game that they play and then deciding that Aliyah is going to appear alongside Michael Jackson and perhaps and JFK Junior all at once, like.
Ben Laden with Obama clarify whos still alive?
Kay Junior is, JFK Junior is still alive.
JFK Junior is still alive. So I think JFK j is going to try and expose globalists because they killed his father.
We're talking about Tupac's coming back, Robin Williams is coming back Aliyah. As you mentioned, sort of pick your favorite dead celebrity, and so what happened was these folks descended on Dallas where they thought there was going to be sort of the Dead Celebrities Parade, and they're milling around and then they're seeing like a homeless guy and they're like, I think that's Robin Williams. And then everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's a Robin Williams and so on, and a lot of these guys, I mean, look, I'm not sure these guys are super up on, like Tupac, for example, and there's I think that's Supac, you know, all these guys I think that's Biggie and it's.
Sort of this.
You can see they're sort of going into this world where like nothing bad ever happens, No, no one ever dies of a drug overdose or a suicide. The other thing I would add is that they think a lot of dead celebrities were murdered or went into hiding, like JFK. Junior faked their deaths because they were gonna blow the lid off the cabal. So like the the late dj Avich, you know he faked his death. All these kind of people just you know, Whitney Houston. Oh, but they're all coming back at this big moment. And you can see these people who have just particularly in this when they were kind of million around Dallas for months, just the amount of their own lives and their own like hearts that they've invested into into it. You know, they're just you know, headed for a brick wall when eventually they realize none if it's happening.
It's just predominantly white people who live in a bubble walking around Dallas thinking they see Tupac everywhere.
It does.
I mean it's really like Tubuk, do you really know who Tupac is?
And you think that guy's Tupac and biggie. They are.
These are diametrically opposed on many levels. But I bet you're seeing it as the same person who's going into a subway.
Well, they would do these live streams where they would say, like, didn't y'all see that dead rapper?
Like they wouldn't know.
Any names, you know, and they gotta have this game of telephone figure it out.
I'm not gonna be a conspiracist or anything like that, but I just watched a movie last week with Robin Williams in it. It was called Man of the Year. And guess what they had election fraud back then? The machines that are switching to doing electronically and they were counting wrong.
Is this a documentary, No, it's just a movie. Are there any lessons we can take from morecan mindy?
No?
It should be pointed out they've they've pointed to people specifically JFK. Junior, as there's been a man who's gone to multiple rallies, stands behind Donald Trump, and that's JFK.
Junior.
I went to Seapack and I saw him there as well, and he's taken selfies because he's also JFK Junior. So some people aren't just abstract apparitions. They are actually humans that they point to and say, you know, this is who you are.
Yeah, I've actually I was just texting with him. So his name is Vincent Fusca, and he is this like Trump super fan. In the lead up to in the twenty sixteen election, he had this van kind of festooned with Trump paraphernalia, and so he kind of ends up becoming because he's a big Trump fan. He's behind him at a lot of rallies when the JFK Junior stuff starts happening, and this guy, I should say, it looks nothing like JFK Junior. He dresses, he wears like a big fedora. He's a very scruffy guy. He wears like like a big suit coat.
And so, now, to be clear, JFK Junior was a stylish man, and it could only be assumed that that style, mixed with privilege and wealth, would have led him into the modern era.
Not choosing to wear a fedora.
Yes, yes, thank you.
Yeah maybe in the nineties, you know, but now I don't think so.
And so oh.
Yeah yeah, early swing day, big big bad voddha daddy.
He would have had a Fodora.
There would have been a lot of college kids who wanted to look like JFK Junior who could pull off a Fodora, But modern JFK Junior no, no freaking way, no way.
And so so he's standing behind Trump, and when the JFK Junior stuff starts happening, people go, oh, my gosh, I think that's JFK Junior behind Trump. And then there was like a blond woman nearby and they said, I think that's JFK Junior's wife. And so, I mean, they kind of get going. But the wild thing to me about it is this guy doesn't come out and say, hey, guys, I'm not JFK Junior.
Leave me alone.
He goes, oh, who's to say.
And so I've seen this guy maybe seven or eight times, and he'll be out a rally or something and people go, oh, JFK Junior, you know, we want pictures. And then I say to him, Hey, you want to tell me about how everyone thinks you're JFK Junior obviously not, and he goes, oh, I'd love to talk to you later. How about in an hour let me catch up. I'm just so busy today, but I'm in town. You know, yeah, my number, let's talk later. Obviously never gets back to me. I talked to this one woman who was like, oh, posing for all these selfies with him, and I said, you know that's not right, and she's.
Like, haven't you ever heard of Hollywood? Haven't you heard of visual effects? Haven't you ever heard of Medea?
You know it's you know they I mean, they're really.
Deepening Tyler Perry as evidence. It's a it's a smart move. And I give Vincent props. I tell you, if somebody stops me on the street and says Joel McHale, I love you in community, I don't correct them. Nope, that's let them think that. Let them live their own reality. As Americans, we have every right to live our own reality. I think it's in the Constitution somewhere somewhere deep. Now, there's there's a dark side to some of this, because I will say when I talked to the woman who was into Jamatrium, and she was a part of this negative forty eight group. They show up in Dallas, they wait in Dallas for JFK Junior to arrive, and then they stay there for months and months on and then there's stories of families who are losing loved ones to this conspiracy mindset, and people are sending money to these the leader pratsmen I believe, Like, what are some of the dark sides of believing in these weird fantasies?
Yeah, I mean, so you know Q and I've talked to so many people who have lost family and friends to Q nine. And when you talk about something as extreme as negative forty eight as sort of that faction, I mean you're talking about people who have essentially given up their lives at this point. I mean, it's like they've joined kind of like a traveling commune or something. I mean, you know, they're saying in this hotel room for months at a time, which is not cheap.
They're kind of pooling all their funds.
At one point, you know, there were a bunch of like little toddlers, little kids involved, which you know, it thought great for them to be roaming around looking for Tupac or whatever. And you know, I talked to one guy who whose wife had he thought he had a you know, a totally fine, normal marriage, and then.
She just says, oh, yeah, I'm going to go to this Trump rally.
Well, as it turned out, she was going to join Negative forty eight and then just vanishes, and you know he's seeing her in these videos and stuff, and he's like, what is happening in my family? There's no evidence she's ever coming back, you know, all this kind of stuff. I mean, it is really really grim stuff.
This is a poor guy.
You just you see about homie, like my wife she left me for to k JR. I get it's what a successful man. And he's been through a lot. You know, he's died, he's come back, he's living as this man vincent. He's trying to pull off Fedoras and modern times.
It's it's difficult.
Yeah, it's a bold decision.
Yeah, I'm glad he's found love, but she's left me alone. We're gonna posit it right there.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back to Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy. I want to bring in Professor Joe Yuzinski, political scientists and conspiracy theory expert at the University of Miami who followed the JFK Junior gathering in Dallas. Joe, welcome, Thanks for having me. So Joe, we got will summer here. We've been going down this JFK Junior, wormhole, rabbit hole, whatever hole you want to call it, we're in it. You've you've looked at what's happening and what continues to happen in Dallas from your perspective, what's going on down there.
So you have people that probably have a bunch of psychological issues. Maybe they're prone to delusions, They're prone to believing things in spite of evidence, and that's what got them to this point. And this is fanciful. It's fun for them. They're probably enjoying it. But it doesn't shock me to hear the things that Will is talking about. I mean, there are families, and I get emails from these families once in a while, you know, the sun disappeared, or you know, one family member you know got into a conspiracy theory. Now they can't even talk to the person. And there isn't much I can say to these families other than I'm not that kind of doctor. I mean, there's nothing I can do for this sort of stuff. And I sympathize and empathize with them, but there isn't much you can do.
What makes people predisposed to believe conspiracy theories in the first place, why do they go and seek them out?
Well, the answer is going to be a little bit unsatisfying, but this is where we are, and that is that some people, more than others, have a worldview in which, you know, they go over to the window when they wake up in the morning, they look out and they see stuff and they say, oh, that must be caused by a conspiracy, you know, being driven by people who I already don't like. And the question becomes, well, where does that come from? And the answer is, we don't know yet. We just know that it exists, and we know that some people are just really prone to it. So it's not the beliefs themselves, it's not the ideas. It's that it's people that have a very thick set of lenses. So when they come into contact with these ideas, it's just easy for them to say, yeah, that must be true.
You know, America, it's not a new thing to believe in conspiracy theories. It's not a new thing to have perhaps a warped sense of reality. We are the country that gave you the Salem witch trials. We're always looking for weird ways of which to perceive what's happening around us.
How serious.
Is the situation we're living in now? Is this Is this an aberration? Is this something that social media has one created or two is just reflecting what's already been happening out there, and we're blown it into it's overblown our perspective on it.
Yeah, you know, I mean look, as you said, I mean, conspiracy theories have been with us throughout American history, as going back to the witch trials. I mean, there's really rich history of its sort of each kind of big pivot moment in the United States of a conspiracy theory is really abounding. At the same time, I think what's unique about the moment we're in is number One social media, as you mentioned, which I think helps people with this kind of conspiratorial mindset connect with one another. The way I think of it is, if you think of like the Kennedy assassination, in order to find like minded people, you would have to maybe print to zine, send letters, go to a convention, stuff like that, and then everyone on your block would be saying, like, if you're a nut or whatever, Whereas now these people can just go online and find like minded people, reinforce their beliefs, and find new recruits.
Really, really easily.
The other thing I would say is we've at least I think, in modern history, we haven't seen this kind of conspiratorial thinking embraced by so many politicians, to the point where we have members of Congress who believe in QAnon and have supported it. Recently, Donald Trump is posting really explicit pro q and on videos. So in that way, I think it really helps mainstream these conspiracy theories in a way that we.
Haven't had before.
I love thinking that in the old days, you at least had to learn how to produce a zine, Like there's something to the stereotype of like well you had to cut out letters and you actually had to build a board and connect it with string there and it's like no.
Literally, there's a certain buy in that that buys you.
Now you can do this all online. You don't even have to go to hobby lobby to buy the shit. You can do it on the internet. The buy and it's so low, Joe, I wonder where do you see the threat level something like this.
It's it's with politicians. So to me, I don't think people have changed all that much over time. If anything, we're believing conspiracy theories as much as we did ten twenty thirty years ago. Different now is not just Trump, but particularly Trump and other people who want to do what Trump has done. So when you have people who can act on conspiracy theories with a monopoly of authoritative force, when you have people who already have large audiences because they're politicians transmitting these things, that's going to reach a lot of people, and it's going to influence a lot of people. Like any of us could go on to social media and spurat out whatever stupid conspiracy theory we want. Doesn't mean anyone's going to pay attention, right, It doesn't mean anyone's going to care or even look at it. But if Trump does it, that's a very different ballgame, right. And when you have people who have political power engaging in this, that's incredibly dangerous. And if you look back through history the times where we have, you know, the worst episodes of conspiracy theorizing, it's usually because of politicians getting involved in acting on it in some way.
Is it possible to put these ideas back in a box? Can you roll this back? You know, I recently was out talking to people about the election and election deniers and so much is based on this idea of as soon as you have doubt and you see it through a lens of doubt and mistrust everywhere, it almost doesn't matter what's going to happen in the next election, you're going to see it. It's going to be there. Are we already hardwired these brains to see and distrust so many things that there will not be a turning back that even though somebody like Donald Trump might wield so much power and be able to direct it in certain ways that we've sort of already infected a generation with this mindset.
Well, there's already people who think that no matter what, Right after any election, there's about you know, twenty to thirty percent of the country who think it was rigged.
Why because they.
Lost, right So as in politics, as in sports, who complains after the football game? Now it's the lose team, right, So that's sort of normal after every election. What's abnormal right now is that you have the losing candidate saying it was rigged, I was cheated, and going on and on and on about it and pulling in the whole of the conservative media and lots of allies in Congress. So now you have sort of a full court press of people saying it's rigged, it's rigged, it's rigged. So that's why you have between sixty and eighty percent of Republicans saying twenty twenty was rigged against them, rather than the normal thirty forty fifty percent that might have otherwise said it was rigged just for the fact that they lost.
How close are we to having sixty or eighty percent of the GOP believe JFK Junior is coming back?
Is that weeks or months away?
I think that would be a tougher one to pull off.
I mean, Trump has a lot of influence, so if he got behind a conspiracy theory repeatedly for a long period of time, he could make people buy in. And if it's something like election fraud, he can pull that off because those ideas are always around. But sometimes you'll come out with conspiracy theories that just don't influence anyone. I mean, I'm not aware of a lot of Ted Cruz's dad killed JFK truthers out there, even though he pushed that, you know, six or seven years ago. I mean, it just didn't take off. But I think if you go after ideas that people are sort of already inclined towards I mean, he can do a lot of damage that way.
Yeah, I mean I think we are all inclined to the idea of wanting Aliyah to be back in our lives again. We want another classic album, We want that redemption. I think that's on the cusp if he If he even nudget us in that direction, I think we all buy tickets immediately to the next concert, whether or not she appears or not.
I mean we think that QAnon stuff is wacky and crazy, and where do people come up with these ideas? But I mean we lived through the eighties. I mean there was massive Satanic panics during that time. Satan was everywhere, and even Oliver Stone's JFK movie, which was, you know, a popular movie was about the pedophile deep state going after the President of the United States. I mean Joe Peshi played the defrock pedophile priest. So even the basic idea behind QAnon is not new. I mean all of this stuff is recycled and rehashed, and it's largely the same people believing the same stuff. Sort of a choose your Own Adventure mad Lib book that they're just replaying over and over again.
I think QAnon has a political valance to it as well. If you look at the.
Pictures from January sixth, the people, all the people who were there who were convinced that this was going to be kind of this big, like kind of fascist moment where the dreams were going to come true. And certainly, I mean, I think it's unique in that it has achieved such mainstream prevalence within the Republican Party.
I mean, we're talking.
About election denial stuff like that. And in many ways, I think QAnon is kind of an easy thing to talk about because you can kind of get a handle on it. It's people holding cues and stuff like that. But a lot of these ideas that are core to QAnon have become are kind of swirling around the GOP, and I've become much more successful without the q label attached. So we think about, for example, this idea that you know, talking about gay people existing in a school is part of a pedophile groom or plot, and so we can see these things really being weaponized into policy in a you know, I think a really ominous way.
I want to talk about how this is covered.
What you know, obviously, there are elements of conspiracy theories that belong in the news, that become news.
What I think the role of roles should be.
For journalists in coming to some of these fringe beliefs. Is it giving too much air to follow some of these JFK junior ideas and put them up on a pedestal so people can see those ideas and have that air out or what you're talking about right now, because this is effecting our culture, do they need to be more vigilant and bring this to the forefront so we can engage with them, we can knock them down or at least be aware that they're out there.
Sure, I mean, I think it's a complicated one for me.
You know, you certainly don't want to just go find and a couple of nuts online and say like, oh, these guys are so crazy For me, it's when it starts crossing over into the real world. I mean, we've had QAnon believers murdering people. We had a q and On guy murder his wife. In twenty eighteen, a q and On guy shut down a bridge near the Hoover Dan He had a bunch of guns. That was at the point where I was like, this is not just an online thing anymore. This is something where I have to trust my readers enough, both as an audience and as you know, citizens, that they deserve to know what's going on in the world. And you know, I do think that idea of amplification is a relevant one. But at the point where you have Donald Trump saying like check out this cue stuff, you know, I think the cow is out of the barn. And I would add, in the case of JFK Junior, I mean one of these maybe he's kind of the evil.
JFK Junior impersonator.
There's another guy who's put together a coalition that is going that has people running to control elections and battleground states. Who's a JFK Junior impersonator. They're the Republican nominee. So really, I mean, this is stuff that is going to have really, I think, really concrete impact on our lives.
Unfortunately, that was one of the details when I talked to the Jamatria woman. You know what, what the talk of the rally at that point was not that this was just a person who believed this wild thing, but it was a person who was in Dallas who had a strong following on places like Telegram, and the talk was that they had a relationship with the Trump campaign, that a lot of these people from Negative forty eight were also setting up chairs and in you know, the fact that they would show up and try to help the campaign get set up at the rallies, they would get certain VIP passes. And this is not just a fringe thing that exists outside some of the campaigns in some ways that are also working and coordinating within them.
It's becoming folded into it.
There is sort of this tension with the Trump campaign where they seem to see these people as what they are, which is huge Trump super fans, and Trump is kind of constantly signaling to the QAnon believers, but at the same time they don't want the average person to see a bunch of q stuff at the rallies. So we see the Negative forty eight people doing the QAnon symbols and stuff at the rallies and they're being told, you know, don't do that, what have you. But there's kind of this pull, this back and forth, and.
Trump doesn't understand that it's so complicated, it's so above.
There was some.
Onion headline that I think nailed it that was essentially Trump half assing his support of Q and I like, yeah, I guess the Democrats eat babies or whatever the hell it is. You guys think like you can feel in like I if this makes you like me more sure, But I can't even begin to wrap.
My head around what you guys think is going on.
Joe, I'm wondering what you think the proper response from the media would be uncovering these types of stories.
That's a really tough question. I mean, I'll tell you. When I started studying the topic about fifteen years ago, there was barely any coverage of conspiracy theories in the mainstream news. So I started a Google alert back then, so every night I would get all the articles that had the term conspiracy theory in it. And back then I was getting four or five articles a day and none on the weekends. And at the end of twenty fifteen that had jumped to one hundred.
A day every day.
And just this is anecdotal, but just for myself, I think I took close to three hundred interviews in twenty twenty alone, So almost every journalist was calling me when they were writing about it, and they were all writing it about it quite a bit. And then I think what happened shortly after twenty sixteen is that a lot of major news outlets started getting their own misinformation conspiracy theory social media newsdesks. So they now have dedicated reporters just covering this topic. So it's going to continue to get a lot of attention. I don't know, you know what the effect of the coverage is. I mean, I think that some things went wrong in twenty twenty. I think there were a lot of journalists that had sort of a panic over conspiracy theories and misinformation, and the headlines sort of got into their own echo chamber. It was like Q was taking over the world and it's the biggest thing ever. And you know, as I was polling on it, I was like, I'm just not getting these these massive numbers. It's there, it exists, and they have a presence online. But I think Will was one of the few people who was in journalism who was saying, you know, maybe it's not as big as some of the fantastic headlines are saying it is. So I think in some ways, you know, some of the sensationalistic report and got ahead of itself.
We'll be right back.
Will give us a little perspective here, not only on the q andon movement as to where it is now, but even looking at something like this JFK junior theory, the negative forty eight group. You know, how big is it actually and how much of an effect does it have on the conversation?
Yeah, sure, so I've actually got I've got some polls right in front of me for just this moment. So yeah, okay, So and now these polls are a little out of date, and Joe does some great polling on this, and I think he has newer numbers. So, but the difficulty of nailing down QAnon belief is there's a couple things. Number One, a lot of times people are going to say they may believe some of the tenets of it, but they're not like on the forum saying you know where we go when we go all stuff like that. At the same time, we have to realize that at the end of twenty two, twenty Cute basically told the fans the brand had become too damaged and to stop to saying QQQ and just to sort of use the talking points. And so there is going to be an amount I think of people who are kind of downplaying it there's a March twenty twenty one pole of five thousand people that's found that fifteen percent of them believe Satan worshiping pedophiles run a global child sex operation. We got two thousand people in January twenty twenty one that found fifteen percent believe that Trump was at war with these Hollywood pedophiles. And now when you start asking about q Andon, the numbers get a little lower. You're talking to think three to seven percent. Still, we're talking about millions of people. That's more popular than some religions in the United States.
So you know, don't shit on the Quakers. Why you got a shit on the Quakers. I know what you're getting at there. I can read between the lines. They're a good, peaceful group of people. Stop shitting on the Quakers. Don't come on to my podcast and make all this anti Quaker attacks. I know they had a hard time getting people into the whatever they call it, commune room, but they're working hard on this. Okay, exactly, continue, but leave the Quakers out of your mouth.
Just getting wrecked by q and on here, Yeah, they're getting blown out. So yeah, we started talking about that at the same time. I mean, the JFK junior people are kind of a faction of that, and then we get down to the negative forty eight group, which is smaller than that. So I would say Negative forty eight I think has tens of thousands of Telegram subscribers. I think when we think about hardcore fans, we're probably talking a couple thousand.
It's actually interesting to see, Joe, where do you see? They're the hardcore fans of the people who show up at the events who are posting most of that information. But there's that secondary element too, of when it just becomes a brand. I go to some of these events and I see people wearing C paraphernalia.
Que's back and there's Q shit everywhere.
Yes, the online conspiracy following a mysterious character known as Q was more popular than ever.
Is that a QUE?
Yeah?
Are you a QUE supporter?
Certainly some people I taught to you, they're worried that just because they understand that it's a it's trolling behavior, that it's a brand that they can put on their body, it's going to piss off the media, it's going to get attention from the people they want to get attention with, and they may not even know the tenets of what q is, but they do know that it's something that they support in theory because in their mind the support is just trolling. Is that dangerous? Is that sort of a is it the evolution of conspiracy theory? Then when it just becomes pepsi that we're we're in for a world of hurt. Where do you see that job?
Well, we're sort of calling everything Q and on now right, And if you go back to the idea that Q and on adopted a lot of ideas that pre existed q andon, then it's not quite as disturbing. So between twenty nineteen and more recently, we're depending on how you ask the question. If if you're just doing direct questions, are you a believer in q andon? Do you follow q and on? We're getting between five and twelve percent, which makes it one of the least believed and followed things that I pull on.
I mean to put that in perspective.
We just say, do you think there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy in nineteen sixty three, We're getting between fifty and sixty percent. So QAnon isn't all that huge. But when will's exactly right, when we ask on these more general ideas, like our teachers grooming kids to become trans Are there satanic cults doing massive Satanic rituals across the country. Are elites running sex trafficking rings? We're getting between twenty and thirty five percent. Now, I wouldn't call those ideas Q ideas. I mean, QAnon adopts them, but they could have existed decades ago. And some of those ideas sort of have their origin thousands of years ago, so they've been around, and I just don't want to attribute them to q because then it says like, oh, this guy was able to convince thirty percent of the country that elites are running sex trafficking rings, when in fact, those ideas you know, might have been around.
Well before that.
It's just we weren't paying attention.
You know.
Even back during the Satanic Panic of the eighties, there were very few polls taken of how many people were buying in to this idea of Satanic cults running around. And I've only found one pole and it was of Texas, so you have to you have to keep that in mind.
But it was eighty.
Percent of people at the end of the eighties thought that, you know, one of the major problems in the country was satanic cults going around abusing people. So I don't know how well that might have been believed in you know, some other state at the time. But right now we're trying to poll on all these things, and it's just we don't have good comparisons to the past.
You know.
One thing I would note there is that there's something unique about QAnon in comparison to some of these other conspiracy theories. If you're talking about, like the thing of the Kennedy assassination, was it was a conspiracy theory or the moon landing was fake, Well, there's kind of not a lot you can personally do about it. In the case of Quanon, there's kind of this there's sort of a utopia at the core of it, and that there are places that we are going to go terrorize these satanic pedophiles. So there is kind of like a way that people can participate in it that I think it makes it more dangerous than you know, believing that again the moon landing was fake or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, it's a game. There's a group identity, right, So a lot of people believe Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, but they're not friends. They don't consider themselves to be part of a group or a movement, right. But QAnon, a lot of those people do like they are doing something together. They're following along, they're solving the clues, they're expecting an outcome in a shared way. And that's something that most conspiracy theories don't really have. And that's why QAnon has always been very hard to define, right because it's sort of cultish but not really a cult. It's a group but sort of decentralized. It's got a lot of conspiracy theories in it, so it's not just a conspiracy theory, and it's got sort of activities that people can do to sort of be a part of it and play along that other conspiracy theories just don't have.
I do love thinking of it like activities. It's like we get to get together, we get to solve white Tom Hanks is drinking baby blood. It's like just a bunch of little Encyclopedia Browns running around America.
It's funny you say that.
I mean, they had a rally in DC and they said, you know, we're gonna kind of go on this excursion. If you're interested to go protest and comet ping pong, So they have the whole itineraries well before.
I let you go.
Part of the reason this podcast is one for me to wrap my head around some of the stuff that I'm seeing out there on the road. But two help me, what am I gonna see out there on the road a couple months from now? One in regards to the JFK Junior conspiracy? How does that morph?
And Two?
Am I gonna get a new Robin Williams movie out of all this?
Yeah?
You know, I think the JFK Junior stuff is gonna continue. I mean I saw in particularly, I think if Trump keeps engaging war with qan On, I think we're gonna see more people getting into Q and I and kind of see some fresh energy behind that. I once went to the kind of the Trumpian July fourth event, and all these women at the Trump Hotel were wearing like JFKJ and your shirts, And this lady had a JAFKJ in your mask on her face and I said to her, you know what's that about? And she goes, He's alive, and she kind of flit flitters away. So, I mean, I don't think that energy is going anywhere. And you know, I think we get we get new conspiracy theories all the time, and so I think you know you got the big one. I'm seeing a lot of movement on this idea that the elites want to make us all eat bugs.
Jordan, so like you might want to be on the lookout for that.
I think there's gonna be a lot of like what they say is I will not eat the bugs, and so I think you might get someone you know a cost to you about that.
So so don't don't make them do it.
I hate this. I hate this job so much. Dear Lord, dear Lord, Jordan, you might want to be on the lookout. I guess there's this thing about elites trying to make you eat bugs? Bug Gazzi, is that what it is? It is, Joe, What do I have to like out for?
Uh?
So worse than that. I think the same reporter who was writing about the bug eating was also writing about forced anal swabbing. It's not just about testing for COVID, it's about humiliating you in public. So if you walk down the street and they have like a government tent setup where they're sticking people with Q tips up the ass.
That's gonna be.
That's gonna be something come true, somebody's dark dream apparently.
So this is how I'm writing it down right now. I need to be aware of bug Ghazi and Bumgazi. They're they're on the horizon. Thank you, gentlemen. Well, well, Joe, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm gonna go down to a Trump rally and a few do you guys want to come along?
Is it?
That might be a little intense for me, fair enough? Shair it up?
Well, Thank you guys for joining me and helping me figure this conspiracy.
Thanks for having me. Thank you.
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